Those of you who get sore about the simplified form of “Taiwan” de “tai”, and simplified characters in general, must be up in arms about the little Japanese “no” that’s used in place of “de” a lot these days. It’s that symbol that looks like a backwards and sideways letter “e”.
As a matter of fact, though, that one has come full-circle. The Japanese phonetic character is the grass style of a chinese character, read “nai” in modern Mandarin, that doesn’t have any meaning nowadays, but used to mean “of” in old Chinese.
Of course, the average Taiwanese probably has never stopped to think about that – to him or her, it’s just a lot quicker to write, and it’s cool and fashionable cos it’s Japanese.