Premier Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) yesterday said he considered it unnecessary to insist that people write the first of the two Chinese characters for “Taiwan” in full traditional form (臺), as the simplified form (台) requires fewer strokes and is used by more people.
Some people prefer the character written in traditional form, while others favor writing it using the simplified form, Wu said, adding that he “respected people’s right to choose.”
“As long as people who write the character do so properly and those who read it know what it is, each form is fine. [Writing using the variant character] has been established by [customary] usage,” Wu said.
Wu made the remarks while commenting on a recent policy by the Ministry of Education to replace the simplified form of the character printed in the ministry’s literature and textbooks with the traditional form, a goal the ministry said it hoped to accomplish by the end of next year.
The ministry said students who wrote the character using the simplified form in national exams or entrance exams would not have grades deducted.
“Writing the character in traditional form is not compulsory, even in school exams,” said Chen Hsueh-yu (陳雪玉), executive secretary of at the ministry’s National Languages Committee. “What we seek to accomplish, however, is to encourage institutions and schools under the ministry to use the character written in its traditional form.”
After the ministry studied the origin of the character, it decided that the tai in the name Taiwan should be written in traditional form rather than its simplified counterpart, Chen said.
“It’s not that people who are used to writing Taiwan using the simplified form for the first character are wrong per se, but from an educational standpoint, we advocate traditional characters and are duty bound to make that clearly understood by teachers and students,” Chen said.
Earlier this year, the ministry reaffirmed its commitment to teaching traditional characters in the nation’s classrooms after a parent complained that his child had been assigned the study of simplified characters for homework.
The ministry’s Department of Elementary Education said at the time that promoting traditional Chinese characters in school had always been — and remained — the ministry’s policy.
“Traditional Chinese characters are important cultural assets. Their significance as documented in historical documents is unquestionable,” the department said.
“Traditional Chinese characters should be adopted in school, in textbooks and teaching assignments since their promotion is a national policy,” it said.
President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) sparked controversy last year when he said that Taiwan and China should come to an agreement on the use of Chinese characters, prompting angry responses from both sides of the political spectrum.
The People’s Republic of China introduced the simplified form of Chinese characters in the 1950s and 1960s to help combat illiteracy in the country.
ADDITIONAL REPORTING BY STAFF WRITER
A survey of young Taiwanese showed that only 36.5 percent of men and 19.6 percent of women believe marriage is important, a trend that academics say is key to the nation’s low birthrate. Yang Wen-shan (楊文山), an adjunct research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Sociology, yesterday announced the 12th round of results from a longitudinal survey of attitudes among young Taiwanese toward markers of adulthood. While few of the respondents, who were aged 28 to 32 when surveyed in 2017, found marriage to be important, 95.8 percent believed that being responsible for oneself should take precedence, data showed. Economic independence came in
SHRINKING FEMALE POPULATION: Last year, 107.74 boys were born for every 100 girls in Taiwan, which is a greater gender imbalance than in Japan and South Korea The Ministry of the Interior recorded 9,601 births in January, the first time the nation has produced fewer than 10,000 newborns in a single month, while different indicators showed that Taiwan might also be facing a population with increasingly fewer births, women and marriages. It comes after the ministry reported a record low 165,249 births last year, which was lower than the 173,156 deaths recorded last year. The nation experienced negative population growth for the first time last year, ministry data found. The number of births in January also dropped from a year earlier, when there were 12,510 births. In February, there were
The Hualien District Prosecutors’ Office has listed six people as suspects in a judicial investigation into a fatal train crash on Friday last week. Fifty people were killed and more than 200 were injured when the Taroko Express No. 408 train slammed into a crane truck that had slid onto the tracks near the entrance of Cingshuei Tunnel (清水隧道) in Hualien’s Sioulin Township (秀林). The office also summoned six officials at the Taiwan Railways Administration’s (TRA) Hualien Engineering Section for questioning about alleged illegal business operations and unsafe work conditions by Yi Hsiang Industry Co and Tung Hsin Construction Co, the two
KEEPING FOCUSED: Premier Su Tseng-chang was said to have commended Minister of Transportation and Communications Lin Chia-lung, but said the tragedy takes priority Minister of Transportation and Communications Lin Chia-lung (林佳龍) has submitted a verbal resignation in the wake of the Taroko Express No. 408 train crash two days ago, Executive Yuan spokesman Lo Ping-cheng (羅秉成) said yesterday. In a call, Lin told Premier Su Tseng-chang (蘇貞昌) that he wished to step down, to take responsibility for the deadliest accident involving a Taiwan Railways Administration (TRA) train in 40 years. As of press time last night, the Hualien District Prosecutors’ Office had revised the death toll from 51, which had been reported on the previous day, to 50, after DNA testing showed that what had
RSS