Implications of developing a phonetic script for Taiwanese
Plausible and dangerous: China will see it as a real threat
Plausible but innocuous: It could happen, but no big deal
Implausible but dangerous: Couldnât happen, but the idea itself is bad enough
Implausible and innocuous: will go over like a lead balloon, nobody notices
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Seems to me if there were serious Taiwanese nationalists who wanted to tout their local culture and distinguish it from the mainland, and possibly sow seeds of dissent across the strait in Fujian province as well . . .
. . . the best thing they could do would be to promote a scholarly effort to develop a phonetic script for the Taiwanese language. For that added wicked touch, maybe based on katakana.
Personally, I think itâs quite plausible and rather dangerous: if the mainlanders catch on to the implications, they would need to worry about separatism not only in Taiwan but in Fujian as well. And then Cantonese and Hakka speakers say, why not us too?
Think about it. If you dismantle the Chinese written language, you dismantle the Chinese empire. Even if the Taiwanese donât try it, maybe the American CIA should give it a shot!
Good idea? Bad idea? Crazy talk? What do you think?
There are already (several) phonetic scripts for Min-nan-hua. But perhaps you mean to make it the official script in Taiwan. In that case, youâd fracture Taiwan way before you fracture mainland China
I donât think it would have to be that fractuous in Taiwan, not with even Lien Chan trying to stumble his way through a few Taiwanese phrases in order to win votes.
If English is being introduced at the elementary school level, side by side with Mandarin, then why not an official Taiwanese script as well, perhaps as a partner to Mandarinâs zhuyin fuhao?
Itâs not like learning or speaking Mandarin would be forbiddenâas Taiwanese was under KMT rule.
[later edit] Note that this doesnât necessarily mean that Chinese characters would be supplanted, merely that Taiwanese speakers would have an alternative to characters for writing their own language. I suggest that this would be easy enough since nothing would be abolished, merely an alternative would be presented. An increasingly popular alternative, I would suspect, and one with strong political implications.
thatâs kind of weak. What would Hakkas complain about? Most Hakka I know speak Taiwanese as well.
And if by âtruly native Taiwaneseâ you mean the aborigines, pardon me while I fall down laughing. I think those guys have a LOT more to complain about, donât you? Not least a lack of any meaningful political power whatsoever.
If I understand correctly, you are proposing replacing characters with an âalphabet.â Personally, I doubt it would ever happen.
Those in power decided to keep traditional characters after coming to Taiwan, even though the mainland decided to create simplified characters. The mainlanders already gave up on characters (in their traditional form) I doubt theyâd care what Taiwan does with them.
I also think zeugmite is right that the process of changing the script would create many more problems in Taiwan than in China. For instance, imagine spelling reform taking place in the U.S. or other English speaking countries. Itâs not easy.
Hereâs an articlehttp://zhongwen.com/x/faq26.htm on zhongwen.com about abolishing characters. There was an even more relevant article on there before. I canât seem to find it.
That being said, Iâd love to see something more uniform and simple. In any language.
I donât think the political implications would be that great.
As Zeugmite already pointed out, there are already phonetic systems for Taiwanese (Hokkien/Hoklo). Thereâs a few using the latin alphabet, one using zhuyin (bopomofo), and one using Japanese katakana. Thereâs also systmes using Chinese hanzi, and a mixture of hanzi and phonetics (although i donât know how thorough these are).
Personally I think that if and when Taiwan does get around to chosing an official standard for written Taiwanese, it will be one which uses hanzi ro possibly a mixed system. It is certainly arguable (although I donât think I agree) that a phonetic system would be better, but I think a system based on hanzi would be easier for the Taiwanese to accept and use.
[quote=âdonnadieâ]If I understand correctly, you are proposing replacing characters with an âalphabet.â Personally, I doubt it would ever happen.
Those in power decided to keep traditional characters after coming to Taiwan, even though the mainland decided to create simplified characters. The mainlanders already gave up on characters (in their traditional form) I doubt theyâd care what Taiwan does with them.
[/quote]
No, the OP did not mean replacing Chinese language characters with an âalphabetâ. He was talking about the Taiwanese language. Taiwanese is an ORAL language only. The Taiwan people have adapted Chinese characters to represent Taiwanese, but it is adapating a foriegn language, Chinese, to the Taiwan language. By the way, Hakka, Cantonese and Shanghainese are also ORAL languages with no written form. They use Chinese characters as tools, mostly for non-native speakers, but there is no real written Taiwanese language. There are Romanizations which use the Western alphabet to help students pronouce the sounds. I think these were developed by Missionaries.
The original poster hinted at developing a language script similar to Thai or Arabic or as he says based on Katakana. I think a short term fix for this based on Katakana or even the Western Alphabet like Vietnam uses. I would prefer Katakana for its political implications.
I donât think it would catch on in China with the regional language, but it is worth a try. It would go a long way at helping to fossilize a Taiwanese national consciousness and help make Taiwan people proud.
Perhaps Katakana though would piss off all the KMT (China Nationalist Party) supporters as they hate Japan people as much as their brothers in China. Perhaps something besides Katakana.
Zeugmite: Please enlighten me if I am so ignorant. I would like to learn about this. Where was I wrong? I am not a native speaker of Taiwanese, Hakka, Cantonese or Shanghainese so I am not so sure about this. Please explain.
Maybe someone else who is not as politically biased as Zeugmite could explain it to me.
[quote=âHobartâ]Zeugmite: Please enlighten me if I am so ignorant. I would like to learn about this. Where was I wrong? I am not a native speaker of Taiwanese, Hakka, Cantonese or Shanghainese so I am not so sure about this. Please explain.
