What is the best short explanation when someone asks why both 台 and 臺 are commonly used in traditional Chinese to write Taiwan, Taipei, Tainan, etc.?
(Mods, please move this to “Learning Chinese” if it’s not appropriate here.)
well, it’s easier to write, innit? Tried writing "臺’’ by hand in the post office? You’ll have a queue of 15 people behind you by the time you’ve finished.
I suppose the easiest explanation is that lots of complex characters have, and have always had simpler forms. The PRC didn’t invent all the simplified characters they use. Many already existed.
I think that 臺 should be abolished. It’s totally superfluous. 台 already belongs in the set of traditional Chinese characters.
I know, but most simplified characters that have non-identical traditional counterparts are only considered legitimate as simplified characters, not as both simplified and traditional, so why does 台 happily exist in both character sets for the purpose of toponyms, while in the traditional set 臺 is equally legitimate for some (all?) of these toponyms?
Some government units ask us to change all 台s to 臺s, I guess it looks more sophisticated. I agree with Chris, what’s the point really? Also, 臺 is easily mistaken for 壹 (one), at least for a less intelligent foreigner like myself.
臺 is to 台 what UPPERCASE is to lowercase.
I even made a Microsoft Word macro that changes 臺 to 台:
Sub TaiToTai()
’
’ Searches for all instances of hyper-traditional Tai and changes it to normal Tai
’
Selection.WholeStory
With Selection.Find
.Text = ChrW$(&H81FA)
.Replacement.Text = ChrW$(&H53F0)
.Forward = True
.Wrap = wdFindContinue
End With
Selection.Find.Execute Replace:=wdReplaceAll
End Sub
[quote=“Chris”]I even made a Microsoft Word macro that changes 臺 to 台:
Sub TaiToTai()
’
’ Searches for all instances of hyper-traditional Tai and changes it to normal Tai
’
Selection.WholeStory
With Selection.Find
.Text = ChrW$(&H81FA)
.Replacement.Text = ChrW$(&H53F0)
.Forward = True
.Wrap = wdFindContinue
End With
Selection.Find.Execute Replace:=wdReplaceAll
End Sub[/quote]
I don’t want to diminish your solution, but wouldn’t a simple “Search & Replace” action achieve the same result?
[quote=“Ricarte”][quote=“Chris”]I even made a Microsoft Word macro that changes 臺 to 台:
Sub TaiToTai()
’
’ Searches for all instances of hyper-traditional Tai and changes it to normal Tai
’
Selection.WholeStory
With Selection.Find
.Text = ChrW$(&H81FA)
.Replacement.Text = ChrW$(&H53F0)
.Forward = True
.Wrap = wdFindContinue
End With
Selection.Find.Execute Replace:=wdReplaceAll
End Sub[/quote]
I don’t want to diminish your solution, but wouldn’t a simple “Search & Replace” action achieve the same result?[/quote]
Yes, but then I would have to type in the Chinese characters each and every time. Since I do this with every document I work with, it’s easier to click one button than it is to click three or four times and type 11 or 12 keystrokes.
They represent two alternative transcription systems from the original Sinckan-che (Siraya language) word Tayowan.
(Should really have waited until Friday to post this, but oh well.)
[quote=“Zla’od”]They represent two alternative transcription systems from the original Sinckan-che (Siraya language) word Tayowan.
(Should really have waited until Friday to post this, but oh well.)[/quote]
The Dutch themselves left us many renditions of that Sirayan place name. There’s Tayowan, Taoyuan, Tayouan, Tayovan, Taioan… too many to even keep track of.
Tayovan: upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ … %9C%96.jpg
Taioan: commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File … %9F%8E.jpg
From the root I’m guessing it’s a form of *tao-an which would be the place where people live. However I don’t think that’s what the whole 台 v 臺 mixup is about. In early Chinese accounts of Taiwan, some of the Dutch’s phonetic transliteration were rendered as 台窩灣, which denoted the “o” part of *tao-an.
