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quote:
I’ve never seen the “Keelung” spelling on pre-KMT maps of Taiwan. “Kelang” and “Kelung,” yes, but no “Keelung.”
“Among the headhunters of Formosa” a rollicking read I’m enjoying at the moment, written by an English woman c. 1918, refers to ‘Keelung’
I wrote:
I’ve never seen the “Keelung” spelling on pre-KMT maps of Taiwan. “Kelang” and “Kelung,” yes, but no “Keelung.”
Salmon replied:
quote[quote]"Among the headhunters of Formosa" a rollicking read I'm enjoying at the moment, written by an English woman c. 1918, refers to 'Keelung'[/quote] Hmm. You're right. But check out the map on page 26. It gives "Kelung." The map in Rutter's [i]Through Formosa[/i], which is from the early 1920s, however, gives "Keelung." I think this needs further study. Other sources appreciated.
In my January 1969 National Geographic article they came up with another spelling for the NE seaport… Chilung
“Chilung” is correct under the bastardized Wade-Giles usually seen in Taiwan (which would, of course, be “T’ai-wan” in proper W-G).
I’ve started a related thread on non-Wade-Giles place names.
Just what part of China is your “proper” W-G supposed to reflect - it is a fact that mandarin is spoken different in different places
Huh? It’s not my proper Wade-Giles.
quote[quote]it is a fact that mandarin is spoken different in different places[/quote] Of course. But there is a declared standard for Mandarin: guoyu/putonghua. (These are basically the same.) Standard Mandarin is based upon but not the same as the Beijing dialect of Chinese.I’m not sure what your point is.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but in my understanding “Mandarin” is used to name the “standard edition” (though probably not ISO certified) of Chinese. Dialects like Hakka or Taiwanese would probably not be called “Mandarin” - or? Although, it is not that standardised (probably due to the lacking ISO certification) as we all can see at the “Mandarin” spoken in Taiwan (Guoyu) or on the Mainland (Putonghua)…
Today’s Taipei Times has a piece titled “Lawmakers urge change to names of cities’ streets.”
[quote]Streets in Taipei and Kaohsiung named after places in China should be changed to reflect the fact the government no longer plans to retake that country, Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) lawmakers said yesterday.
“Streets in the two special municipalities should be reviewed, since many of them were named with a sense of the ‘Greater China’ ideology,” Legislator Chiu Yeong-jen said…
A Taipei City Government official surnamed Huang disagreed with the lawmakers’ claim that roads and streets in Taipei reflected a Greater China ideology.
“The Taipei City Government has been working on updating road names. Civic Boulevard is one case. But the name change ultimately needs residents’ approval and therefore the task could be time-consuming,” she said.
Lin Yu-chin, deputy director of Kaohsiung City Government’s Civil Affairs Bureau, however endorsed the lawmakers’ view.
He said that Kaohsiung was considering conducting a review of street names to make them more international. [/quote]
Uh oh. Kaohsiung changing street names to make them more “international” surely wouldn’t have anything to do with using hanyu pinyin. It is more likely that the city is thinking along the lines of Taipei’s monumentally stupid, failed experiment in giving major streets “nicknumbers.”
Also alarming is the Taipei City Government’s notion that “Civic Boulevard” is a good precedent to follow.
One of the things that I loved about my early days of driving a car in Taiwan was the very limited knowlege of Chinese require - The street names are the same in every town/city - so what if there was no pinyin.