[color=#800000]Moderator note: This topic was split from a discussion about [url=http://tw.forumosa.com/t/xinbei-city/55378/1 County being renamed Xinbei City[/url][/color]
[quote=“Anatoli”][quote=“QAM”]
Think integrated and you won’t need united. If Taiwanese can design chips, they and we can name locations with a variety of systems, as writers see fit.[/quote]
These are slogans, meanwhile Taiwanese place and street names are being romanised as writers see fit making foreigners wonder, which street is which.[/quote]
Which is why I typically read the Chinese on the signs… nothing to worry about…
I had some fun today, I explained the meaning of “Sin City” to my chinese teacher… I really hope they go for New Taipei, but I don’t have a vote in Taiwan so I guess my oppinion doesn’t matter too much
Think integrated and you won’t need united. If Taiwanese can design chips, they and we can name locations with a variety of systems, as writers see fit.[/quote]
These are slogans, meanwhile Taiwanese place and street names are being romanised as writers see fit making foreigners wonder, which street is which.[/quote]
Which is why I typically read the Chinese on the signs… nothing to worry about…[/quote]
You want visitors to this country to learn the many hundreds of characters included on road signs before finding their way around? The situation is not analogous to the US, where signs are written in an alphabet with just 26 letters.
“Just read the Chinese” = “I’m alright Jack, with my ninja Chinese skills, so sod everyone else”
You want visitors to this country to learn the many hundreds of characters included on road signs before finding their way around? [color=#BF0000]The situation is not analogous to the US, where signs are written in an alphabet with just 26 letters.[/color]
“Just read the Chinese” = “I’m alright Jack, with my ninja Chinese skills, so sod everyone else”[/quote]
That is because you can read those names in the form of words. Here is a test for you, only ten numeric characters involved. See if you can memorize this address easily, not to mention many roads all made out of these characters.
72349374, 9798729 Street,
975930753 City, 234243 State
You want visitors to this country to learn the many hundreds of characters included on road signs before finding their way around? [color=#BF0000]The situation is not analogous to the US, where signs are written in an alphabet with just 26 letters.[/color]
“Just read the Chinese” = “I’m alright Jack, with my ninja Chinese skills, so sod everyone else”[/quote]
That is because you can read those names in the form of words. Here is a test for you, only ten numeric characters involved. See if you can memorize this address easily, not to mention many roads all made out of these characters.
72349374, 9798729 Street,
975930753 City, 234243 State[/quote]
What on earth is the relevance of this? Taffy is making the point that there’s little sense in expecting tourists to learn Chinese in order to find their way around. That’ll just make them LESS likely to come and spend their cash, making their daft wee adverts in the US and Europe even MORE of a waste of money.
Living here has very little to do with it. Most people living here very quickly get used to the various Romanized spellings, so they don’t really care how they’re spelled (well, except for people like maoman and Cranky, who get about fit to bust a gut). The rest of could care less if its spelled Jilong, Jilung, Keelong, Keelung or whatever – we know what it means. Or else, as Ludahai points out, we just read the Chinese.
What are the numbers for? What’s your point?
Ludahai, what you’re ignoring with your numbers example is:
• Global familiarity with the roman alphabet (especially among travellers)
• Patterns and frequency (letters are not randomly arranged - in the major languages of the world which use the roman alphabet, there are vowels and consonants, and often consonant clusters)
Anyway, I would contend that a string of numbers is far easier to memorise than a string of Chinese characters if you’ve never seen them before. Do you remember what those squiggles looked like before you learned to read them? I do, and apart from a couple of really obvious (and simple) characters like 口, 一, and 山 I would have serious trouble remembering ten new ones and separating them from the background noise. You’re not just distinguishing the characters in the address from each other, you’re distinguishing them from the hundreds of other characters used in Chinese-language addresses.
You want visitors to this country to learn the many hundreds of characters included on road signs before finding their way around? The situation is not analogous to the US, where signs are written in an alphabet with just 26 letters.
“Just read the Chinese” = “I’m alright Jack, with my ninja Chinese skills, so sod everyone else”[/quote]
But I know people who have lived here for 20 years who don’t know anything more than basic Chinese characters… really shameful if you ask me…
As for which system is used, I really don’t care… Tongyong, Hanyu, as long as they are used consistently and as long as the party implementing it hasn’t been hypocritical about it (as the KMT has)
Why is it shameful? Its a tool, nothing more. If you can get by comfortably without it, why bother? Some kind of “respect” thing? But what if you simply don’t respect the speakers at all? Why then should someone learn Chinese? I don’t get it.
