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MOE honors those who help preserve languages

The Ministry of Education honored nine organizations and 17 individuals for helping to preserve and promote their mother tongues during an award ceremony on International Mother Language Day yesterday.

"The mother tongue is an important part of cultural heritage," program host Wang Chi-wen (王綺文) told the audience. "When a language becomes extinct, the culture will become extinct as well."

However, according to UNESCO estimates, 50 percent of the 6,000 languages in the world today will become extinct by 2050, she said.

The ceremony yesterday, therefore, was to honor those who work hard to preserve Taiwan's diverse languages and cultures, Wang said.

For Hsu Teng-chih (徐登志), learning and promoting her family tongue was a way for her to trace her linguistic roots.

Although born into a Hakka family, Hsu could only speak Hoklo (also known as Taiwanese) as her family lived in a Hoklo-speaking neighborhood, she said.

"I started learning Hakka at six when we moved to Tungshih [東勢] because of my father's work," Hsu said.

Tungshih is in Taichung County with a large Hakka population.

However, when Hsu started going to the local elementary school, she found herself isolated by her classmates, because she spoke Sisien (四縣) Hakka, while the locals spoke Dapu (大埔) Hakka.

"Out of peer pressure, I started to speak Hakka like they did, and stopped speaking the Hakka spoken by my family. After a period of time, I forgot how to speak my family's Hakka," she said.

After retiring from her 36-year career as an elementary school teacher, Hsu decided to relearn the family's language.

Hsu authored a number of textbooks teaching Dapu Hakka and taught Hakka lessons during her spare time at several elementary schools.

For Cheng Shih-chung (鄭詩宗), a dermatologist at Kaohsiung Medical University Hospital, better communication between physicians and patients was his goal in promoting education in his mother tongue.

A native Hoklo speaker, Cheng was often surprised at the inability of medical students to communicate with Hoklo-speaking patients.

"One time, when a student was supposed to tell a patient that she had yizang yan [胰臟炎, pancreatic inflammation], the student told the patient, in Hoklo, i-tiunn hoat iam, meaning her aunt's husband has inflammation," Cheng said. "The patient was confused because she didn't have an aunt."

The student made the mistake because yizang, the Mandarin term for pancreas, is similar in pronunciation to yizhang (姨丈), the Mandarin word for "maternal aunt's husband," and the student thought it might be pronounced the same way in Hoklo, Cheng said.

In another instance, while a student meant to tell a patient that she had heart and liver problems, the student said, in Hoklo, that the patient was sim koan bo-ho, which literally translates as "evil-hearted" in Hoklo, Cheng said.

In order to prevent such confusion, Cheng began to offer medical Hoklo and medical Hakka courses at the Kaohsiung Medical University.

"Besides promoting better communication, it's important to be able to speak to a patient in his or her native tongue because it's also a way to gain the trust of that patient," Cheng said.
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