Final round of Holo Taiwanese characters

Characters

Besides knowing the roman orthography for Holo Taiwanese (explained in this handbook:臺灣閩南語羅馬字拼音方案使用手冊), knowing how to read Taiwanese in characters is key for Taiwanese language study in Taiwan. And at long last, the third batch of standardized Holo Taiwanese characters has been announced by the Ministry of Education's National Languages Committee. You can find it here: 臺灣閩南語推薦用字(第3批)

This document contains the newest 300 characters from the 3rd round of standardization, but also remember the 100 characters adopted May 1, 2008 and 300 characters adopted in May 2007.

臺灣閩南語推薦用字（第1批）採用創用CC授權
臺灣閩南語推薦用字(第2批)採用創用CC授權

Your best bet is to just download one of the cheat sheets provided by the government here.

You can also see a list of some of the suggested revisions and how they would affect Holo Taiwanese songs frequently heard at karaoke:

臺灣閩南語卡拉ok正字字表 (pdf)

For the time being, this is the final batch and these three lists of 700 characters total more or less finish the process of standardizing those previously "hard to pin down" Holo Taiwanese characters. Amendments will be made as required in the future.

I got advance word on August 27 of this impending announcement, mostly due to my relentless stalking of the National Languages Committee (國語會).

Dictionary

In addition, the MOE's Taiwanese Southern Min Dictionary of Frequently Used Phrases (臺灣閩南語常用詞辭典) which fully integrates the now standardized orthography, is online and functional. The print version will be published in October.

There is also a similar dictionary for Hakka (臺灣客家語常用詞辭典), an initial list of standardized characters (臺灣客家語書寫推薦用字 (第1批)) and a standardization of romanization as well (臺灣客家語拼音方案).

The online version allows you to search in characters or romanization, with tone marks/numbers or without tones, using either the official standard Taiwanese Roman Orthography (台語羅馬字，簡稱台羅拼音) or its predecessor and main inspiration, Church Romanization (教會羅馬字，亦稱白話字).

The dictionary also includes notes on literary or colloquial readings and example sentences. One thing to note: one thing missing from the dictionary are some very common nouns and phrases; the scope of this dictionary is not yet that ambitious. You won't find Tâi-uân (台灣), kok-ka (國家), Tiong-kok (中國) or kok-tiong (國中) in this dictionary, though you will find the characters listed separately or in phrases such as Kok-li̍p Tâi-uân Gē-su̍t Kàu-io̍k-kuán (國立台灣藝術教育館).

The standardized romanization system used in that dictionary, Taiwanese Roman Orthography , is outlined in the orthography handbook mentioned above (臺灣閩南語羅馬字拼音方案使用手冊). The handbook should allow any competent Southern Min speaker to master the basics of the romanization and tone system within a couple of hours.

The dictionary draws on and is also complemented by two earlier Southern Min character databases, both of which have been updated to reflect orthography standardization and are available in print for about NT$300.

閩南語字彙(一)修訂版 & 閩南語字彙(二)修訂版


Input method

The MOE also offers a multi-platform input method that gives only romanization output, built on Open Vanilla, downloadable here (these links are to version 1.2, which may be be updated soon to reflect any additions. You can find the download at the dictionary main page, linked to above):

臺羅輸入法下載：Windows、Mac、Linux.

For character output using romanization input, which is what most people will want, there are a number of sources; I recommend FHL Taigi IME (信望愛台語文輸入法).

Remaining problems

Unfortunately, there is little public interest in using the new standardized Holo Taiwanese orthography, either in romanization or character form. So don't expect to see written Holo Taiwanese popping up on your TV subtitles, Karaoke lyrics, cereal box, street signs or story books any time soon.

In fact, I expect the vast majority of Taiwanese people, even those younger ones that are educated with the standardized characters and romanization, to remain unable to effectively read or write their mother tongue. But this is certainly a huge step forward.

Some changes to the mother tongue education program in Taiwan which I imagine will make it even more ineffective than it is now ...

Regular correspondence in Holo Taiwanese & Mandarin

As my flurry of posts today indicates, my nearly week-long absence from the blog should not indicate I am fading into irrelevance! But there are a few more Taiwanese-language related links to share with you today.

One issue which should be obvious to most students of Taiwanese and Mandarin is the regular correspondence between those two languages, which can be used to guess the pronunciation of any one of a pair of cognates. But the casual student of this topic will have found it difficult to put his or her finger on some of the finer details of that regular correspondence.

I made a somewhat flawed post in the past on some of the tonal correspondences between the languages, but I have run across some much richer information lately.

First, take a look at the Master's Thesis (PDF) written by Luo Jia-peng (駱嘉鵬), who put considerable time into studying the rhyme tables of the Kuang-yun 《廣韻》, an early rime dictionary from about 1000 A.D. that is highly useful for creating historical reconstructions of pronunciation and studying divergence in modern Sinitic languages.

