Phoney pinyin war
I am shocked to read Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) legislators’ opinion continuing the pinyin “phony war” by supporting the revival of the ill-designed Tongyong pinyin (“Language: A tool for messages or identity,” Jan. 18, page 8). They should spend their time instead on a wholesome language policy and real struggles of identity, rather than playing vainly with a few consonants.
When I wrote about this subject 17 years ago in this newspaper (“Letters,” Jan. 12, 2000, page 8), Tongyong pinyin was still a nascent system in a state of flux. Now we know its inconsistencies and defects.
One reason for these is that it was designed by amateurs rather than linguists. Another is the lack of public consultation and “road test” before being hastily promulgated — for crude ideological reasons.
We know how Tongyong has been designed, intentionally or not, to clash with Hanyu pinyin.
For example, the same two letters “ci” refers to one Mandarin syllable in Hanyu, but another in Tongyong.
The result is that many signs in Tongyong appear as irritating misspellings for those who have studied Mandarin through Hanyu pinyin.
At worst, lives might be at stake if such confusion appears in, say, mountaineering maps.
While proponents of Tongyong pinyin despise the international standard Hanyu pinyin, they gladly take for granted the privileged status of English as the dominant reference. They then mistakenly equate the Latin script with the English language.
However, the Latin letters’ sounds are not universally bound to those in English: They can be assigned different values depending on the language being written.
What is written as “ch” is pronounced differently in Italian, Spanish and German from that in English. This can be also the case in Mandarin, Taiwanese (also known as Hoklo) and Hakka — that is just fine. It does not have to be one-size-fits-all (tongyong, 通用)
As I wrote 17 years ago, the legislators should focus on developing a wholesome language policy.
The pro-localization groups could better spend their effort to change place names that do not accord with local identity and transitional justice (eg, Songjiang Road, Dihua Street, references to Chiang Kai-shek [蔣介石]).
They could promote signs written in the local languages: Zhongli/Chung-lak being the Hakka capital of northern Taiwan, perhaps signs in Taoyuan/Tho-yen airport metro can also show Hakka written in its Latin orthography?
Most importantly, we should support the established orthographies rather than new inventions.
Hanyu pinyin is no longer the property of this or that nation, but the common heritage of all Mandarin-speaking people, no matter their nationality.
Zhou Youguang (周永光) — the father of Hanyu pinyin — passed away this week at age 111. He was one of the very few modern intellectuals who had such stature to be able to criticize the Chinese regime without being brutally silenced.
May we remember his spirit of progressive rationality, especially when we consider issues of language policy.
Te Khai-su
Helsingfors, Finland
The term “assassin’s mace” originates from Chinese folklore, describing a concealed weapon used by a weaker hero to defeat a stronger adversary with an unexpected strike. In more general military parlance, the concept refers to an asymmetric capability that targets a critical vulnerability of an adversary. China has found its modern equivalent of the assassin’s mace with its high-altitude electromagnetic pulse (HEMP) weapons, which are nuclear warheads detonated at a high altitude, emitting intense electromagnetic radiation capable of disabling and destroying electronics. An assassin’s mace weapon possesses two essential characteristics: strategic surprise and the ability to neutralize a core dependency.
Chinese President and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Chairman Xi Jinping (習近平) said in a politburo speech late last month that his party must protect the “bottom line” to prevent systemic threats. The tone of his address was grave, revealing deep anxieties about China’s current state of affairs. Essentially, what he worries most about is systemic threats to China’s normal development as a country. The US-China trade war has turned white hot: China’s export orders have plummeted, Chinese firms and enterprises are shutting up shop, and local debt risks are mounting daily, causing China’s economy to flag externally and hemorrhage internally. China’s
In their recent op-ed “Trump Should Rein In Taiwan” in Foreign Policy magazine, Christopher Chivvis and Stephen Wertheim argued that the US should pressure President William Lai (賴清德) to “tone it down” to de-escalate tensions in the Taiwan Strait — as if Taiwan’s words are more of a threat to peace than Beijing’s actions. It is an old argument dressed up in new concern: that Washington must rein in Taipei to avoid war. However, this narrative gets it backward. Taiwan is not the problem; China is. Calls for a so-called “grand bargain” with Beijing — where the US pressures Taiwan into concessions
When a recall campaign targeting the opposition Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislators was launched, something rather disturbing happened. According to reports, Hualien County Government officials visited several people to verify their signatures. Local authorities allegedly used routine or harmless reasons as an excuse to enter people’s house for investigation. The KMT launched its own recall campaigns, targeting Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) lawmakers, and began to collect signatures. It has been found that some of the KMT-headed counties and cities have allegedly been mobilizing municipal machinery. In Keelung, the director of the Department of Civil Affairs used the household registration system
RSS