{"id":1111,"date":"2008-06-08T23:04:06","date_gmt":"2008-06-08T15:04:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/?p=1111"},"modified":"2015-12-17T15:23:06","modified_gmt":"2015-12-17T07:23:06","slug":"gaoxiong-street-signs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/2008\/gaoxiong-street-signs\/","title":{"rendered":"Gaoxiong street signs"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/news_photos\/2008\/04\/sinle_st.jpg\" alt=\"Sinle St\" style=\"width: 333px; height: 127px; float: right; border-left: .5em solid white;\" \/>During an extremely brief trip a few weeks ago to <span class=\"py\"><acronym title=\"Gaoxiong, &#39640;&#38596;, Kaohsiung\">G&#257;oxi&#243;ng<\/acronym><\/span>, Taiwan&#8217;s second-largest city, I was able to grab a few photos of signage there. Most of these were taken from a moving taxi; thus the poor quality and lack of much diversity. But these are the best I could do under the circumstances. <\/p>\n<p>First, a few basic points: <\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>they&#8217;re in Tongyong Pinyin (<em>bleah<\/em> &#8212; but at least they&#8217;re consistent)<\/li>\n<li>they don&#8217;t use InTerCaPiTaLiZaTion (This lack is, of course, a <em>good<\/em> thing. If only Taipei hadn&#8217;t screwed this up!)<\/li>\n<li>in most cases the text in romanization is large enough to read even at a distance (Very good &#8212; unlike all too many relatively recent signs elsewhere, such as Taipei County.)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>In short, other than the choice of romanization most of these signs aren&#8217;t all that bad. They&#8217;re certainly much better (and more consistent) than the ones that Taipei County put up in Tongyong Pinyin a few years ago. (Although <a href=\"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/2006\/taipei-county-signage-and-romanization-systems\/\">Taipei County&#8217;s current magistrate said more than two years ago that he was in favor of switching to Hanyu Pinyin<\/a>, as far as I can see he has done absolutely nothing about this. Of course, some might say that he&#8217;s done absolutely nothing about anything; but I&#8217;ll leave discussion of that to the political blogs.) <\/p>\n<p>Here&#8217;s another G&#257;oxi&#243;ng sign with romanization that isn&#8217;t too small.<br \/>\n<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/news_photos\/2008\/04\/dacheng_st.jpg\" alt=\"Dacheng St.\" width=\"333\" height=\"426\"  \/><\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m not a fan of the practice of force-justifying the Chinese characters and romanization\/English to the same width. This style can be seen in many of these signs. Sometimes this results in the romanized\/English words being spaced too far apart; more often, though, the Chinese characters are left with lots of space between them &#8212; so much space that it would be easy to have spaces indicate word divisions for the texts in Hanzi (something Y.R. Chao recommended nearly a century ago), which might be an interesting thing to try on signs. I wonder if anyone has ever performed any experiments on this. <\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/news_photos\/2008\/04\/highschool.jpg\" alt=\"\" title=\"highschool\" width=\"450\" height=\"249\"  \/><\/p>\n<p>The full Mandarin name of the school indicated by the blue sign on the left is rather long: <\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p><span class=\"py\">G&#257;oxi&#243;ng sh&#236;l&#236; G&#257;oxi&#243;ng n&#474;z&#464; g&#257;oj&#237; zh&#333;ngxu&#233; <\/span><br \/>\n(&#39640;&#38596;&#24066;&#31435;&#39640;&#38596;&#22899;&#23376;&#39640;&#32026;&#20013;&#23416;)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Whoever made the sign wisely desided to cut that down to <span class=\"py\">&#39640;&#38596;&#22899;&#20013; (G&#257;oxi&#243;ng n&#474; zh&#333;ng)<\/span>. If only someone had realized that it would have been better to use something shorter than the full English name, too. &#8220;Kaohsiung Municipal Girls&#8217; Senior High School&#8221; is a lot to fit on one small sign. &#8220;Kaohsiung Girls&#8217; High School&#8221;, &#8220;Girls&#8217; Municipal High School&#8221;, or something even shorter would have been much better. <\/p>\n<p>Here are some more signs. <\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/news_photos\/2008\/04\/wufu_zihciang.jpg\" alt=\"\" title=\"wufu_zihciang\" width=\"193\" height=\"400\" \/><\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/news_photos\/2008\/04\/jhonghua.jpg\" alt=\"\" title=\"jhonghua\" width=\"450\" height=\"221\"  \/><\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/news_photos\/2008\/04\/group.jpg\" alt=\"\" title=\"group\" width=\"450\" height=\"276\" \/><\/p>\n<p>And finally an address plate on a building. This style could certainly be better.<br \/>\n<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/news_photos\/2008\/04\/dayi_st_building_plate.jpg\" alt=\"Dayi St.\" title=\"dayi_st_building_plate\" width=\"333\" height=\"250\"  \/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>During an extremely brief trip a few weeks ago to G&#257;oxi&#243;ng, Taiwan&#8217;s second-largest city, I was able to grab a few photos of signage there. Most of these were taken from a moving taxi; thus the poor quality and lack &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/2008\/gaoxiong-street-signs\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,15,41,71,70,32,20,19,48,3,52],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1111","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chinese","category-chinese-characters","category-english","category-gaoxiong","category-kaohsiung","category-mandarin","category-pinyin","category-romanization","category-signage","category-taiwan","category-tongyong"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1111","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1111"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1111\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7062,"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1111\/revisions\/7062"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1111"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1111"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1111"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}