Why is it shameful? Its a tool, nothing more. If you can get by comfortably without it, why bother? Some kind of “respect” thing? But what if you simply don’t respect the speakers at all? Why then should someone learn Chinese? I don’t get it. [/quote]
there are many Taiwanese folks living in the US
who cannot speak English at all. (not even
enough to communicate with the mailman or
pizza boy)
You want visitors to this country to learn the many hundreds of characters included on road signs before finding their way around? [color=#BF0000]The situation is not analogous to the US, where signs are written in an alphabet with just 26 letters.[/color]
“Just read the Chinese” = “I’m alright Jack, with my ninja Chinese skills, so sod everyone else”[/quote]
That is because you can read those names in the form of words. Here is a test for you, only ten numeric characters involved. See if you can memorize this address easily, not to mention many roads all made out of these characters.
72349374, 9798729 Street,
975930753 City, 234243 State[/quote]
What on earth is the relevance of this? Taffy is making the point that there’s little sense in expecting tourists to learn Chinese in order to find their way around. That’ll just make them LESS likely to come and spend their cash, making their daft wee adverts in the US and Europe even MORE of a waste of money.
Living here has very little to do with it. Most people living here very quickly get used to the various Romanized spellings, so they don’t really care how they’re spelled (well, except for people like maoman and Cranky, who get about fit to bust a gut). The rest of could care less if its spelled Jilong, Jilung, Keelong, Keelung (Jilong) or whatever – we know what it means. Or else, as Ludahai points out, we just read the Chinese.
What are the numbers for? What’s your point?[/quote]
I am not against Romantizing signs for the convenience of foreigners. In fact, I am totally for it. On my last visit to Korea, many years ago, they only had street signs in Korean characters. It was surely a pain to find my way around.
All I was trying to point out is the logic behind Taffy’s reasoning. Please note the highlight I made. To someone unfamiliar with those 26 Roman characters used in English, the readability of those signs are just as good as my numerical example. A display of subtle western chauvinism.
Hmm. Did you read my response? It’s not about “western chauvinism”, it’s about familiarity and mathematics.[/quote]
Not r5eally. Seeing that number test proposed, it sounded more like that awful plan of Acenue 1, Street 36, whatever system that Ma spent a fortune putting together in taipei City. The main reason -aside from the innaness of it- that it did not work was that any romanization ssytem is supposed to give you a common ground with teh lovcals and have some if even faint resemblance to the local system. A local may see Jienguo and scrathch their heads but may hit it after several attemps. Avenue 187 does not exist in his context and therefore has no clue of what the lost tourist is looking for.
We do get that a string of numbers and strange names may make for hard memorization, but we are not asking to memorize. Most of the time, a tourist will have a map or an address written on a piece of paper. To verify the address, if using letters, then just follow the sequence. If not teh same sequence, then it is not the same address. Ther eis no need to read it aloud with teh correct pronunciation. On the contrary, identifying a “drawing”, a character, would require a lot more observation. May be possible, but takes longer time.
That is teh problem of romanization of street signs in Taiwan. If a tourist sees a bus stop saying Yinko, but there is a street sign above saying Yinge, he may supoose he’s in teh same place, but there will be teh lingering fear of some mistake. That lingering sensation is called confusion.
It’s interesting you should bring that up. The Murray numeric type system, which was developed in the late nineteenth century, was a braille syllabary for the blind. It functioned by having its users memorize some 400 numbers and their corresponding (in the system) Mandarin syllable. This made it easier for blind people than for sighted people to learn to read and write Mandarin. (This, BTW, is still the case, though the blind in China use other braille systems now.)
Later on, someone made the logical connection and made a corresponding Murray script for the sighted.
Political parties certainly deserve brickbats for hypocrisy. For example, the KMT was once so opposed to Hanyu Pinyin that it adopted a made-in-Taiwan system to counter it, which failed. (Sound familiar?) But if such historical hypocrisies invalidated the possibility for change, then nothing could ever get done – not by the KMT, not by the DPP, and almost certainly not by any political party anywhere.
I should have stopped reading after the first off-topic post. My bad. This thread should be about rendering Mandarin Chinese into Alphabetic (No one has brought up Alpha-Zeta characters yet, anyone? Argh!). That’s all. It looks like even Ovid Tseng has come to the conclusion that it is an unwieldy way to talk politics, since it has more to do about what your Chinese language teacher decided when you were in Kindergarten or older. They had their reasons, but probably it was one of pedagogy does it really matter whether Mao would have approved or Hu does. Wen? No, not now anyway.
are you suggesting that the CCP politburo was not consulted
about this name change? :no-no:
My favourite city in North America is New York, New York.
(or New York, NY… or New York City, New York… whatever)
If I was put in charge of the official naming commision,
I’d change Taipei County’s name to “Taiwan City, Taiwan”
(or Taiwan, Taiwan) If it’s going to become the biggest
city with the highest number of residents, it deserves a
name as big as New York City.