I don’t know about the origins of 台 versus 臺 but Michael Cole has an interesting article where he speculates that the increasingly common us of 臺 by Taiwanese reflects an effort at distinguishing from mainland Chinese. I imagine that Hansioux or others can correct me but as I believe that 台 was more commonly used in the Japanese colonial era, the use of 臺 might also be seen as a form of de-colonialization too.
I don’t know if the use of 臺 was exclusively an effort to wipe out Japanese influence, because the Japanese used 臺 themselves…
Japanese map from 1895
Japanese map from 1934
The choice between the formal 臺 and the simplified 台 is definitely as fluid back then as it is today. Certainly the Prefecture used the simplified 台 as the design concept for the Prefecture’s emblem, but it’s not like the Japanese government gave an order saying that it had to be written as 台.
There was an effort to force everyone to write 臺 instead of 台 during the KMT’s oppressive rule. But since the Japanese didn’t enforce the use of 台, it seems unlikely that the KMT’s efforts were focused on uprooting Japanese influence.
I think the primary reason why KMT disliked 台 was that the CCP went with the effort to simplify Chinese. So the KMT wanted to maintain they were the sole carrier of traditional Chinese culture, and went the other way to ban all shorthand characters.
The secondary reason is that it is really hard to figure out why the character 台 got the pronunciation of 臺 in the first place. 台 should definitely read as /i/ or /gi/ back in Middle Chinese, evidenced by 怡, 冶, 貽, 飴. However, by Sui and Tang dynasty, the pronunciation for /tai/ already exists, and there’s a bunch of characters such as 殆, 始, 苔, 胎, 治, 始 that indicate /tai/ reading existed for a long time as well.
The original character of 台 means sweets. It’s a phonetic-semantic compound (形聲) of the phonetic 㠯 (/i/ or /gi/ in Middle Chinese) and the semantic 口 (mouth). 㠯 is an old way of writing 以 and 已. It’s something that sounds like /gi/ that you put into your mouth. So the /gi/ pronunciation part is clear.
The /tai/ pronunciation on the other hand seems to come out of the blue. Back when this thread got started I tried to find an explanation to why 台 should be read as /tai/ but that was an epic fail. I simply don’t know why 台, which is already a phonetic-semantic compound is again borrowed as a phonetic part of so many other /tai/ sounding phonetic-semantic compound words…
臺 originally is a man (士) standing on a tall platform (高) shooting an arrow (至), and thus meant watch tower. Maybe, just maybe… people before Han and Tang dynasty took the top 吉 portion as a short hand way of writing 臺 and that became 台 and the rest of the /tai/ sounding 台 characters came from there, but I really can’t figure this one out…
However, if the KMT was aiming for historical-linguistic accuracy when they forced people to use 臺 instead of 台, they should change the 台 portion of 殆, 苔, 胎, 治, 始, 颱 and many more to 臺 as well.
I say leave it up to the people, and the people will use 台 because people don’t give a rats ass about historical-linguistic accuracies.
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To clarify, I was thinking that it could be a case of two words looking similar getting lumped together fairly early on.
So there’s the “sweets” character 台 /gi/ and the “fetus” character 胎 /tʰai/, and then they were so similar they became the same character with two different pronunciation.
I had a hard time proving that to be the case though. In Baxter-Sagart’s reconstruction, 台 /gi/ and 胎 /tʰai/ were reconstructed very similarly as *lə and *l̥ˤə in Old Chinese. 臺 on the other hand was reconstructed as *lˤə, also very very similar.
Meaning that to Baxter and Sagart, the two words are so interchangeable, because they were since the ancient period.
I don’t know how *lˤə could become /tʰai/ or even /gi/ for that matter. But I think that means my two different similar looking characters with different pronunciations merged as one hypothesis is incorrect.
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Thanks, Hansioux. As always, this history and language lesson is greatly appreciated!