Friday, August 5, 2022

The power of government sanction

The power of government sanction: Tâi-lô, the system advocated by the Taiwanese Ministry of Education, is quickly replacing the century-old Pe̍h-ōe-jī, surprisingly even in Malaysia and the Philippines. POJ is a well-established system with lots of publications. This shows what really counts is official recognition and promotion by a government, despite the fact that this alienates proponents of other systems. It is so ironic: The whole point about Taiwan switching from POJ to Tailo was to detach itself from the rest of the Sinosphere. What it actually did was to unwittingly "unite" the rest of the Hokken-speaking world. It's probably why Taiwan is now promoting Chinese-characters-based writing system, which is not readily available to non-Chinese-educated Southeast Asians.










Thursday, August 4, 2022

Advantage of Chinese over Japanese 日本語に対する中国語の利点 中文優於日文的優勢

An advantage of Chinese over Japanese: The meanings of the scientific names of dinosaurs are apparent, even without knowledge of Latin and Greek. For example Brachiosaurus is 腕龍, which literally means "arm dragon." 

An advantage of Japanese over Chinese: Despite meaning of katakana being obscure, Japanese users have easy access to western literature on dinosaurs because the names sound substantially the same. 

日本語に対する中国語の利点: ラテン語やギリシャ語の知識がなくても、恐竜の学名の意味は明らかです。たとえば、ブラキオサウルスは腕龍で、文字通り「腕の龍」を意味します。

中国語に対する日本語の利点: カタカナの意味が不明であるにもかかわらず、日本人ユーザーは名前が実質的に同じように聞こえるため、恐竜に関する西洋の文献に簡単にアクセスできます.

中文優於日文的優勢:即使不懂拉丁語和希臘語,恐龍學名的含義也很明顯。例如腕龍就是腕龍,字面意思是“臂龍”。

日語優於中文的優勢:儘管片假名的含義晦澀難懂,但日本用戶可以輕鬆參考西方有關恐龍的文獻,因為名稱聽起來基本相同。






Written Taiwanese in movie subtitles 映画字幕の台湾語



Groundbreaking! Written Taiwanese, in a mixture of Chinese characters and romanized alphabet, as currently promoted by the government, accompanied solely by English, with no Mandarin in sight. In a children’s film at the National Taiwan museum. 国立台湾博物館で今日撮りました。画期的です。子供向けの映画で、教育部が推進している漢字ローマ字混じりの台湾語と英語のみの字幕。北京語は全くありません。