cahier lukhnos

417 is the number of the distictive syllables, discouting tonal differences, in the Mandarin spoken in Taiwan. 1323 if tones are counted.

What is with these two numbers?

I learned how to use Hanyu Pinyin many years ago. Way before Taiwan got trapped in the Romanization polemics. Since then I have been aware of the influences of Romanization systems upon the language we speak and write. On the other hand, Hanyu Pinyu has many upsides. Once mastered, reference books by Hong Kong and Mainland Chinese editors become instantly accessible: idiom dictionary, Chinese-English, Chinois-français, Chinesisch-Deutsch… all indexed with Pinyin. I also got the idea how I should index my Chinese documents, and even my address book got sorted that way.

Perhaps because of this early imprint, I have choosen the side to support in the very early days of the Romanization Debate (it seems, though, because of the ideology of the present government, Tongyong is on top now). Only once had my support been slightly shaken, and that was when National Taiwan University’s Dr. Chiang Wen-yu (Institute of Linguistics) said that Romanization system is just like the writing system, you can tell, from how his or her name is spelled, where the person comes from. I forgot the exact phrase or even the source, but her words have some truth in it that moves me. Hélas! From my prejudices, the only Romanization system that can represent Taiwan is neither Tongyong nor the tohubohus of the Gwoyeu Romatzyh, but a system that is designed by two Westerners, of which no one ever understands the difference between t and t’, Wade-Giles…

(Compare the T in Emperor T’ang T’ai-tsung and Tang-kuei soup or Wu-Tang Clan.)

The pestering thing about the Romanization debate is that it gets you politically. Naturally, I understand every point made by the Tongyong Camp or the Anti-Pinyi Camp (if the latter remains a set after subtracting the Tongyong people in it…), being the points cultural, ID-political, subjectivity/difference, or simply “Romanization is also a form of ideogram,” all leading to a Romanization system of Taiwan’s own breed. Yet, as Mr. Dan Jacobson always repeats and we have repeatedly heard: “Wŭo zhichí Taiwan dúlì, dàn bàituo qǐng yòng Hànyŭ Pinyin” (I support Taiwan Independence, but please adopt Hanyu Pinyin–quoting him shows nothing about my stand on this thorny issue). Unfortunately, the “red” tag is already on the Pinyin camp. At the same time, I always feel sorry for Chien-kuo South Road, what is now Jianguo South Road. It just doesn’t look right, doesn’t sound right, doesn’t… feel right. Not to mention Zhongshan South Road or Zhongxiao East Road (and please, ban the Half-Pinyin, Half-Tongyong-ish ZhongXiao East Road or ZhongShan North Road! My respect for Tongyong is completely lost because of this stupidity. Leave the CamelCase to Wiki or Microsoft Windows APIs, not the Pinyin names which follow established “hyphenation” rules!) Call it nostalgia: if ever TPE became Taibei and KHH Gaoxiong (the tales of the two cities are written in Wade-Giles), I might feel as shameful and as resentful as those late 19th-century Alsaciens having learned in shock that their land was taken by the Germans! Surprisingly, both the Pinyin and Tongyong Camps, acrimonious against each other that they seem, do have a common enemy (how Mao-ish): Wade-Giles, ye olde Romanization system that was the brainchild of a British diplomat and a Sinologist. Dr. Liao Hsien-hao, also a professor at National Taiwan U (Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures), once wrote that “W-G is a waste of Latin alphabets; b’s, d’s, g’s get unused, and its rules do not fit into the phonetics of Mandarin” (op-ed in China Times). The waste-of-alphabet argument stands. But Prof. Liao may have forgotten the Phonetics a bit: the Mandarin /d/ is actually not [d]. Those apostrophes are not eyesores either. Sometimes it brings in certain kind of exotic, Orientalist chinoiserie flavors (recall some Dutch place names beginning with apostrophe or the Latin transliteration of Hebrew/Arabic).

I have digressed too much. Standing behind the outmoded W-G while using politically incorrect Pinyin at the same time, I make use of every opportunity I have to preach on the advantages of the two systems. “One good thing about Pinyin,” I had said often, “is that it has almost an one-to-one mapping with the Bopomofo symbols.”

(to be continued)

lukhnos :: May.24.2005 :: tekhnologia 技術或者藝術 :: 2 Comments »