But even as a linguist working on his "beautiful system," Yu cannot avoid the political issues. "The issue has become so politicized," he says, admitting that in the course of the last three years in which the debate has raged, "I have been forced further and further towards a strong `Taiwanese identity' position." He laments the fact that what should be the work of producing a rational system of romanization for Taiwan has become a conflict between Greater China identity and Taiwan identity.
"It has become a question of sovereignty," Yu said. "Why should we, for example, spell place names according to the Hanyu system. A sovereign nation can spell city names as it chooses." The shift from Peking to Beijing and from Bombay to Mumbai reflect this trend and Yu feels that Taiwan should follow suit. And for locations like Wanhua, which is also commonly known by its Taiwanese name of Manka, "this simply cannot be romanized under the current Hanyu system."
"I am not against the Hanyu system," Yu insists, and has gone out of his way to reduce the number of differences between the two systems to a minimum. "I think the two can exist side by side ... but there should be a system that takes Taiwan's history into consideration."
But sometimes it is this very history that gets in the way. While Hanyu is Tongyong's biggest rival in Mandarin Chinese, in Taiwanese, which Tongyong champions, it faces resistance from an entrenched system developed by the Presbyterian Church, which complex and unintuitive as it is, currently dominates the Taiwanese language educational establishment.
"Tongyong is about being coherent within the Taiwanese context," said Yu, adding that he has put considerable effort to offer "ease of access," simplifying and rationalizing wherever possible. He is the first to admit that some problems still exist within the Tongyong system, but believes that "the slow process of standardization is taking place."
It has been five years since the standardization of street signs using the Roman alphabet was first mooted and little has been achieved in the interim. Even now, the Taipei City Government is standing out against the adoption of Tongyong, so that standardization across the island may still be someway off, and it still remains to be seen what level of acceptance Yu's "beautiful system" will achieve.
RSS