I am a member of the Ministry of Education's Mandarin Promotion Council, but did not vote for the Tongyong Pinyin (通用拼音) system as has been reported in the papers. Since anyone approving of the Hanyu Pinyin (漢語拼音) system has been cast as someone who "does not identify with local culture," most have adopted a low profile.
I am the only one in the council with a background in information science and so I would like to explain why, from an information technology perspective, Tongyong should not be blindly promoted.
The most important reason is that the social cost of adopting Tongyong Pinyin would be too high. Hanyu Pinyin has been used by the international community for 20 years and in 2000, US libraries made it their standard system of Romanization of Chinese. The publishing industry and educational organizations have invested an enormous amount of money in its promotion.
If Taiwan wants to adopt the Tongyong system, it will face the following problems:
First, all Web pages meant for an international audience will have to exist in both Hanyu and Tongyong Pinyin versions to be searchable. All software involving the Romanization of Chinese would have to include an internal application for conversion from Hanyu to Tongyong and vice versa. This is not a problem that can be solved with a simple external application and accuracy can't be guaranteed.
Such conversion software would have to have the capacity to differentiate between words with generally accepted spellings that should not be converted and words that should be converted. A comparison table, for example, would be necessary for place names, and since new words arrive in a steady stream, it would have to be regularly updated; personal names would have to be automatically detected.
When it comes to high-quality document conversion, each and every document would have to be checked manually. Such conversions would not only increase the cost of software, but would also cause great harm to network efficiency and become a nightmare.
Second, and even worse, since Pinyin abbreviations use only the first letter of each word (the Hanyu abbreviation for 中研院, [Zhongyanyuan, Academia Sinica] is ZYY, while the Tongyong abbreviation is JYY [Jhongyanyuan]), not only would it be difficult for any software to perform a correct conversion, but, in the future, Taiwanese will not understand Hanyu abbreviations, while international users will not understand Tongyong's.
Wouldn't the easiest way to promote local culture be to adopt the method that creates the least trouble for international users?
It is true that Tongyong Pinyin differs from Hanyu Pinyin only in terms of its substitution of certain letters. But Hanyu is in use around the world, while Tongyong is targeted only at Taiwan.
If Taiwan wants to promote Tongyong internationally, the cost would be substantial. A greater worry is that foreigners would consider it too much trouble to come to Taiwan, which would harm the nation's image. Is it really worth asking the people of Taiwan and Taiwan's international friends to pay such a price just to get rid of the letters "q" and "x"? Taiwan's resources are limited. Can we really spare resources to fight for Tongyong Pinyin, too?
The most appropriate solution would be for all organizations in Taiwan with an international outreach (the National Central Library, the Tourism Bureau and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs) and all information and road signs to adopt the Hanyu system, in which case there would be no harm in using Tongyong for domestic education. If there is a reckless decision to adopt Tongyong, government departments will run software conversions until they turn blue in the face and foreigners may abandon Taiwan for China out of pure convenience.
I hope that at this critical juncture Taiwan will be able to make a historically responsible decision that benefits everyone.
Hsu Wen-lian is a researcher at the Institute of Information Science of Academia Sinica and a member of the Mandarin Promotion Council.
Translated by Perry Svensson
US$18.278 billion is a simple dollar figure; one that’s illustrative of the first Trump administration’s defense commitment to Taiwan. But what does Donald Trump care for money? During President Trump’s first term, the US defense department approved gross sales of “defense articles and services” to Taiwan of over US$18 billion. In September, the US-Taiwan Business Council compared Trump’s figure to the other four presidential administrations since 1993: President Clinton approved a total of US$8.702 billion from 1993 through 2000. President George W. Bush approved US$15.614 billion in eight years. This total would have been significantly greater had Taiwan’s Kuomintang-controlled Legislative Yuan been cooperative. During
Former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) in recent days was the focus of the media due to his role in arranging a Chinese “student” group to visit Taiwan. While his team defends the visit as friendly, civilized and apolitical, the general impression is that it was a political stunt orchestrated as part of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) propaganda, as its members were mainly young communists or university graduates who speak of a future of a unified country. While Ma lived in Taiwan almost his entire life — except during his early childhood in Hong Kong and student years in the US —
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers on Monday unilaterally passed a preliminary review of proposed amendments to the Public Officers Election and Recall Act (公職人員選罷法) in just one minute, while Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) legislators, government officials and the media were locked out. The hasty and discourteous move — the doors of the Internal Administration Committee chamber were locked and sealed with plastic wrap before the preliminary review meeting began — was a great setback for Taiwan’s democracy. Without any legislative discussion or public witnesses, KMT Legislator Hsu Hsin-ying (徐欣瑩), the committee’s convener, began the meeting at 9am and announced passage of the
In response to a failure to understand the “good intentions” behind the use of the term “motherland,” a professor from China’s Fudan University recklessly claimed that Taiwan used to be a colony, so all it needs is a “good beating.” Such logic is risible. The Central Plains people in China were once colonized by the Mongolians, the Manchus and other foreign peoples — does that mean they also deserve a “good beating?” According to the professor, having been ruled by the Cheng Dynasty — named after its founder, Ming-loyalist Cheng Cheng-kung (鄭成功, also known as Koxinga) — as the Kingdom of Tungning,
RSS