How much does Ma really like Hanyu ?

Ma Ying-Saywhat? Jeou, is it? The good mayor spells his name according to some phonetic system that has yet to be invented. Or is it a Hong Kong colonial relic? Perhaps something of a colonial relic himself, the mayor would have us believe that to adopt the Tongyong system (通用拼音) would prevent Taiwan from "stepping out and marching into the international community."

As if Taiwan has not already stepped out into the international community.

As if it's for international friends to decide whether Chungli (中壢) becomes Zhongli or Kaohsiung (高雄) is turned into Gaoxiong.

As if foreign scholars, who think nothing of devoting years of their lives to mastering several thousand Chinese ciphers and all their idiosyncrasies, cannot be bothered to spend a few hours learning their variant phonetic renderings.

Ma maintains that the Tongyong system "has long since been rejected by foreigners." He seems to fear some kind of linguistic-based quarantine.

I was dining with old-time expat journalist Dennis X (that's "X" as in "Mr. X," not as in Deng Xiaoping [鄧小平]) the other night, when I asked his opinion of the pet spat of the moment.

Dennis weighed in with a vote for "anything but Hanyu Pinyin(漢語拼音)," since to go with the Chinese Communist Party system would only be seen by the international media as another capitulation along the path of supine surrender to China.

In fact, the obituary service has already been performed, by Jim Mann of the Los Angeles Times: "Deng Xiaoping, the late leader of China, is about to arrive in Taiwan. So is Jiang Zemin (江澤民), China's president. Taiwan is preparing to surrender to the mainland," ("Taiwan Waves Linguistic White Flag," Feb 9).

Let it be admitted that not all foreigners land in Taiwan with a firm grounding in phonetic cryptography. But, since many will soon have instant internet access by the press of a wristwatch button, there will be ready-to-hand data banks for quick conversion.

In the meantime there's already a plethora of Websites available at the click of a mouse on your home or office PC. In addition to those offered by government and educational institutions. There are some very well-researched sites which provide useful background on how the different systems developed (such as www.edepot.com/taoroman.html), as well as tables providing the basic conversion rules.

Their explanation seems accurate as far as the major systems are concerned. But there are a couple of caveats, the major one being that Wade-Giles "remains [the] defacto system in Taiwan for personal names."

In fact, what we have is a butchered form that is anything but consistent.

Where Wade-Giles makes use of the umlaut and the apostrophe, our homegrown version does not: both 呂 and 盧 both come out as "Lu," while "Cheng" is made to do double-duty for 程 and 鄭.

So, make no mistake about it, for Ma and rest of those in the unificationist camp, it is not a question of Hanyu Pinyin being superior -- otherwise why not spell his name Ma Yingjiu (馬英九) -- but of whether we wish to take this route to merger with China.

That is, a political question for the people over at the Foreign Ministry. We foreigners have been made the fall-guys in Ma's attempts to look "presidential."

After all, if Ma really had the interests of foreigners at heart, then why all this changing of street name spellings according -- apparently -- to the season of the year?

Lynn Miles is a freelance writer in Taipei.