For the sake of argument, let’s say that kids are able to absorb a romanized system of writing Taiwanese fairly easily.
The next question is how much time should they be spending on speaking, writing the phonetic system and writing the new Taiwanese characters.
I bet schools are going to be spending a disproportionate amount of time with thsi phonetic system and characters. I think learning of Taiwanese should be compulsory but only as one or two hours a week of ‘Taiwanese appreciation’ classes or something like that, not formal teaching. Kids would then be able to pick up some extra Taiwanese without too much pressure and tests galore.
Somebody mentioned that nearly all kids who have Taiwanese speaking parents can speak Taiwanese. That is just not true. Many parents are fluent in Taiwanese but speak 99% Mandarin to their kids. If there is no input from grandparents, the kids know relatively little Taiwanese. Should they be forced to learn it school in the way that is being proposed? I don’t believe so. That is likely to turn them away from the Taiwanese dialect/language rather than towards it.
BTW, Is there a language called Philipino? I thought the most spoken language was Tagalog.
Yes, Tagalog is the base language for Philipines National Language, which is dubbed as “Filipino” Ask mr. google.
Regarding school instruction in different language:
Back in around 1920 - 1950, in my homeland, West Kalimantan. School is only a privilege for the affluent. Chinese of different dialect background were establishing their own school. I heard this from my Chinese Teacher in Jakarta. She was taught in bilinggual “Hakka” + “Mandarin”. Other school taught “Hainanese” + “Mandarin”, “Hokkian”+“Mandarin”, “TioCiu”+ “Mandarin.”
I read a news two years back about the history of this school. The first school established in Java is Chinese school, and instruction were given in bilinggual “English”+“Mandarin.” Every year they had a competition between students from different school. And it proves that the school that employed bilingual instruction in “English”+“Mandarin” is the best school at that time.
I’m not saying that dialectal instruction is not good. I still imagine I was in that period of time. I would still want to learn things in my native Hakka tongue.
It reminds me of the debate in Wales a decade ago (probably still ongoing) about whether to teach Welsh in Welsh schools. Plenty of people still speak Welsh in Wales but it was feared that it would slowly decline over time if it wasn’t taught in school.
Others said forget about Welsh, and focus on some other more useful second languages like French, German, Spanish etc.
When there are only X number of hours in a week, it could be argued that the time allotted to formally learning Taiwanese could be better spent learning English.
Let’s face it - Taiwanese isn’t going to disappear as a dialect, because too many people speak it, and Taiwanese kids need all the extra help they can get learning Englsih.
Will spending more time on Taiwanese actually mean less time for learning English? Let’s hope not.
In my opinion, the reason that Mandarin is easily romanised is because there are only 4(5) tones.
I used to teach in Hong Kong, and in order to learn the language, adopted the fairly standardised system used around the city. However, when I would ask a native Cantonese speaker how to pronounce a work written like this, or when I’d say, “Give me an example of a 2nd (high-falling) tone word.” they simply couldn’t do it. Not once did I find someone who could produce a specifically toned word on demand. It is for this reason that I see the greatest result of teaching children to write in romanised Taiwanese would merely be the increased use of a standardised, albeit toneless romanisation system. Yay! What a waste of money. They’re not only asking kids to learn to romanise every word, but also know the specific tone each word has. C’mon, most Cantonese don’t even know about the original 1st and 9th tones that they should say, but don’t.
It may be completely different (as I don’t know much about Taiwanese), but I think expecting children to learn such things is pointless, and unfair.
You can graft the characters on to each other without bastardizing it, for example 出去 is exactly the same in Taiwanese as it is in Mandarin. If you consider that 出 is a Ru-sheng character ending in -t that Mandarin has lost over time, then they are exactly the same thing. For example Italian has cominciare, French commence, and English commence, though they are spelled differently to match pronunciation, they are exactly the same word (root).
It is only the words that come from a pre-Han or ex-Han (from Yue dynasty?) that still exist in Taiwanese that create problems for writing with characters. I think Cantonese has a few words like this from neighboring languages. Basically some of the words are just ancient and aren’t used in modern Mandarin like many people who write Taiwanese write 你 instead of 汝 out of habit, mostly it is in mainland China that will use 汝.
But I’m not really an expert on these issues, just what I have heard, so don’t take everything I say for granted.
Sui-jian li-e lomaji ka goa bo kang khoaN, a-mko khoaN-u engkhai msi bunte. Tosia li sia Taigi tng-phoe. Siu-sian, li-e bunte chiah si lngthe (li so-sia e nngte), tansi chit-e si itpuaN tiongbun e sujip-hoat. Bat Tai-ji si SiuN kipun, iong kokgi chiah u hoatto sujip (nabo li ka-i chhongkiat (倉頡) sujip-hoat).
Li toa teh taioan phasng chin ku, goa kaki kui-tang niania.
