Many foreign nationals in this country will be relieved to hear that the government is gearing up to install Hanyu Pinyin as the national system of Romanization. The devolving Wade-Giles system will be abandoned, as will the controversial Tongyong system introduced by the previous administration.
The problem of Romanization hardly appears on the radar for most locals, but for officials that deal with the standardization of street names and place names and other bureaucratic tasks, turning Chinese sounds into Roman script has been a perennial headache, and one that has been amplified and distorted by the debate over Taiwanese and Chinese identity.
This newspaper welcomes the development. Taipei City in effect acted as a trial site for this policy, and the results — evident on signs, brochures and government documents — have been competent and professional, notwithstanding the tweaking of the system with capital letters for syllables or erratic use of the apostrophe.
Few will weep for Tongyong, an ideologically inspired — and poorly crafted — variant of Hanyu Pinyin that failed to deliver on its promise to provide a Romanization system for all of Taiwan’s languages, including Austronesian tongues. Tongyong was a charade that only succeeded in ceding Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) control of the issue to President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) pro-China government.
Local DPP administrations have faithfully introduced the Tongyong system, and some Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) local governments (such as Taipei County) continue to adopt it. It will be interesting to see what types of carrot and stick the central government will wield to convince local governments to spend — yet again — a large amount of money changing Roman lettering on their property.
The superiority of Hanyu Pinyin will ensure its survival, regardless of politics, but supporters of Taiwan’s independence need not be too concerned; any move to introduce simplified characters would be far more threatening and more worthy of vigilance.
That said, there are several problems with installing Hanyu Pinyin, the most pressing of which is the danger that the government will imitate Chinese autocracy in forcing people to change the Romanization of their names in passports and other documents.
Even in the unlikely event that the president and Cabinet officials changed their Romanized names to set a good example — and this would be necessary if they did not wish to be branded hypocrites — this would not justify regulations compelling people, even newborns, to spell their names in a certain way.
Introducing Hanyu Pinyin is about convenience and consistency, but should not, through autocratic rules, become a new front in the battle over identity.
Pragmatism is exactly why we would see the retention of “Taipei,” “Kaohsiung” and “Hsinchu” instead of “Taibei,” “Gaoxiong” and “Xinzhu,” and is the most sensible way to proceed in a politicized environment.
Familiarity and ease of use is more important than ideology. But more important than any of this is the principle that individuals in a free society have the right to decide how they shall be addressed. If the president turns up his nose at “Ma Yingjiu,” or if the minister of the interior curiously insists on his name being spelled Liao Liou-yi (廖了以) instead of Liao Liaoyi (despite the first two syllables being identical), or if the minister of finance is particularly attached to the given name “Sush-der” (述德) instead of “Shude,” then this should be respected.
But the Cabinet should understand that if it does not extend this courtesy to ordinary people, present and future, then a strong protest would be justified. Indeed, a strong protest would be essential.
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