Beaches in Taiwan?

Not a beach but if you are interested in somewhere to swim that’s nice, cool and relaxing and doesn’t have the lifeguards tooting at you once the water touches a bollock you can always head to Wulai for the swim in the river. It’s lacking in the bikini clad babes but it’s lovely to swim in on a hot day. Go for a hike, cool off with a dip in the river. Nice, clean clear waters too.

Keep up the good work, Taiwan badly needs yet another romanization system! :sunglasses:

But if it’s supposed to be Czech-based then you want to save the ž for the sound of /zh/ (ㄓ). Unless it’s meant to be deliberately confusing like the other systems are. :slight_smile:

I don’t think there’s a sound for /j/ (ㄐ) in Czech. The closest approximation would be ď, or ť if you want to do the unvoiced version like in “mainland” China, and the latter way is how the Czechs themselves seem to transliterate Chinese words. 北京 is “Pej-ťing,” so 金門 would be “Ťin-men” (or “Ďin-men”) but note this is the same as the sound of the initial in 挑/雕.

But why?

Yeah, at the moment it’s purely decorative, with the wonderfully atmospheric name of - take a deep breath - Lungmen Nuclear Power Plant. As if that name isn’t asking for a world class nuclear accident. Anyway, you can lie on the sand, gaze across the sparkling blue water at ‘Lungmen’ and meditate on the superiority of Taiwanese construction and government oversight over the Japanese. Or vice versa.[/quote]

The one across the bay from Kending is still working, isn’t it, if you need that extra warmth while hanging out on the beach. :sunglasses:[/quote]

I have a nice little anecdote about that one. When I was living in Taiwan, I spent a few weeks living in Hengchun/ Kending and hooked up with a local scuba dive centre. Quite nice diving there, by the way. During one of the dives near to Nanwan we swam through a thermocline, that is where the temperature of the water suddenly changes- in this case it was into warmer water. After the dive I asked the guide what the reason for the thermocline was and he said, nonchalantly, “oh that’s just the waste water outflow from the nuclear power station”.

Just the opposite. ž is the intial for both 機 (pinyin: j) and 之 (pinyin: zh). “But people will get confused,” I can hear you starting. I have faith they won’t. In WG, Ch is j, zh, q, and ch, and some people insist it is the only good Romanization system. In languages like Japanese, “ti” (in one Romanization system) is the spelling for the phoneme “chi” and “si” for “shi” (which is the same consonant as 西 in Mandarin). What I’m trying to say without resorting to IPA is that basically people are smart enough to understand that ži (機) and žr (之) are slightly different consonants – if they want to understand.

The problem with highly specific systems is that, for people uninterested in learning the finer details of the language, they are unnecessarily clumsy. My parents couldn’t differentiate the “sh” sound in sh and x anyway, so using two different letters for those sounds just served to confuse them.

Anyway, I’m not really trying to replace pinyin. Just having fun with a pretty writing system. (Mods, please feel free to split all of this into a new thread… or temp it.)

Just the opposite. ž is the intial for both 機 (pinyin: j) and 之 (pinyin: zh). “But people will get confused,” I can hear you starting. I have faith they won’t. In WG, Ch is j, zh, q, and ch, and some people insist it is the only good Romanization system. […]

The problem with highly specific systems is that, for people uninterested in learning the finer details of the language […] using two different letters for those sounds just served to confuse them.[/quote]
OK, I understand what you’re aiming at. But we need to distinguish the two approaches: (a) transliteration (whether “romanization” into the Latin alphabet or into another writing system) and (b) transcription (into another language, possibly also using another alphabet). While Hanyu Pinyin follows the first approach, your Háček Pinyin in statu nascendi is an example of the latter. They’re not really comparable.

Which of the two will be more useful depends on the situation. If you are writing a Chinese cookbook in English, you may want to go for a simple transcription, so that people can reasonably well approximate the pronunciation of dishes with minimum effort. You’ll end up with something like “chow mein” or “Yeung chow rice,” both of which sound close enough and it won’t matter that each time it’s a different “chow” that’s been transcribed the same.

But when people in another country develop a writing system for their language, they generally do it for their own use, and not for the benefit of some, in this case English-speaking, foreigners halfway around the world. Just like French, German, Czech or even Esperanto words generally can’t be pronounced properly by an English speaker without prior training, Hanyu Pinyin also has some learning curve, and it doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with it. On the contrary, a conscious choice has been made to make it like that so that it’s more efficient once it’s learned. Kind of similar to how it’s more efficient to write a³ instead of a·a·a, assuming you’re familiar with the convention.

Without the intention to sound smug, I think this is more naturally understood in Europe where there are a lot of languages using the same Latin letters but pronouncing them differently so the default thinking is not to assume a letter (such as ‘x’) stands for some sound you know from your own native language. But then, the US also has a lot of weird, difficult to pronounce place names, and yet no-one seems to be campaigning to have them transcribed phonetically and renamed.

