Rome was not built in a day. Neither can Romanization be completed overnight. Politically, Taiwan has gone through difficult processes of decolonization and democratization. But Romanization of location names in Taiwan will be as easy as "ABC." \nIn essence, Tongyong Pinyin for Romanization is different from Hanyu Pinyin only in three consonants. \nA major advantage of Tongyong is to use "ci" and "si" instead of the two puzzling consonants "q" and "x" in Hanyu. \nFor foreigners and Taiwanese with or without Hanyu background, it will be much easier to read. For example, it's Banciao and Sindian in Tongyong instead of Banqiao and Xindian in Hanyu. The other different consonant is "jh" in Tongyong instead of "zh" in Hanyu, for example Jhanghua v. Zhanghua. \nAnother advantage of Tongyong is its versatility for different languages in Taiwan or even major languages in the world. For example, in Hoeloe (a Tongyong spelling of "Hoklo," also known as Taiwanese -Ed) language ("oe" is the German umlaut of "o"), Banciao, Sindian and Jhanghua will be pronounced as Banggioe, Sindiam and Jionghua. \nAnother Hoeloe example is "oea" for oyster and "oa" for taro. In contrast, Hanyu does not have "oe" or "iam" among others. \nThere are no reasons for Mayor Ma Ying-jeou to reject Tongyong and adopt Hanyu in Taipei unless he really wants Taiwan to become a country with two systems. I hope he will not become a horse troubling the whole herd. Using his excellent English, he can learn the three different Tonyong consonants in three minutes. \nHis Mandarin is also perfect, but is different from Mandarin spoken in China. In the same manner, Tongyong is easy and versatile although it is slightly different from Hanyu. \nI would not be surprised if, someday, China wanted to adopt Tongyong for its convenience and general applicability. \nAs the leading English newspaper in Taiwan, the Taipei Times should play a role in promoting the Tongyong system. It is advisable to compile a Tongyong Romanization dictionary for common Chinese words and phonetic syllables in Mandarin, Hoeloe, Hakka and Aboriginal languages by your editors with manpower and financial support from the government. Romanized names of counties, cities, towns and villages in Taiwan should be included. \nIn addition, the Taipei Times should help the government edit important official English documents. \nCharles Hong \nColumbus, Ohio
In the closing weeks of 2000, an army of Singaporean government officials descended on Washington to make good on a handshake between then-US President Bill Clinton and Singaporean Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟). They had agreed to strike an FTA after a round of golf in Brunei that past November. Running a small city-state, Singapore’s leaders and their diplomats live with their ear to the ground, attuned to the slightest geopolitical movements. They were motivated then by a big-picture strategic concern — keeping the US embedded in their region. An FTA they thought would help do that. It worked. Clinton’s successor,
On Oct. 7, the Chinese embassy in New Delhi sent letters to the Indian media asking them to refrain from calling Taiwan a country while reporting on its 109th National Day, which fell on Saturday last week. This move backfired and, on the contrary, contributed to the immense popularity of Taiwan among Indians, leading to an outpouring of congratulations for it on Twitter. Asked about the letter, the Indian Ministry of External Affairs said: “There is a free media that reports on issues as it sees fit.” Bharatiya Janata Party spokesman Tajinder Singh Bagga put up several banners outside the
On Oct. 6, the UN Committee on Human Rights released a statement on the concentration camps in China’s Xinjiang region in which at least 1 million Uighurs and other ethnic minorities are incarcerated. On the same day, Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) was telling delegates at a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) meeting that “happiness among the people in Xinjiang is on the rise.” It was a stark reminder of the CCP’s longstanding practice of trampling on human rights and deceiving the world. In October last year, the Taiwan East Turkestan Association and the Taiwan Friends of Tibet held an event titled
In a Facebook post on Wednesday last week, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Taipei City Councilor Hsu Chiao-hsin (徐巧芯) wrote: “The KMT must fall for Taiwan to improve.’ Allow me to ask the question again: Is this really true?” It matters not how many times Hsu asks the question, my answer will always be the same: “Yes, the KMT must be toppled for Taiwan to improve.” In the lengthy Facebook post, titled “What were those born in the 1980s guilty of?” Hsu harked back to the idealistic aspirations of the 2014 Sunflower movement before heaping opprobrium on the Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP)
RSS