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.
On May 7, 1971, Henry Kissinger planned his first, ultra-secret mission to China and pondered whether it would be better to meet his Chinese interlocutors “in Pakistan where the Pakistanis would tape the meeting — or in China where the Chinese would do the taping.” After a flicker of thought, he decided to have the Chinese do all the tape recording, translating and transcribing. Fortuitously, historians have several thousand pages of verbatim texts of Dr. Kissinger’s negotiations with his Chinese counterparts. Paradoxically, behind the scenes, Chinese stenographers prepared verbatim English language typescripts faster than they could translate and type them
More than 30 years ago when I immigrated to the US, applied for citizenship and took the 100-question civics test, the one part of the naturalization process that left the deepest impression on me was one question on the N-400 form, which asked: “Have you ever been a member of, involved in or in any way associated with any communist or totalitarian party anywhere in the world?” Answering “yes” could lead to the rejection of your application. Some people might try their luck and lie, but if exposed, the consequences could be much worse — a person could be fined,
Xiaomi Corp founder Lei Jun (雷軍) on May 22 made a high-profile announcement, giving online viewers a sneak peek at the company’s first 3-nanometer mobile processor — the Xring O1 chip — and saying it is a breakthrough in China’s chip design history. Although Xiaomi might be capable of designing chips, it lacks the ability to manufacture them. No matter how beautifully planned the blueprints are, if they cannot be mass-produced, they are nothing more than drawings on paper. The truth is that China’s chipmaking efforts are still heavily reliant on the free world — particularly on Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing
Keelung Mayor George Hsieh (謝國樑) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) on Tuesday last week apologized over allegations that the former director of the city’s Civil Affairs Department had illegally accessed citizens’ data to assist the KMT in its campaign to recall Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) councilors. Given the public discontent with opposition lawmakers’ disruptive behavior in the legislature, passage of unconstitutional legislation and slashing of the central government’s budget, civic groups have launched a massive campaign to recall KMT lawmakers. The KMT has tried to fight back by initiating campaigns to recall DPP lawmakers, but the petition documents they
RSS