Taipei Times adopts Tongyong Pinyin

There is a notice on page two of today’s Taipei Times saying the paper is adopting Tongyong Pinyin as its official standard.

The notice reads:

For those who pay attention to such matters the Taipei Times has in the past editorialised in favor of Hanyu Pinyin.

I thought Hanyu Pinyin was generally accepted in other countries, not Tongyong. I thought I also read somewhere that even Taiwan is planning on dropping Tongyong.

Given the TT’s political leanings, is this really a surprise?

Which ever way the wind is blowing.

Yes, it is. Because while the DPP was in power and advocating Tongyong Pinyin the Taipei Times was promoting the use of Hanyu Pinyin. I am sure the decision to change was a political one though.

:cry: :cry: :cry: :cry: :cry:

I told you we were told to use the Tonyong for local towns as “not to confuse ithem with places in China with the same name”. Duh! Were we not the ones nameing the palces after them initially?!

Oh, yes, and local, traditional spellings prevail over Hanyu.

Than what the heck is Hanyu for?! :rant:

[quote=“wix”]There is a notice on page two of today’s Taipei Times saying the paper is adopting Tongyong Pinyin as its official standard.

The notice reads:

For those who pay attention to such matters the Taipei Times has in the past editorialised in favor of Hanyu Pinyin.[/quote]
While the government switches streets to Hanyu Pinyin.
Will this ever end? :laughing:

We have a DECREE in Hsinchu that place/company names can keep the names if they choose so.
But the system is Hanyu Pinyin (this is KMT heaven here, after all).
Streets are changed here since last year to show ZhongHua Road for example.

flickr.com/photos/mrtang/3780271181/
I should actually mail Taipei Times about it.

A similar story:
en.wikisource.org/wiki/Gulliver% … Chapter_IV
Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift, Part I, Chapter IV
The two great empires of Lilliput and Blefuscu,… Which two mighty powers have, as I was going to tell you, been engaged in a most obstinate war for six-and-thirty moons past. It began upon the following occasion. It is allowed on all hands, that the primitive way of breaking eggs, before we eat them, was upon the larger end; but his present majesty’s grandfather, while he was a boy, going to eat an egg, and breaking it according to the ancient practice, happened to cut one of his fingers. Whereupon the emperor his father published an edict, commanding all his subjects, upon great penalties, to break the smaller end of their eggs. The people so highly resented this law, that our histories tell us, there have been six rebellions raised on that account; wherein one emperor lost his life, and another his crown.

Pardon my ignorance since I’ll scan a TT maybe once a year, but when has the TT ever been in favor in Hanyu Pinyin? I was under the impression that they had always been using Tongyong (痛用 as I like to call it) to spell Taiwanese names and non-famous place names.

[quote=“engerim”]
A similar story:
en.wikisource.org/wiki/Gulliver% … Chapter_IV
Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift, Part I, Chapter IV
The two great empires of Lilliput and Blefuscu,… Which two mighty powers have, as I was going to tell you, been engaged in a most obstinate war for six-and-thirty moons past. It began upon the following occasion. It is allowed on all hands, that the primitive way of breaking eggs, before we eat them, was upon the larger end; but his present majesty’s grandfather, while he was a boy, going to eat an egg, and breaking it according to the ancient practice, happened to cut one of his fingers. Whereupon the emperor his father published an edict, commanding all his subjects, upon great penalties, to break the smaller end of their eggs. The people so highly resented this law, that our histories tell us, there have been six rebellions raised on that account; wherein one emperor lost his life, and another his crown.[/quote]

Not similar at all. Ours started with six rebellions, and has worked around now to arguing about eggs. A highly preferable state of affairs to my way of thinking.

Newsflash to Taipei Times: Tongyong has been abolished. Flushed down the toilet. Do not be complicit in the perpetuation of this evil system! :raspberry:

Taipei Times wants to use TYPY, China Post all-caps its headlines, Taiwan News is, well, Taiwan News. Now there is no paper I can buy in good conscience. Guess I’ll stick the the Internet.

I think there have been forces within the TT, mostly foreigners who realized that using the international standard might make the paper look a bit more, well, international, who supported HYPN, but it looks like the local pro-green management faction has made a stand. In a way, it makes sense; under the DPP, they were allowed to support whatever system they liked, but now there’s more pressure to hold the political line in the face of KMT domination within the government.

Or it could just be an arbitrary decision for no particular reason, which is just as likely.

Just curious… who DOES know the Tongyong system? Certainly none of my students do; every Chinese textbook I’ve used works with either Hanyu pinyin or zhuyin. Is this move useful for anyone at all?

One day I’d really really like to be able to look at a sign in Taiwan and know how to pronounce the darn place even when I don’t know the characters. OK, so I still won’t know the tone.

(For those like me who also wondered “What’s the difference?”, Wikipedia has a decent introduction: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tongyong_Pinyin)

Pedant note: isn’t the ZhongHua Road sign above actually “incorrect” Hanyu pinyin because it capitalizes “Hua”? Not sure about that, however.

Absolutely no one. I remember president Chén saying that Tōngyòng was “made by the Taiwanese for the Taiwanese”. What a joke. I have NEVER met a Taiwanese person who could read Tōngyòng…

Oh, this is just pathetic.

I wonder if this will be like the Taiwan News’ supposed “proud” use of Tongyong – which has turned out to be not really much use of Tongyong but simply more of the same sloppiness as before.

I’d love to hear from some staffers at the Taipei Times about how this came to be. (E-mail or PM would be fine.)

If they want a taiwan-centric system, why not just use BoPoMoFo?

Dysliterates.

In other news, the Taipei Times today announces its support of phlogiston theory and affirms its belief in Lamarckism. In an editorial the paper announces:

Yes.

Some signs in Xinzhu use that style, some don’t.

Where is this Xinzhu (Hsinchu) (Hsinchu) place to which you refer?

About a year ago the TT opined, in Pinyin is welcome, but not coercion:

[quote=“Taipei Times editorial”]Many foreign nationals in this country will be relieved to hear that the government is gearing up to install Hanyu Pinyin as the national system of Romanization. The devolving Wade-Giles system will be abandoned, as will the controversial Tongyong system introduced by the previous administration…

This newspaper welcomes the development. Taipei City in effect acted as a trial site for this policy, and the results — evident on signs, brochures and government documents — have been competent and professional, notwithstanding the tweaking of the system with capital letters for syllables or erratic use of the apostrophe.

Few will weep for Tongyong, an ideologically inspired — and poorly crafted — variant of Hanyu Pinyin that failed to deliver on its promise to provide a Romanization system for all of Taiwan’s languages, including Austronesian tongues. Tongyong was a charade that only succeeded in ceding Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) control of the issue to President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) pro-China government…

The superiority of Hanyu Pinyin will ensure its survival, regardless of politics…[/quote]

The newspaper’s actual usage, however, remained largely unchanged, with a melange of spellings and systems for place names, bastardized Wade-Giles for most personal names, etc.

Between Junan and Thô-hn̂g-kōan