Three years ago, former Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Yeh Yi-jin (葉宜津) raised quite a few eyebrows when she proposed abolishing Taiwan’s zhuyin fuhao (注音符號, Mandarin phonetic symbols commonly known as “Bopomofo”) system in her bid to become Tainan mayor.
Yeh did not make it onto the ballot, and it was not clear how she would have begun to implement such a gargantuan change locally. Not only is Bopomofo learned by all schoolchildren in Taiwan, it is the most popular system for typing Chinese in the nation, despite being considered one of the least efficient input methods. Bopomofo has also become an integral part of the nation’s youth culture — to the chagrin of many older people and linguistic purists — with teenagers creating new Internet slang and abbreviations using the script.
Sunday was International Mother Language Day, which promotes awareness of linguistic and cultural diversity, and the Ministry of Education honored eight people and two groups for promoting Taiwan’s bentu (本土, “local” or “native”) languages, which have lost ground over the decades to Mandarin. While Bopomofo was introduced by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), which along with Japanese colonialism was responsible for the decline of bentu languages, it is now a script unique to Taiwan and a part of its cultural identity, just like the nation’s use of traditional Chinese characters.
Responding to the occasion, Tainan City Councilor Lee Chi-wei (李啟維) revisited the issue of using Romanization instead of Bopomofo to teach schoolchildren. Lee said that the use of Bopomofo makes it difficult to promote interest in, or recognition of, the nation’s dialects and languages, as it is not commonly used outside of Taiwan.
Lee obviously cares about saving Taiwan’s bentu languages, but what does Bopomofo have to do with it? It is almost exclusively used for typing and teaching Mandarin to schoolchildren, and would never be used to write any substantial text. All of Taiwan’s languages are already written in either Chinese characters or the Latin alphabet.
Lee might be referring to a modified Bopomofo system seen in some Hoklo (commonly known as Taiwanese) textbooks along with the Latin alphabet, and while its practicality is debatable, it is not clear what exactly he is arguing against, as the Latin alphabet is also commonly taught.
It seems that there is a different agenda here, as Lee and Yeh espouse the idea that using the Latin alphabet to teach Taiwan’s languages would help the nation connect more with the world. Yeh’s reasoning does not make sense at all, as elementary-school children learn the Latin alphabet in English class anyway. Lee echoed this point, adding that many older people cannot read their license plates because they never learned the Latin alphabet. That has absolutely nothing to do with Bopomofo, and is completely irrelevant today.
Lee is right that it is important to continue making Taiwan a more globalized nation, but again, promoting Taiwan’s bentu languages to outsiders has little to do with this when the urgent problem is that they are declining in Taiwan.
The whole point of the government’s language policy is to encourage more people to speak bentu languages, and the focus should be on the most efficient and practical way for Taiwan’s children to learn them. If Romanization is best, then it should be used, not because it makes Taiwan more globalized.
When Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi Jinping (習近平) wakes up one morning and decides that his People’s Liberation Army (PLA) can win a war to conquer Taiwan, that is when his war will begin. To ensure that Xi never gains that confidence it is now necessary for the United States to shed any notions of “forbearance” in arms sales to Taiwan. Largely because they could guarantee military superiority on the Taiwan Strait, US administrations from Jimmy Carter to Barack Obama practiced “forbearance” — pre-emptive limitation of arms sales to Taiwan — in hopes of gaining diplomatic leverage with Beijing. President Ronald
As the US marks one month under the leadership of President Joe Biden, the conversations around Taiwan have shifted. As I discussed in a Taipei Times article (“No more talk of ‘bargaining chips,’” Jan. 30, page 8), with the end of former US president Donald Trump’s administration — and all of the unpredictability associated with it — Taiwan would not have to worry about being used as a “bargaining chip” in some sort of deal with the People’s Republic of China. The talk of Taiwan being used as a bargaining chip never subsided over those four years, but under Biden, those
The Canadian parliament on Monday passed a motion saying that China’s human rights abuses against the country’s Uighur Muslim population in Xinjiang constitute “genocide.” Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has so far avoided using the word genocide in regard to Xinjiang, but if he did, it would begin to generate solidarity among G7 nations on the issue — which is something Trudeau has called for. Former US president Donald Trump used the word genocide regarding Xinjiang before leaving office last month, and members of US President Joe Biden’s administration have been pushing for him to make the same declaration, a Reuters report
While China’s abrupt ban on imports of pineapples from Taiwan is malicious, it is a problem that the government can manage. However, the ban’s real aim might be to test Taiwan’s status in the eyes of US President Joe Biden’s administration. Beijing cited biosecurity as the reason for its ban, which is to start tomorrow, an untenable assertion, as 99.79 percent of Taiwan’s pineapples exported to China since last year passed customs tests. The timing is intriguing. The ban was announced just before harvesting is to begin; after Biden ordered a review of supply chains of chips and other strategic materials; and
RSS