Maybe someone else who is not as politically biased as Zeugmite could explain it to me.[/quote]
Well, youâre right only if you donât consider Taiwanese to be Chinese. Cantonese, Shanghainese, Mandarin, etc. are all Chinese. Written Chinese connects them all.
You also have a problem in that both Cantonese and Hokkien can be written as they are spoken using characters, but in a way that isnât the same as Standard Written Chinese.
Yes, Hobart. What you wrote betrays a worrying degree of ignorance about Taiwan. I should have thought that someone posing as a champion of this island would try to learn a bit more about it. Havenât you heard Taiwanese boasting about how their language (Hokkien, but when they are talking about this aspect they prefer to call it Holo) is the original Chinese as spoken in Luoyang in Henan Province in ancient times, whereas Mandarin, which such people prefer to call Beijing hua, is some kind of Mongolian-Manchurian mongrel language? (Their opinion, not mine, I hasten to point out.)
Juba: I learned this in University many years ago before I came to Taiwan, but isnât it inaccurate to use modern Mandarin to write Hakka, Cantonese and Taiwanese? Were almost every Chinese illiterate only about 100 to 200 years ago when they were all farmers. Isnât using Chinese characters for Hakka an adaptation, or am I wrong about that for Hakka, what about Cantonese and Taiwanese for example? Were Chinese characters something used primarily by only the Mandarins and educated in Ancient China? People speaking Hakka at home and Cantonese at home had Chinese characters to represent their language but it these languages werenât exactly written lanugages and werenât the Characters adapatations and aids but not a perfect fit?
Admittedly, I focused my studies on Modern China, so please forgive my cursory knowledge.
Whether modern spoken Taiwanese is connected to ancient Chinese shouldnât have much bearing on whether the modern dialect should share a script with modern Mandarin, nor whether their respective speakers should be united under a common state. Quite the contrary.
Imposition of a common language has always served as a political tool of the elite, especially over linguistically diverse empires like Rome, Imperial Britain, and China. Even after the Roman Empire fell, the Catholic clergy maintained a loose hegemony over the European contentinent for another thousand years by virtue of their monopoly on Latin education and learning. Half a century after the Raj faded away, New Delhi still uses English (and Hindi, I believe) to unify administration over its fractuous domain. And a nearly a century after the last Qing emperor abdicated, the Beijing dialect and a unified writing system throws a blanket over scores of regional dialects, several of them effectively languages in their own right.
So (I humbly submit) promoting the Taiwanese language, and especially a script divorced from the homogemous Chinese character system, would directly challenge this use of language as a political tool, and help bust the myth of Chinese culturalâmuch less politicalâunity.
Saying âTaiwanese is Chineseâ is like saying âSpanish is Latinâ.
But Taiwanese is a Chinese language, just like Spanish is a Latin language.
But not a strong connection.
But not all Hokkien words can be written with characters, and thereâs not standard for this. Hokkien can also be written using the Latin alphabet. Does this make it Latin?
Thereâs two extremes here:
They are all Chinese dialects. Itâs all one language.
They are different languages that share some comon roots.
Hobart was taking the second position ot an extreme, but thatâs certainly not nonsense. The answer lies somewhere in the middle.
Well, too late. It already does and has for a few thousand years.
nor whether they should not be.
Imposition of phonetic spelling in the regional vernacular has always served as a political tool of the regionalist or nationalist, especially to build up distinct province-sized nation-states.
I see no problem with having a common language of communication.
Pffft. If itâs a myth, why would you have to take such social engineering measures to bust it? Sounds like you are using language as a political tool. Even said so yourself.
But not a strong connection. [/quote]
Pretty damned strong.
But not all Hokkien words can be written with characters, and thereâs not standard for this.[/quote]
Said another way, Not many Hokkien words cannot be written with characters. And only dialect-specific syllables need to be standardized (and of those, only those that havenât historically been in usage). The rest are simply cognates. By that I mean they are the exact same characters. No standardization is needed for those.
If you, Bu Lai En, can comprehend anything in Hokkien written with the Latin alphabet, without beforehand having known it, then we can talk about whether that makes it Latin, mmkay?
[quote]Thereâs two extremes here:
They are all Chinese dialects. Itâs all one language.
They are different languages that share some comon roots.
Hobart was taking the second position ot an extreme, but thatâs certainly not nonsense. The answer lies somewhere in the middle.[/quote]
The answer is very clear. As purely spoken languages, they are etymologically related languages from the Sinitic family (about as old as the Romance languages). But language encompasses more than speech. As such, they are unified by writing, due to the use of a common written script and a common âlearnedâ or nowadays ânationalâ written language. Add to that an early unified culture, they co-developed very closely. Writing did and does affect speech, and dialect speech did and does affect written vocabulary.
The key thing I try to get through to you guys is that sharing the Chinese script is fundamentally unlike sharing 26 letters of the alphabet, because each character has meaning. Please learn this fact.
Iâm sure you realise that I understand this. I am also sure that you can understand that many disagree with your emphasis on how much meaning is held by individual characters. I can know the meaning of every character in a newspaper article, and still not read that article. Meaning lies in the words and the grammar as well. Please learn this fact.
Iâm sure you realise that I understand this. I am also sure that you can understand that many disagree with your emphasis on how much meaning is held by individual characters. I can know the meaning of every character in a newspaper article, and still not read that article. Meaning lies in the words and the grammar as well. Please learn this fact.
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Words that are constructed from the characters with their meanings and grammars that became what they are through a grammaticalization process of turning âmeaningâ characters into âgrammaticalâ characters. Both were exchanged and adapted through the shared writing. Please learn some Chinese historical linguistics.
I never said characters in isolation provide the whole meaning of a passage or else they would not need to be put in any order. Thatâs a straw man. I did say that sharing a character script is fundamentally unlike sharing 26 meaningless letters in the level of close relationship it allows between speeches.
