site to tout Taiwan’s English environment bad beyond belief

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Taiwan is touting its “English living environment” with a “carnival” (i.e., a room with a bunch of booths from various government agencies and a few businesses, each with some display at least vaguely associated with English). Awards will be given; I wonder how many of them will be deserved.

Here’s a sample from the carnival Web site’s introduction to the “mascots” for the event: American boy

Hello! We are Mascot Profile, because theme of this year is (ENJOY TAIWAN), make us to be siblings organic to assemble to get together too. In the face of the change of the world environments, because the progress of science and technology makes the mutual distance shorten, so world has merged together already a village . In fact, Taiwan is the same too, because the plasticity of Taiwan is strong, accept degree high, already already like world village, there are various kinds of culture and characteristic . This kind of phenomenon is six of ours. Introduce myself by us right away now , see which one be most lovely!

This machine-translated monstrosity is nothing short of a disgrace.

As for why they need mascots, or why most of these represent people from countries where English is not the native language — that’s beyond me. Perhaps it’s to distract people from the disastrously bad English.

For anyone who would like to attend and perhaps get to see how the “original flavor in Taiwan of Israel opens the prelude, will praise 33 excellent organs,”* the event opens today (Tuesday, December 20) at Taipei 101. For details and more atrocious English, see the Web site for the 2005 English Carnival.

* No, I didn’t make that up either.

Pinyin Info in the New York Times

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Pinyin Info made the Reading File of this Sunday’s New York Times, with Victor H. Mair’s essay danger + opportunity ? crisis being quoted:

On pinyin.info, a Web site about the Chinese language, Victor H. Mair, a professor of Chinese at the University of Pennsylvania, explodes the myth that “crisis,” in Chinese means both “danger” and “opportunity.”

A whole industry of pundits and therapists has grown up around this one grossly inaccurate formulation. A casual search of the Web turns up more than a million references to this spurious proverb. It appears, … often complete with Chinese characters, on the covers of books, on advertisements for seminars, on expensive courses for “thinking outside of the box” and practically everywhere one turns in the world of quick-buck business, pop psychology, and orientalist hocus-pocus. …

Like most Mandarin words, that for “crisis” (weiji) consists of two syllables that are written with two separate characters, wei and ji. The ji of weiji, in fact, means something like “incipient moment; crucial point (when something begins or changes).” Thus, a weiji is indeed a genuine crisis, a dangerous moment, a time when things start to go awry. A weiji indicates a perilous situation when one should be especially wary. It is not a juncture when one goes looking for advantages and benefits. In a crisis, one wants above all to save one’s skin and neck!

source: By Any Other Name, New York Times, December 18, 2005

Ban loan words, says North Korea

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When it’s not prompting nightmares, North Korea is often good for a laugh.

The December 9 edition of Minju Chosun, the newspaper of North Korea’s Cabinet, editorialized on the “Culture of Language,” arguing for the importance of the “four don’ts.”

  1. Don’t use difficult Chinese phrases and other words of foreign origin. Loan words should be banned because they are “‘toxins that destroy the character and purity” of the Korean language. They also undermine the people’s sense of independence.
  2. Do not make excessive use of regional dialects. That sort of thing “creates confusion in language, hampers communication and degenerates personality.”
  3. Avoid slang and vulgar words. They cause misunderstanding and distrust and mar public unity.
  4. Don’t speak too fast. The proper speaking speed is 260-270 words per minute. If people speak too fast, it’s hard to understand what they are saying.

Talk about the “purity” of a language is of course particularly absurd, especially considering what a large portion of Korean has been borrowed from Sinitic languages over the years. But there is a grain of truth in the assertion that borrowings from Chinese have resulted in some troubles for Korean. The problem, however, is rooted in Chinese characters rather than linguistic borrowing itself. William Hannas discusses this some in his excellent book Asia’s Orthographic Dilemma, including within a section on the so-called homonym problem.

For nearly two millennia non-Chinese languages on China’s periphery have shared Sinitic vocabulary) freely, in a manner known to all of the world’s languages. Until recently, the direction of this “borrowing” had been largely from Chinese to Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese, although the latter languages — most notably Japanese — have reversed the process and for the last century and a half have been coining new terms from Sinitic morphemes that are adopted by all four languages. As a result of this borrowing, more than 40 percent of Japanese, 50 percent of Korean, and at least one-third of the words in Vietnamese are based on Sinitic morphemes, according to Liu (1969:67). These figures apply to everyday vocabulary and are lower than other researchers’ counts that take in a wider corpus…. Ho Ung claims 60 percent (1974:44), and Oh claims 90 percent for some types of Korean materials (1971:26). Helmut Martin notes that in formal Vietnamese the ratio of Sinitic words can reach 50 percent; for newspapers it goes much higher (1982:32).