Goa kamkak hoh, chit-e luntuaN it-tit lohkhi anne oan-ke Taigi si-msi u-iaN e gugian, gao bo chhubi.
“Link” engkhai ka kokgi kang khoaN, kong: liankiat, a-mko goa msi chin chhengchho.
jack 1234 said: “Sui-jian li-e lomaji ka goa bo kang khoaN, a-mko khoaN-u engkhai msi bunte. Tosia li sia Taigi tng-phoe. Siu-sian, li-e bunte chiah si lngthe (li so-sia e nngte), tansi chit-e si itpuaN tiongbun e sujip-hoat. Bat Tai-ji si SiuN kipun, iong kokgi chiah u hoatto sujip (nabo li ka-i chhongkiat (倉頡) sujip-hoat).”
I was going to say the exact same thing…but u beat me to it.
phaiN-seN, goa chin-ku bo ing lomali, goa ganna u thoe-po chit-sut-a.
goa gam-gak ing kok-gi e nng-the phah tai-bun siuN kan-kho. li pi goa khah u nai-sim.
goa chiok hoaN-hi u tu-tioh chit-e thread–paiN-seN, m-chai-iaN thread tai-gi anna kong –choe-gun goa oh tai-oan-oe xiuN-koe pin-toaN.
anyway, you miss my point about grafting. certainly CHINESE characters can be used in a minnan writing system. the example of chhut-khi is one where the characters happen to be the same for mandarin and taiwanese.
however there are a lot of taiwanese words that don’t correspond to their mandarin equivelants. take the earlier example of phang, or fragrant. there are those who would say well in mandarin it’s 香, just use that character and don’t worry about it, anything else is too much trouble. that’s the kind of thing that is wrong, grafting MANDARIN character usage onto taiwanese.
Thanks to those who have contributed to the linguistic points in this thread.
I’d like to respond briefly to some of the Social Darwinists here.
If Taiwanese is suffering now – and I think it most certainly is, and would also hold that any resurgence only seems “huge” in relative terms – this cannot be attributed simply to some sort of natural selection. Talk of “keeping the government out of it” seems at best naive, given what the government did to suppress Taiwanese and the other languages of those native to Taiwan prior to 1949.
It’s not as if the Ministry of Education just got into the business of languages, and everyone here ought to know that. This isn’t just “preservation” but a response to very specific historical events. What the government did before in its suppression of local languages and culture was wrong.
(For those of you just reading through the thread who know little of Taiwan’s history, Mandarin – a foreign language to almost everyone native to Taiwan when Chiang Kai-shek & co. arrived – was forced upon the population at school (where children who spoke even just one word of Taiwanese could be fined (not a minor matter, given the per capita income) and even beaten), through job placements, and through the media.)
Perhaps some might think of it differently if it were put in terms not of “Taiwanese” but of the languages of Taiwan in general. It’s not just the Taiwanese language that has suffered. More to the point, Hakka and especially the languages of Taiwan’s tribes were also suppressed and are disappearing. I cannot agree with those who would say that this is not a cultural loss.
I would have the government push for at least some level of fluency among the young in three tongues: Mandarin, a “local” language (Taiwanese, Hakka, Ami, Tsou, etc.), and a “world” language (English, Spanish, Arabic, etc.). I wouldn’t support pushing Taiwanese on Aborigine children, for example. (Note: That is most certainly not necessarily what is being done now.)
Vietnamese has more than that, but it’s done just fine after tossing out characters and using romanization.
I still can’t understand how, after any reflection, anyone could regard it as somehow easier to learn hundreds or even thousands of characters – for which as a system the word “arbitrary” is far too kind – than to learn to record their own speech patterns through a small set of letters that are infinitely more consistent.
Everyone, please, please read DeFrancis and the considerably more contentious Hannas.
Words having the same root doesn’t mean that the languages they’re from developed in some sort of phonetic parallel with each other, so I don’t think people can rely much on etymology to provide such simple solutions in character use.
I won’t bother to repeat what I’ve already said in Taiwanese, as this thread seems to go more and more on about (blah…blah…blah…)
I wonder what Hannas stance would be now, since his whole book was based off the fact that Asian scripts would disappear with computers. Hah! Computers were made to handle large amounts of information, I find the exact opposite happening. Although, he did write a lot of good factual information in the book, the last few chapters were crap.
As you can see by mine and Dalton’s posts that it is possible to communicate in romanization even without tone marking, as long as what you’re writing sounds enough like what you’re used to hearing, it’s ok. But if you’re going to be writing literary stuff with deeper meanings, then you need characters (best solution).
Dalton: Grafting: I know what you mean. I’m sure you would think that I understand these problems as well as you do. I guess those of us who ahve studied it would know that 香 in Minnan uses a different word 芳. Then again, you can write 香 and someone will read it as phang, because they’re just translating it, not exactly reading its real pronunciation which is the other word. But then 香港 would be read according to that characte’s correct pronunciation.
Regarding the software then, I’m curious what do you use? I would like to find one that allows me to use a romanization (whichever, I’m flexible) to type characters but I think the only ones I found were for typing the romanizations only with the correct accents. What about typeing characters?
I understand that Vietnamese has more tones than Mandarin (I have tried studying it, and gave up). But as you said Cranky, they just ‘tossed out the characters’, and now work with a completely romanised system. However, as many people have already said, since children must learn to write in Chinese, and learning the exceptions that exist when reading characters in Taiwanese is infinitely easier than learning a completely new system, the teaching of a standardised romanisation system for Taiwanese is pointless.
I wouldn’t agree that that’s the basis for his whole book. But, either way, you’ll get a chance to learn more about his current outlook on things next year, when his next book, Writing on the Wall, comes out.
I don’t agree with everything in the book either – not even DeFrancis does. But I don’t think it’s correct to dismiss completely his comments on computers and characters. Computer users are already forgetting how to write many characters – even some simple ones – by hand. This is only going to get worse.
It’s not the depth of the meaning but the means of expression that matters. If it can be spoken and understood, it can be romanized successfully. About that there is no doubt. And it doesn’t matter if the topic is “wo yao chi fan,” Hegelian thought, or rocket science. Remember here that we’ve been talking not about written standard Chinese but Taiwanese, which does not have a deeply ingrained tradition hostile to baihua writing.
As Hannas points out, characters are only the “best solution” for problems that they created themselves: “Linguistically speaking, the only good thing that can be said about Chinese characters is that they help solve problems which their own use has created.”
I strongly disagree that “learning the exceptions” (under which must also come learning the obscure characters little seen in contemporary standard Chinese) is “infinitely easier” than learning a romanization system – quite the opposite. But with this I think I’ve come full circle back to my first or second post in this thread…
It’s not only Hannas who points out the limitations of characters in computerization, but also J. Marshall Unger (specialist in Japanese and vociferous critic of kanji).
[quote=“cranky laowai”]
As Hannas points out, characters are only the “best solution” for problems that they created themselves: “Linguistically speaking, the only good thing that can be said about Chinese characters is that they help solve problems which their own use has created.”[/quote]
Wasn’t it DeFrancis who wrote that in the introduction to Hannas’s book? In any event, that statement fully expresses Hannas’s sentiments.
Yes, quite so. I haven’t yet read Unger firsthand, though, so I didn’t mention him. Victor Mair, too, has written some important work on this topic. (BifleTor, you wouldn’t happen to have Unger’s review of Hannas, would you? I’ve been looking for that but couldn’t find the journal in the National Central Library and haven’t had time to go out to Academia Sinica for it.)
Wasn’t it DeFrancis who wrote that in the introduction to Hannas’s book? In any event, that statement fully expresses Hannas’s sentiments.[/quote]
Good call. I was too lazy to find the quote from within the book itself so I copied from DeFrancis’ introduction. But IIRC he is using Hannas’ exact wording.
Here’s DeFrancis’ summary of some of the main points in Hannas:
[quote]1. It is not, as many argue, that the characters are intrinsically well suited to Chinese, but that they generated this “suitability” themselves by forcing the language into their own characteristic mold.
Linguistically speaking, the only good thing that can be said about Chinese characters is that they help solve problems which their own use
has created.
Reform of character-based writing is basically a zero-sum game, where
changes introduced in one area lead to problems in another, until the
whole effort falls apart because of the shortsightedness of reformers
who cannot perceive that there is no solution within the context defined.
Our position here is not that East Asians lack creativity, but that they achieved their intellectual greatness in spite of the character-based writing system.
Under pressure to absorb international vocabulary, encouraged by new
technological venues, and facilitated by English language bilingualism,
the alphabet is taking its place alongside traditional orthographies in
more and more applications.
Viewed globally and historically, it is clear that characters are on their last legs. [/quote]
I strongly disagree that “learning the exceptions” (under which must also come learning the obscure characters little seen in contemporary standard Chinese) is “infinitely easier” than learning a romanization system – quite the opposite. But with this I think I’ve come full circle back to my first or second post in this thread…[/quote]
I fully agree. The complexity of a character-based system to transcribe Taiwanese as a secondary language to Mandarin far exceeds that of a well-design alphabetic system. Taiwanese are taught how to read and write characters for baihua. Ask them to use characters to write in the literary style of the Song dynasty, for example, and they falter. Likewise, learning to use characters to write Taiwanese is in essence learning a whole new writing system. In other words, knowledge of using characters to write baihua is not amortized in learning to use characters to write Taiwanese.
The same argument can be made for Mandarin as well (that it is easier to write Mandarin in alphabetic form rather than with characters). Indeed, this is posited by several Chinese specialists: DeFrancis in his book Nationalism and Language Reform in China, Chao Yuen Ren, Victor Mair (Hannas’s teacher)—I need not mention Hannas.
