Alphabetic politics
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As a recent example of the politics of writing, Bill Poser wrote at Language Log: Better Not Use Q and W
A Turkish court has fined 20 Kurds 100 lira (US$74) for holding up placards at a New Year’s celebration containing the letters Q and W according to a Reuters report. These letters are used in Kurdish but not in Turkish. Using them therefore violates the law of November 1, 1928 on Adoption and Application of Turkish Letters, whose purpose was to change the writing system of Turkish from the Arabic-based Ottoman system to the Roman-based system developed under the secular modernizing regime of Mustafa Kemal "Attatürk".
October 31st, 2005 at 10:14 am e
Taiwan’s passport office has been forbidding people to use Q and X in romanizations of their own names, as I’ve noted elsewhere in remarks on the same Reuters story. But of course I’ve never heard of anyone here getting fined for that.
Come to think of it, though, back in 1975, during the bad old days of martial law, the KMT government banned a newly published version of the Bible because it used romanization. That, though, was aimed at surpressing not just romanization but also the Taiwanese language.
October 31st, 2005 at 1:51 pm e
Mark,
that reminds me of the once heated debate in Taiwan about romanization, back in … I want to say … 2000. Then sec of education, Zhen1 Zhi4Lang3, a psycholinguist, argued for the adoption of PinYin. At the time when the Taiwan independence movement was at its height, it was, of course, politically incorrect.
My friend, Tsai4 Chih-hao had done some thorough analyses of the pinyin system and other romanization systems around, see http://research.chtsai.org/. We used to talk abut it over lunch, but those days are long gone. Now Hao is back in Gao Xiong, and we haven’t see each other for years. Anybody knows what happend so the Taiwan romanization?
October 31st, 2005 at 11:32 pm e
Hi, Gary:
I’ve corresponded some with Tsai Chih-hao but never had the pleasure of meeting him. Gaoxiong, where he is now, has supposedly switched to Tongyong Pinyin for its signage. But I haven’t been down there in years, so I can’t verify this.
The central government ended up adopting Tongyong Pinyin as the official romanizations for Mandarin and Hakka. The Tongyong scheme for Taiwanese, however, was not adopted. The debate over this continues.
In terms of application, Tongyong Pinyin is now seen on highway signs throughout the country, as highways are controlled by the central government. But in part because of the contentiousness of the issue — not to mention that it costs money to change signs and that lots of local governments don’t want to allot their own funds to this — the central government left local governments free to make their own decisions on romanization. Taipei has adopted Hanyu Pinyin and implemented it fairly well, other than the annoying, unnecessary practice of using InTerCaPiTaLiZaTion. (Taipei has also failed to make proper use of the apostrophe, for example romanizing 景安 as “Jingan” (”jin” + “gan”) instead of as “Jing’an”.) Other places still have their signage mainly in MPS2.
As for pedagogy, schools continue to use zhuyin in the teaching of Mandarin. People tend to use lots of different methods for the teaching of Taiwanese and other languages; it’s a mess.
The government has wasted a lot of time and money coming up with Chinese-character schemes for Taiwanese and Hakka. Few people are ever going to learn or use these. Indeed, the successor to Ovid Tzeng actually proposed using Chinese characters to write the languages of Taiwan’s aboriginal tribes — which, to be blunt about it, is one of the dumbest ideas imaginable.
In short, Ovid Tzeng, a great scholar, was forced out in part because he advocated Hanyu Pinyin, which was seen as antithetical to Taiwan expressing its de facto independence. But, ironically, his successors have done something Tzeng would almost certainly never have done: embraced Chinese characters, regardless of the language, which does more to tie Taiwan to China culturally than Hanyu Pinyin for Mandarin ever could.
As for 余伯泉, the main person behind Tongyong Pinyin, he was unable to remain in his low-level position at Academia Sinica and is now heading a Mandarin-training program for foreign students at a university in Taoyuan County.