The Taiwanese have become confused with all of this, routinely talking of “English letters” (the alphabet), “English names” (of non-English people), and developing weird transcriptions such as soon-to-be ex-mayor How Long Been’s “New Row Main Festival,” supposedly to make it easier for “foreigners.”

Thank you for your attention. :bow: Sorry for the off-topic. :blush: Now, back to the beaches… where were we? :sunglasses:

Only in the movies ! But Kenting has some nice beaches.

These guys know how to have some fun

youtube.com/watch?v=dQHWsHoglbk

Yeah, at the moment it’s purely decorative, with the wonderfully atmospheric name of - take a deep breath - Lungmen Nuclear Power Plant. As if that name isn’t asking for a world class nuclear accident. Anyway, you can lie on the sand, gaze across the sparkling blue water at ‘Lungmen’ and meditate on the superiority of Taiwanese construction and government oversight over the Japanese. Or vice versa.[/quote]

The one across the bay from Kending is still working, isn’t it, if you need that extra warmth while hanging out on the beach. :sunglasses:[/quote]

I have a nice little anecdote about that one. When I was living in Taiwan, I spent a few weeks living in Hengchun/ Kending and hooked up with a local scuba dive centre. Quite nice diving there, by the way. During one of the dives near to Nanwan we swam through a thermocline, that is where the temperature of the water suddenly changes- in this case it was into warmer water. After the dive I asked the guide what the reason for the thermocline was and he said, nonchalantly, “oh that’s just the waste water outflow from the nuclear power station”.[/quote]

Probably a good diving spot cause fish like the warm water? When we passed the nuclear waste facility on Orchid Island we saw a local diving instructor take a group of snorkeler into the water just below the plant. Couldn’t believe it. There have been rumors of leaking barrels contaminating the water and the locals should know about that. There are hundreds of other locations on the island where you can go snorkeling, why go there? It’s also not convenient, the next village is a few kilometers away. You don’t even get the warmer water, just possibly the radiation. :loco:

The water is simply for cooling, there’s no radiation leak , it’s easily
detectable. There is toxic waste on Lanyu though.

I still find this a bit hard to differentiate (though I’m better now) with the Taiwanese pronunciation as they seem to make them sound very similar and not as pronounced as say in China. Personally, I like having the two different letters to help me with my own pronunciation. But when first learning, it was hard to find the correct word on Pleco because of the Taiwanese accent making them sound so very similar. ie. shi bu shi (是不是) in Taiwan sounds like si bu si.

You’re preaching to the choir. Hanyu Pinyin isn’t broken, but it has a few unreasonable elements to it, and so just for fun I like to experiment with other ideas. I wouldn’t actually teach anyone Chinese pronunciation based on this system (well maybe if they were Czech…). More just a thought experiment. I flushed it out a bit here:

In an attempt to look like I’m getting back on topic, there are beaches up in Sanžr and out east in Gonglão. :smiley:

You’re preaching to the choir. […][/quote]
OK, but if the Czechs come up with a transcription for English where “shit” and “sheet” are both written the same, I expect you’ll endorse it too (otherwise it reeks of ethnocentrism).

[quote]“Reception? There’s a šit in my drawer!”
“That’s normal, sir. We always provide one for our guests.”
“But the stenč…”[/quote]

It’s pretty different because then you’d have two identical spellings which have different pronunciations. On the other hand, nothing is spelled “the same” in háček pinyin. While č for example represents two distinct phonemes, they only show up before specific vowel sounds, making a very convenient mutually exclusive distribution. As long as you remember that čr/ča/če/čo/ču = [tʂʰ] and či/čy = [tɕʰ], then it’s really not at all different from how, in Spanish (and English), ca/cu/co = [k] and ci/ce = [s].

You’re right, it’s not the same. What I wrote would be applicable as a criticism of Wade-Giles with apostrophes and ü dropped but your háček pinyin is more tongyongesque in that full information how to pronounce it is still there but just spread around (which I still think is unnecessary and confusing but it’s just a matter of opinion). I stand corrected.

You’re also right that many other languages (although ironically not Czech) have a similar feature (or suffer from a similar problem, one could say) that the pronunciation of a letter (or multigraph) cannot be determined in isolation. Still, I think this is usually an artifact of how the writing system developed, or of the pronunciation shifts that happened after the way of writing was already established, and never a conscious design choice. Since writing Chinese with the Latin alphabet is a relatively recent phenomenon, I don’t think it’s necessary to introduce all this baggage into it. One of the advertised advantages of Esperanto, a constructed language, is its “one letter, one sound” equivalency.

I appreciate your explanations and since you clearly know what you’re doing and why you want it like that, go for it. Hopefully one day you’ll at least get a medal from the Pan-Galactic Háček Appreciation Society. Meanwhile, here’s an honorary Krtek for you:

Hahaha, just where do you hail from, Mr. Doraemonster?

Is that a Czech check? Uncheck the Czech box. :whistle:

Czechs would write them differently: šit vs šít :smiley: