{"id":710,"date":"2007-05-07T12:58:17","date_gmt":"2007-05-07T04:58:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/2007\/banqiaos-orificial-signage\/"},"modified":"2018-08-22T17:30:29","modified_gmt":"2018-08-22T09:30:29","slug":"banqiaos-orificial-signage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/2007\/banqiaos-orificial-signage\/","title":{"rendered":"Banqiao’s orificial signage"},"content":{"rendered":"

David<\/a>, who for just a little while longer lives in the same Banqiao neighborhood as I, sent me a photo of a street sign in our highly populated but little-discussed city. <\/p>\n

\"'Guanciao<\/p>\n

The sign tells us this is “Guanciao” West Road. In Hanyu Pinyin this would be “Guanqiao.” Guanqiao<\/em>? The only word in my biggest Mandarin-English dictionary under that spelling is guānqiào<\/span> (關竅\/关窍), which is defined as “orifices on the human body.” Hmm. Taiwan might have the questionable taste of having many a road still named after a dead dictator, but orifices<\/em>?<\/p>\n

This oddity is explained by the fact that Banqiao is simply continuing its tradition of typos — even on relatively new signs. (The style of the sign and the choice of Tongyong Pinyin both indicate this went up within the past few years.) <\/p>\n

Guanciao<\/em> (Guanqiao<\/em>) should be Guancian<\/em>. (In Hanyu Pinyin, 館前西路 is written Guǎnqián Xīlù<\/span>.) It’s worth noting this is not a tiny lane but a road in a well-traveled part of town. <\/p>\n

As long as I’m putting up yet another post with photos and doing further damage to my reputation of having one of the Taiwan blogosphere’s fastest-loading, least Turtonesque<\/a> sites*, I might as well go ahead and add one more so I can mention something else about this sign. <\/p>\n

Let’s look at the relative size of the Chinese characters and the alphabetic text. The majority of the letters are but one quarter of the height of the Chinese characters.<\/p>\n

\"sign<\/p>\n

Although in this particular case the lettering might not be too<\/em> small, this style often leads to nearly illegible romanization, especially on signs posted high above streets. <\/p>\n

*<\/strong> Just in terms of the average number photos per post, that is. (But that’s in part because I’m a lousy photographer.) Congratulations, Michael, on reaching two thousand posts<\/a>! <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

David, who for just a little while longer lives in the same Banqiao neighborhood as I, sent me a photo of a street sign in our highly populated but little-discussed city. The sign tells us this is “Guanciao” West Road. … Continue reading →<\/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":[110,12,15,41,32,20,19,48,3,52],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-710","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-banqiao","category-chinese","category-chinese-characters","category-english","category-mandarin","category-pinyin","category-romanization","category-signage","category-taiwan","category-tongyong"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/710","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=710"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/710\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7837,"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/710\/revisions\/7837"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=710"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=710"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=710"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}