quote[quote]All Chinese languages can be written using Chinese characters, but some of those characters may be very rare in Mandarin spoken usage.[/quote]
Although this is a common belief, this is basically a myth. The languages/dialects/regionolects (whatever you want to call them) of China are very different in many ways that additional characters are not adequate to handle with any sort of clarity or efficiency.
quote[quote]But if some sort of language commission was set-up they could easily create some either by borrowing other characters or inventing new ones. [/quote]
Is there any particular reason you think this writing system should use characters rather than an alphabet?
quote[quote]This has been done effectively in Hong Kong for Cantonese so that you can read Cantonese magazines etc there with something like 5-10% (i'm not too sure) opf the chracters rare or non-existant in Mandarin.[/quote]
What’s usually seen in HK is not really written Cantonese but standard Chinese that has had some extra characters added to it, which is very different.
I strongly recommend to everyone The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy, by John DeFrancis, whose name should already be familiar to many from his Chinese-English dictionary and his other writings.
As pointed out “Mandarin” is a spoken dialect of Chinese. It is quite possible to read a document written in Modern Standard Chinese characters in quite a few dialects including Cantonese, Mandarin, and Hokkien. Even within Hokkien or Cantonese, many characters will be pronounced differently depending on geographical location. There are even great differences in the pronunciation of Irish words depending on geographical location, not to mention English.
Is it necessary to add another version of written Chinese to accommodate the vernacular idiosyncracies of various flavours of Taiwanese ? If it is, then the argument seems to be that Taiwanese is not a dialect of Chinese at all, but a separate language.
When talking about an official language, this in practice means that a man should be able to conduct all his affairs in that language. If the example of legal affairs is used, is it not acceptable that written submissions are made in the current Modern Standard Chinese, and if a man wishes to speak Taiwanese in court, his words could be written down using Chinese characters. This would of course require that a Chinese character (or characters) exists for each Taiwanese word. Could this actually be done ?
I’m not an expert, but I have discussed this with Taiwanese and Cantonese speakers who knew what they were talking about.
quote[quote] The languages/dialects/regionolects (whatever you want to call them) of China are very different in many ways that additional characters are not adequate to handle with any sort of clarity or efficiency. [/quote]
I want to call them languages. I’m talking about the MAJOR languages, like Mandarin, Hokkien, Cantonese, Hakka. Why do you think that chinese characters can’t handle writing these languages? Chinese chractes were used to write classical Chinese - wen yan wen. Comparisons show that ancient poems rhyme better when read in Cantonese or Hokkien than in Mandarin, so are closer to old Chinese (that the written system was created for) than modern Mandarin.
Chinese used to be written (until early this century) in classical wen yan wen, and it was only this century that it began to be written more like it was spoken, in the vernacular bai hua wen. As this was the time the government was trying to unify the country they imposed Mandarin on everybody, before vernacular versions of the other languages could develop. This doesn’t mean that written forms of other spoken languages couldn’t have been developed just as easily.
quote[quote] Is there any particular reason you think this writing system should use characters rather than an alphabet? [/quote]
Most Chinese are already familiar with Chinese characters and Chiense characters quite suit Chinese languages. The arguments for using an alphabet to write other Chinese languages are the same as arguments to replace characters with pinyin for Mandarin. I think it is a bad idea, but others may disagree.
quote: What's usually seen in HK is not really written Cantonese but standard Chinese that has had some extra characters added to it, which is very different.
There are two types of writing in HK (I guess 3 if you include wen yan wen). One is the ‘standard chinese’ which is written in most formal publications etc. It’s the same as Mandarin, but like you said, may (occasionally) have additional chracters. Cantonese who don’t understand spoken Mandarin can read this and pronounce it with Cantonese, but it reads as very formal lnaguage and has about 20% difference in grammar from Cantonese. Then there’s writing in some magazines and novels which writes, using chinese characters the way you would speak Cantonese. There are standardised additional characters (not too many) and it works fine.
quote: and if a man wishes to speak Taiwanese in court, his words could be written down using Chinese characters. This would of course require that a Chinese character (or characters) exists for each Taiwanese word. Could this actually be done ?
It could be done easily. Apparently for about 80% of Taiwanese words it’s easy. For the remaining 20% it is necessary to use some other way. Alternatives include, finding a suitable ancient classical chinese character, borrowing a ‘mandarin’ character with the same or similar pronounciation, creating a new chracter by combining a meaning radical with a sound radical, using a certain number of characters purely phonetically (in a similar way that certain mandarin chracters are used to represent certain English syllables) or even (I think the worst option) using a phonetic alphabet for the remainder. I think some de facto standardisation exists for some words in the rare cases that Taiwanese is actually written (like in KTV for song lyrics etc) but more standardisation would be helpful.
Bri
PS Would a moderator want to move this thread or prt of it to the ‘Chinese’ forum?
I think it should be left here, as it’s not about LEARNING Chinese, which is what the “Chinese forum” is.
I find it kind of interesting that the folks who want to use a Romanization system to make Taiwan distinct from the Mainland aren’t jumping on the bandwagon – a totally different dialect as an official language is so much more different than simply using different Romanization for the same language!! Why don’t we just get “touch-sensitive” street signs, where you tap a button and someone’s sweet recorded voice reads you the street name, thus completely eliminating the problem of rendering the languages??
A very interesting argument, Ironlady. So why is it okay to speak the same language as the Mainlanders, but not okay to use the same Romanisation? Wouldn’t that be a nice problem for a research?
And I support your suggestion with talking street signs. Let’s put multimedia into traffic! Of course, one should be able to customize the output, so the “average foreigner” could get the sign read by Hsu Chi while others… I’m sure it would only marginally change the noise level on the streets. But this is probably more for the “Technology in Taiwan” forum.
Bu Lai En, as you stated yourself: Taiwanese might only be sufficient in 80% and that is rather insufficient. Unfortunately, Taiwanese had been suppressed for a time long enough to let the language grow wild. If there is no written form of a language, standardisation is almost impossible. But what standard dictionaries are there for Taiwanese that meet the claim to be “standard”? I’m afraid it will take a few more years of linguistic study to establish a “Standard Taiwanese” instead of a number of taiwanese dialects. That standard must be taught then at school and after there is a sufficient basis of confident speakers of it, the language could become an official language. But that could be a long way…
Are their really streets in Jilong that romanise the Taiwanese pronounciation. I go to Jilong often enough and started looking out for them, but all the ones I’ve seen use Wade-Giles or some other stupid system to romanise Mandarin. No romanisation of Taiwanese. I saw it in Su-Ao though - Diong Sam
So does anyone actually know what TSU’s proposal means? Official language, in what respect? Just to print it in the GIO’s ROC yearbook? Does it have any real implications? Does it actually require that people should be able to request using the language in certain situations? That there must be news in both Taiwanese and Mandarin on TV? What? If it’s only a statement to be printed somewhere because it looks good, then it doesn’t cost anything or actually mean anything and so of course every aboriginal language plus Taiwanese and Hakka and Cantonese and what have you could be made an official language.
I went to their site earlier today ( http://www.taiwanunion.com ) to get an e-mail address and see if I could get some kind of answer from them.
Unfortunately the cheapskates use a free service with a cap on the amount of traffic allowed per day, and since the limit was exceeded, their site is down until they pay up and upgrade their service.
They must have used to use Taiwanese to romanise the road signs there and started doing away with it I guess, because I read in the View From the Hill column in the Post that they do it, so I started looking, but out of the 20 or so that I’ve remembered to look at they were all romanising Mandarin. Maybe it’s just becuase I’ve been on main roads who have had their signs changed.
You will find a lot of Taiwanese road signs in Yilan County,
particularly Jiaoxi township…
As our goal in the hanyu pinyin sign romanization campaign is for
standards, what does one do if the town is 50% hakka and 50% minnan?
And how does one guess the romanization from abroad? How does one
automate indexing systems… I must have a special flag to produce a
certain romanization depending on the ethnic mix of the area… and
what to do when the mix changes, or race X does not want X language
road signs.
No problem with countrywide Minnanyu [Taiwanese] road signs. But
first the government should prove its commitment, by making it the
spoken language for use in schools — which I don’t see happening.
Are all people in Taiwan who can speak only Taiwanese and Hakka illiterate … since there is no written language that must make them illiterate…but I have seen my girlfriends grandmother read the newspaper
What can my Taiwanese friends sing the same songs in KTV in Taiwanese and Chinese by reading the characters? … that seems to suggest that you can read Chinese characters in Taiwanese
My girlfriends family always speaks Taiwanese but sometimes she can’t express herelf in Taiwanese… does this seem to suggest that thourgh generations that Taiwanese people will become less proficent in the language
Tawinese seems to be a situational language even for the Taiwanese… they can speak in with passion in some siutations …telling a joke… threatening somebody with an iron bar when they bump into eachother in a car crash … but seem to be unable to express themselves in other situations
quote:Originally posted by zhukov:
I have a couple of questions:
Are all people in Taiwan who can speak only Taiwanese and Hakka illiterate … since there is no written language that must make them illiterate…but I have seen my girlfriends grandmother read the newspaper
Very possible. Since most of the people who grew up here from 1895 to 1945 received a Japanese education and only speak “Taiwanese” and Hakka with their families but was never really taught. My grandparents speak Japanese and “Taiwanese” only. They can not really speak Mandarin it’s limited.
quote:
What can my Taiwanese friends sing the same songs in KTV in Taiwanese and Chinese by reading the characters? … that seems to suggest that you can read Chinese characters in Taiwanese
The written language is common to all “dialects” of Chinese. It just that certain words can not be written in Mandarin Han characters because there is no written form of the words in the Mandarin use of the Han characters. It’s sort of like the romance languages have most of the alphabet in common and each individual language has some special characters.
quote:
3) My girlfriends family always speaks Taiwanese but sometimes she can’t express herelf in Taiwanese… does this seem to suggest that thourgh generations that Taiwanese people will become less proficent in the language
Tawinese seems to be a situational language even for the Taiwanese… they can speak in with passion in some siutations …telling a joke… threatening somebody with an iron bar when they bump into eachother in a car crash … but seem to be unable to express themselves in other situations
Well this is the direct result of decades of KMT’s systematic supression of the Taiwanese culture. The situations you described are situations that you would not really learn in a school but in everyday life. The more “intellectual” areas of life has been taught by the schools in Mandarin. So most of the younger generations can not speak “Taiwanese” all the time. You might be able to find that in younger people towards the south but not in Taipei. “Taiwanese” was only taught to the kids by the parents and as the only way for the kids to speak to the grandparents. Ironically, since I grew up in the states speaking “Taiwanese” instead of Mandarin, I have to switch to “Taiwanese” to express myself in “Chinese.” The Taiwanese people respond much better to my “Taiwanese” than Mandarin.