In general, the share of Chinese-style words in these non-Chinese languages increases with formality and difficulty of content, which is to say, Sinitic terms dominate those environments where style and subject matter make them the least predictable. One would think that the emphasis would be on maintaining phonetic distinctions between these word forms, but the opposite is more nearly true. Since most of the terms refer to higher-level concepts, the expectation was they would be identified through writing, where phonetic characteristics matter less. Accordingly, there was less pressure to avoid homonyms and near homonyms. Another, more important reason for the homophony can be traced to the dynamics of borrowing. When a language “borrows” terms from another, it typically adapts the words’ sounds to its own phonology, which is never a perfect match. The borrowing language cannot add distinctions to the sounds of the terms it is borrowing, but it can and does ignore phonological distinctions that its own system is not equipped to handle. In the case of international Sinitic, this means dropping the tonal features that help distinguish one Chinese syllable from another.

source: North Chides South for Dirtying Korean Tongue, Korea Times, December 18, 2005. This article also has an interesting anecdote about a North Korean general’s reaction to seeing “English” letters on a sign in the south.

illiteracy in Taiwan

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Below is the gist of a story on illiteracy in Taiwan. The illiteracy rate is given as 2.84 percent; I believe this masks greater problems with literacy. Note how literacy is never defined. The closest anyone gets is an official with the Ministry of Education who says that “functional illiteracy” is relative.

Farmers in the countryside who can’t use a computer or read “English” (i.e. Roman) letters wouldn’t have that judged against them, but someone in a metropolitan area who couldn’t use an automated ticket-purchase system or make a withdrawl from a bank [via an ATM?] could be considered illiterate:

Gōngnéngxìng wénmáng de dìngyì yīn gèrén shēnghuó huánjìng ér yì, xiāngxia nóngfū bù huì diànnǎo, bù huì Yīngwén zìmǔ kěnéng bù suàn gōngnéngxìng wénmáng, dànshì dūshì rén bù huì yòng diànnǎo mǎi piào, cún tíkuǎn kěnéng jiù suànshì wénmáng.

I’ve tried before to get an answer from the ministry on just how literacy is defined; no one I spoke with knew. Now that the subject has come up again, I’ll give it another try.

Anyway, here’s the story, in my own summary:

As of the end of 2004, Taiwan’s illiteracy rate for people 15 years and older was 2.84 percent, according to an official with the Ministry of Education. The overwhelming majority of those who are illiterate are elderly, the official added.

The official said a new group of the illiterate is emerging: foreign spouses of local citizens. They are not included in the literacy statistics, however, unless and until they obtain Taiwan citizenship.

The ministry will put more emphasis on organizing adult education programs for illiterate foreign spouses through cooperation with city and county governments and non-profit foundations, according to the official.

The ministry also gave some historical figures:

year illiteracy rate
1989 7.11%
1991 6.42%
2004 2.84%

sources:

Romanization to be allowed on some Taiwan ID cards

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The new type of Taiwan’s national ID card (shēnfènzhèng/身分證) will be coming out soon. For the first time, this card will allow the use of romanization — albeit in very limited ways. The use of romanization is being allowed because members of Taiwan’s indigenous tribes had complained, with good reason, that the old ID cards did not permit them to use their real names but only sinicized versions of their names.

The languages of Taiwan’s tribes are not related to Mandarin, Taiwanese, or any of the other so-called Sino-Tibetan languages. Moreover, the 400-and-some syllables of Mandarin are not adequate to accurately represent the languages of any of these tribes, which means Chinese characters can’t handle those names properly.

I spoke earlier today with an official at Taiwan’s Ministry of the Interior, who helped clarify some of the points of the new policy:

  • the space allotted to romanized names is limited to twenty or fewer letters. Supposedly this will be sufficient; but I doubt it.
  • 0nly aborigines will be allowed to use romanization on their ID cards; everyone else will be limited to Chinese characters
  • all ID cards, including those with romanization, must include Chinese characters; thus, Taiwan’s aborigines aren’t allowed to shed the sinicized versions of their names

The above policy applies to “foreigners” as well. In other words, if I become an ROC citizen — as I probably would if the government dropped its insistence that I first abandon my U.S. citizenship — I would not be permitted to have “Mark Swofford” on my identification card. I would have to be identified as “史偉凡” and only as “史偉凡.” I would not be allowed to include a romanized version: Shi Wei-fan (and certainly not Shǐ Wěifán either).

Hmph!

And even if I could have my real name on the ID card, I’d have to omit my middle name, because with that included my name wouldn’t fit within twenty spaces.

Japan’s year of love

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The Kanji Aptitude Testing Foundation has announced Japan’s kanji of the year.

爱

This is used to write the Japanese word for “love.”

With 4,109 of the total of 85,322 votes, 爱 beat out the character in second place, 改 (reform), by nearly two to one.

I’ve always particularly enjoyed the first part of the etymology of this character:

The top was once 旡 jì ‘belch’, for obscure reasons; it has become 爫 (zhǎo) ‘hand’ plus 冖 (mì) ‘cover’. Below are 心 (xīn) ‘heart’ and 夂 (zhǐ) ‘walk slowly’ (a foot pointing down).

(Please remember not to confuse the etymology of a Chinese character with the etymology of the word its used to represent; they’re not the same thing.)

Some opponents of simplified characters are particularly annoyed that the simplified form of this character, 爱, omits the “heart” element and inserts “friend” (友 / yǒu) as the base. But as far as I know, no one has objected lately to the removal of “belch.”

traditional vs. simplified:

愛 爱

source: ２００５年「今年の漢字」応募集計結果発表, December 13, 2005.

traditional Mongolian script & the digital era

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The traditional Mongolian script, which was officially abandoned in the 1940s in favor of the Cyrillic alphabet, has been making something of a comeback, though the Roman alphabet still seems to be winning the debate in Mongolia over which script should be used there in the future.

The National University of Mongolia and the Mongolian University of Science and Technology have been working with Unesco support to develop “e-tools” for the text processing of traditional Mongolian script. “The universities chose to forego the earliest version of the script in favor of the most ‘recent’ one,” according to a Unesco story. (I hope someone can write a comment elaborating on this.)

One result of this project is a database comprising 55,000 words in traditional Mongolian script and Mongolian Cyrillic.

Four volumes of the “Primary World Orthography Dictionary” are ready for publication. Together with spell check software for the script, the team is now finalizing several digitized types of traditional script and genuine Unicode-compatible open-type fonts.

source: Revival of traditional Mongolian script through e-tools

en Français: Les outils électroniques font renaître l’écriture mongole traditionnelle

This site to convert Mongolian Cyrillic to Mongolian Uighurjin (variant name for the traditional Mongolian script) should prove of interest. (Note: It’s not fully functional yet. But I’m adding the link in the hope that the site will be up and running before long.)

Taiwan to abandon use of ‘4’ on license plates

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image of the number four in a red circle 'no' signSuperstitious dread of the number four is so widespread in Taiwan that the officials in charge of the issuing of license plates for vehicles have decided to abandon use of that number altogether for personal cars and motorscooters.

I’m not making this up.

Beginning next year, new license plates for cars will have two alphabetic letters and four digits, and scooters plates will have three alphabetic letters and three digits — and neither of them will have any fours. The reason behind this is that in Mandarin the word for “four” (sì) sounds similar but not identical to the word for “die/death” (sǐ). In Taiwanese the situation is the same: the words are similar but not identical.

It turns out that this is more an expansion of an existing policy than something completely new. The Ministry of Transportation and Communications has long had a policy that kept 4 from being used as the final digit in a license number. And ten years ago this was expanded to cover the second-from-the-last digit as well.

Although I was aware of the superstition involving the number four, I’d never heard of this license policy before. So on the way home last night from the movies I paid careful attention to license plates and, much to my surprise, saw no fours as the final or penultimate digits — except on one bus (not covered by the policy) and one car that looked like it was more than 10 years old (and thus would have a plate number that had been grandfathered in).

But even this allowed for too many fours for many motorists. More than 30 percent of vehicle owners pay some NT$3,000 (US$90) each to be able to choose their own plate numbers — which doesn’t provide anywhere near the same freedom as, say, U.S. drivers can have with their vanity plates.

Especially dreaded by some was the combination “45” (sì and wǔ), which sounds vaguely similar but certainly not identical to sǐ wǒ. This might be translated “death me” (??). If that sounds not quite right, that’s because sǐ wǒ is not grammatically correct Mandarin or Taiwanese.

Given the nature of my Web site, I’d like to note a few things here other than that superstitions are stupid. First, note that Taiwan uses the Roman alphabet and Arabic numerals, just as Western countries do. Although Chinese characters are used to identify the area of the vehicle’s registration, they have nothing to do with the identification of the car itself. Numbers are not given in the form 一, 二, 三, 四, 五, 六,七, 八, 九, 十 but 1, 2, 3, etc.

