Po-jung speaks Taigi about as well as I do, which is to say… kudos for trying, I mean we don’t have this thread for nothing.
Traditionally, baseball coaches taught in Taigi because Taiwan’s baseball history goes back to the Japanese era, so when the Japanese left, the first couple generations of coaches could only speak Taigi aside from Japanese, and all the baseball jargon were Japonified English loanwords.
Starting from the 70s, people living on the West-coast began avoiding speaking Taigi to their children, and also became increasingly unwilling to let kids play baseball. That’s when Aboriginal players, especially Pangcah children from Hualien and Taidong started boarding at baseball schools in the West, and at first these young player would learn Taigi, but eventually in the 00s, as their numbers grew, baseball coaches would give up, and speak broken Mandarin regardless of where the new kids are from.
That was particularly devastating since kids who left their villages lost the chance to learn Pangcah and other Indigenous languages, and baseball from Taigi speaking families stopped being the Taigi hold-outs they once were in the late 90s.
He’s clearly not used to speaking full sentences in Taigi, which is unfortunately par for the course these days.
There is a bunch of Mandarin thrown in for even simple stuff that I’m sure he does know how to say in Taigi, but is simply more accustomed to saying in Mandarin so it comes out first. There are very, very few people in his age group who can speak for 30 seconds without throwing in at least a couple of Mandarin words (or Mandarin-influenced pronunciation of Taigi words).
However, when he did speak Taigi, his speech patterns were good, which probably means he has a reasonably good feel for the language and just needs to use it more frequently. This is super common. I would venture a guess that at least 50% of the population (including young people) would be perfectly fluent in Taiwanese if only they would try in earnest to use it for a few months. The roots are still there, they just haven’t been watered in 70 years. (And will eventually die if not watered soon.)
This is why I make a real effort when speaking Taigi to only speak Taigi, and not code switch. If a Mandarin word pops up first, I’ll take a second to look it up in the dictionary rather than saying the Mandarin. My audience has given a huge amount of positive feedback on actually being able to carry a whole conversation in Taigi, even in interviews with really fluent native speakers who still over-rely on code switching more than they need to. Even if it takes just half a second more for them to think of the proper way to say it in Taigi, they just go for the Mandarin to save the half a second. It’s quite sad.
There is a generational divide between the “full ROC” era (schooling in the 1950s or later) and the one before. Those age 80+ today rarely code switch, and there are plenty still around who don’t speak much Mandarin to begin with.
That’s simply not true.
The director of Taiwan’s premiere rocket program gives full lectures and interviews about rocket science in Taigi.
It’s exceedingly rare, but it exists, and importantly, that means it can be done.
Most of baseball jargon in Taigi are just phonetic translations from their English origin. Mandarin is now used in baseball jargon for political reasons.
There are definitely fields where Tai technical jargon is still relatively common. Most anything manual-labor oriented: agriculture, automotive, construction, plumbing, cooking, etc. Any middle-age or older person working in these or similar fields who typically speaks Tai will have the full range of technical vocab in Tai.
Obviously newer industries like semiconductors and finance have not had the opportunity to develop big vocabularies. Here’s one way people are trying to remedy that which I was lucky to participate in:
A potentially bigger problem is non-technical things like super common Mandarin vocab that don’t really have Tai roots, etc. A mechanic might use only Tai when placing a complicated order for parts (very technical), but give his address to the supplier in Mandarin because most place & street names have been renamed in Mandarin without consideration for Tai. Pretty much every place in Taiwan has a long-standing Tai or Hak name, but they have largely fallen out of use and are unknown outside of the immediate vicinity or old maps.
My favorite is the translation for left-handed pitcher: sousupo
I had a guy once try to sell me a used Volvo. He said it was a shi pai, not a shou pai, then fearing that I wouldn’t understand, he said it in Taiwanese: it was a no-ke-lut-che.
(One of the reasons I didn’t buy it- just imagining the cost and hassle of trying to get someone to fix a Volvo automatic transmission in Taitung.)
Well, they are using the ROC Ministry of Education’s characters. It’s better than a Mandarin translation, and probably better than Martian. But, there are plenty of ROC characters that don’t use the “actual character root”.
Bring Endangered Taiwanese Native Languages Back to Life with the Help of Modern GPUs
There’s a Taigi related talk in 2022’s NVDIA GTC. Professor Liao Yuan-fu from National Taipei University of Technology used Deep Learning to automate Mandarin to Taigi translation, as well as Taigi speech synthesis.
Due to the pandemic, it’s free to register for NVIDIA GTC.
Everything is dying over time, replaced by something else. If you don’t like it, all you can do is try and slow down the dying process. There is no vacuum, words are disappearing, new words are being introduced. If you try to hang onto the old, the new will have less room to grow. If there is a need for the language it will be used by the people who need it. If you look at languages like tools (of communication), every tool has a lifespan, if it breaks you might try and fix it, if there ceases to be place where the tool can be used, it’s cast away.
I understand the value of diversification, traditional culture, etc. but I also see the value of modernization and new culture.
I don’t think there is a point in preventing the use of a language from dying, there is however a point in slowing the down the process and archiving the language for research purposes and perhaps nostalgia.
