'Beautiful system' in the eye of the beholder

The furor over Taiwan's adoption of some system by which Chinese characters can be represented in the Roman alphabet has raged periodically over the last few years, bursting out most recently with the replacement of Ovid Tzeng (曾志朗) by Huang Jong-tsun (黃榮村) as minister of education and the official approval given to the Tongyong (通用) system by his ministry last month.

The form of spelling which is to represent Chinese characters in Taiwan is the source of violent political passions and had boiled down to a duel between the Hanyu (漢語) and the Tongyong systems, the former developed in China and now adopted as an international standard, the latter a system developed in Taiwan by a group of scholars led by Yu Po-chuan (余伯泉), a social psychologist working out of the Academia Sinica.

Yu claims that Tongyong is superior to the Hanyu system primarily in its extensibility. Not only is it able to cope with Mandarin Chinese, but also Taiwanese and Hakka, which are seen by many as important elements in Taiwan's cultural identity. This identity issue is countered by supporters of the Hanyu camp by saying that if Taiwan wants international recognition, it must adopt the international standard. "But why must we blindly adopt something that is inferior," Yu says. "We are part of the Chinese community and our attitude should be one of engagement and cooperation. There is no reason why we shouldn't have our own input."

Explaining his system, Yu could not resist a note of academic belligerence when pointing out the "?" with umlaut that has been a major stumbling block in the Hanyu system because of the problems representing this character in computer and other publishing systems. Tongyong abjures such diacritical marks, "so on this issue at least, I am sure Tongyong's representation will take over from Hanyu," Yu said with pride. This academic engagement is very much at odds with public criticism of the system, which tends to take the attitude that since there is a perfectly adequate system currently available in China's Hanyu system, why bother developing another.

Yu is at pains to emphasize the fact that his system does not differ radically from Hanyu, and that the two are "compatible." According to a comparative study of romanization systems by Tsai Chih-hao (蔡志浩), the two systems have a 19.47 percent difference at the syllabic level. For anyone familiar with the Hanyu system, the adjustment is a minor one, but in an age when the system must also be acceptable to computer search engines and people unfamiliar with Chinese, the issue is more complex.

"It is a question of benefits," Yu said. "If the benefits of adopting Hanyu outweigh those of using Tongyong, then I have no problem with it. But that is simply not the case." What is benefit and what disadvantage of course depends on the individual, and much of the debate of the use of Tongyong is about the price Taiwan will pay in integration with international norms of Chinese language usage, currently largely defined by China.

As Yu expounds the basics of the Tongyong system, it is easy to lose sight of the political issues that are at the center of the furor. As a linguist, he delights in its simplicity. "I can give anyone a working knowledge of this system in just one hour," he says. In relation to the romanization of Taiwanese, the complex system of tone changes, which is the bane of a beginning student, has been simplified to something much more accessible. "It really is a beautiful system," Yu says.