Furthermore, this situation with the license plates contains a lesson on the ideographic myth. Superstitious motorists aren’t seeing the Arabic numeral “4” as an, ahem, ideograph; it is still very much being tied to sound. That the superstitious seize upon the association despite the fact that the sound is not identical to that of the dreaded word for “death” is, I believe, reflective of how readers of Chinese characters must be flexible in how they interpret characters’ phonetic clues. The phonetic elements of Chinese characters have over the course of millennia become so out of synch with the modern language that many, many characters at best only hint at rather than express their pronunciation. Thus, readers must allow for changes in tone, in initials, and in finals. (And often that’s not enough, forcing people to fall back on tedious rote memorization.) Chinese characters are quite simply not a good match for modern Mandarin.

Many thanks to Jens at my favorite ice cream store for alerting me to this story.

Guórén jìhuì「4」， qìjīchē páizhào huàn fā ruò pèngdào Ālābó shùzì 4, cháng yīn mínzhòng bù yuàn lǐng pái ér lācháng páizhào fāfàng zuòyè shíjiān. Jiāotōngbù kǎoliáng mínzhòng de xīntài, juédìng míngnián quánmiàn huàn fā de qìjīchē xīn páizhào, qǔxiāo suǒyǒu hán Ālābó shùzì 4 de hàomǎ.

Jiāotōngbù gōnglù zǒngjú zǎoqī jí yǐ qǔxiāo zuì yòubian de 4 zìmǎ, 10 nián qián yòu qǔxiāo chēpái hàomǎ yòubian dì-èr mǎ de 4, wàichuán 4444 chēpái shì gěi bìnzàng yè shǐyòng, bìngbù zhèngquè. Xiànxíng chēliàng páizhào jǐn yòubian dì-sān wèishù jí dì-sì wèishù yǒu 4 zìmǎ, dàn mínzhòng réngyǒu jìhuì, lìrú 45XX, xiéyīn jiùshì「sǐ wǒXX」.

Jiāotōngbù gōnglù zǒngjú Táiběi qū jiānlǐ suǒzhǎng Wáng Zhēn-shèng biǎoshì, měi ge yuèdǐ huò niándǐ dōu shì jiāo chē lǐng pái jiānfēng shíduàn, dàn ruò pèngdào yǒu 4 de chēpái, chē shāng huò mínzhòng cháng xuǎnzé zìfèi xuǎnhào, huò gāncuì guò jǐ tiān zài lǐng pái, yǐzhì jiānlǐ suǒ zhàn huàn fā hán 4 de hàopái shí, suǒxū zuòyè shíjiān yuē wèi huàn fā yībān hàopái de liǎng bèi.

Jiāotōngbù gōnglù zǒngjú jiānlǐ zǔzhǎng Xiè Jiè-tián zhǐchū, guórén qìchē shǐyòng niánxiàn píngjūn 10 nián, wèile qǔdé hǎo zhàotou, sān chéng yǐshàng chēzhǔ nìngyuàn huā liǎng, sānqiān yuán xuǎn chēpái hàomǎ；jíshǐ bù huāqián xuǎnhào, yě dōu jìnliàng bìmiǎn lǐngdào hàomǎ zhōng yǒu 4 de chēpái.

Xiè Jiè-tián biǎoshì, qìjīchē xīn páizhào xíngshì yǔ xiànxíng chēpái jīhū xiāngtóng, qìchē cǎi liǎng ge Yīngwén zìmǔ jiāshàng sì ge Ālābó shùzì, jǐn jiāng mùqián hàopái shàngfāng Táiwān Shěng, Táiběi Shì jí Gāoxióng Shì děng zhíxiáshì fēnlèi gǎiwéi Yīngwén zìmǔ. Rúcǐyīlái, chēpái hàomǎ róngliàng zēngjiā èrshíwǔ bèi, dádào yīyì sānqiān sānbǎi wàn ge, zú gōng 30 nián páizhào jiǎoxiāo jí huàn fā suǒxū.

Xiè Jiè-tián zhǐchū, chēliàng hàopái róngliàng chōngzú, wèilái hàopái bù huì zàifāshēng Yīngwén zìmǔ yǔ Ālābó shùzì hùnzá shǐyòng de qíngkuàng, qìchē chēpái gùdìng wèi liǎng ge Yīngwén zìmǔ jiē sì ge Ālābó shùzì, jīchē wèi sān ge Yīngwén zìmǔ jiē sān ge Ālābó shùzì.

source: Qìjīchē huànxīn páizhào méi 4 le, Taibei Baodao, November 13, 2005