Phonetic reconstruction of Chinese initials is the main topic of this thesis. Luo, who is really only interested in modern Mandarin and Holo Taiwanese pronunciations and not so much on what the historically correct reconstructions might be, opts to print a table of Huang Jigang's (黃季剛) reconstruction of Kuang-yun initials. But then he gets to the best part, a table which clearly lines up the regular correspondence between Mandarin and Taiwanese with the Kuang-yun rimes (see page 4-5)! There's also a discussion of tones (see pages 6-7)!

And, for the super nerd, you can view this 8 MB excel file where the scholarly Luo has provided a full list of Mandarin and Taiwanese readings for what I thin kis all the characters in the Kuang-yun. Talk about a "wow." Sort that baby by Mandarin or Taiwanese pronounciation and scroll to your heart's content!

Taiwanese characters / orthography

I get regular hits on the blog from people searcing for 300 standardized Taiwanese characters (hanji).

But I should note that there are, as of now, 400 'suggested' standardized characters put out by the ministry of the education. "Suggested" because the Ministry knew it could not and didn't even want to try to enforce their use at Karaoke or restaurants, the only place most people read Taiwanese.

300 characters were adopted in May 2007, and you can view them here:

臺灣閩南語推薦用字（第1批） (pdf)

Another 100 characters were adopted May 1, 2008 (but largely got ignored due to the impending election), and can be found here:

臺灣閩南語推薦用字（第2批） (pdf)

You can also see a list of some of the suggested revisions and how they would affect Taiwanese songs frequently heard at karaoke:

臺灣閩南語卡拉ok正字字表 (pdf)

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This Holo Taiwanese-related piece demonstrating increasingly pathetic behavior by my least favorite female KMT legislator (I have four least favorite legislators) is probably of no interest to most readers, but I find it infuriating that a legislator who knows jack shit about the language has taken itself upon her to "teach" Holo to the non-Holo speaking Premier.

Some comments from the TGB:

國民黨的刪除台語認證專家, 用咱設計"Guan-tau kong Tai-gi"的貼紙作教材, theh khi ka Lau
tiau-hian Tai-gi.....有夠天才.

M tsai-iann kian-siau e tua-bin-sin (moo-sin-a).Gua-bin the i ang.

Âng-á-siù-thiāu ká án-ne kóng, Āu-pái góa beh iōng chôan-lô tō u lí-iû--ah,
Hah, tán chiok-kú--ah.

Some good news for a change

Premier says he disagrees with Hoklo cash cut (Taipei Times)

Premier Liu Chao-shiuan (劉兆玄) said yesterday that he disagreed with Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislators’ rejection of the budget request for Hoklo accreditation examinations.

Liu told Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) legislators Chiu Yi-ying (邱議瑩) and Chen Ting-fei (陳亭妃) during a legislative session that he would do his best to remedy the lack of funding for the examinations this year....
Hung’s move prompted a demonstration outside the Legislative Yuan last Friday.

The premier yesterday rebutted DPP legislator speculation that Hung initiated the motion at the Cabinet’s request.

He said the Cabinet would request a budget to hold the examinations next year.

Chen Hsueh-yu (陳雪玉), executive secretary and a senior inspector at the ministry’s National Languages Committee, said on Friday that the ministry would not be able to hold the exams this year as a result of the budget cuts.

She said the ministry would consider ways of improving the proficiency of Hoklo teachers.

Let's wait and see what actually happens.

Holo Taiwanese proficiency issue

Li Khin-huann (李勤岸) writes on the targeted attacks on mother tongue education in Taiwan, specifically on (unnecessary) efforts to stem the strength of Holo Taiwanese.

The 2001 UNESCO report on mother languages around the world noted that languages in Taiwan, except for Mandarin, are dying. Although these languages, including Hoklo (commonly known as Taiwanese), Hakka and the many indigenous languages, continue to be widely spoken in some cases, they are all in need of preservation efforts...

We all thought that Taiwan had become a democratic state full of cultural diversity and multilingualism. The savage neglect of language and oppression of mother tongues should have passed into history.

Who would have thought that several days before Lunar New Year, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Hung Hsiu-chu (洪秀柱) would propose scrapping the entire budget of NT$40 million (US$1.2 million) allotted to the Ministry of Education’s National Languages Committee for developing a Hoklo language proficiency certification system.

Did the NT$40 million make up a substantial part of the national budget of NT$1.8 trillion or the budget of NT$60 billion allocated to the ministry?

The committee asked the legislature not to cancel its budget or at least not entirely because the proficiency test has been in preparation for a year, and said the government should leave some money for completing the project.

But in the end, the entire budget was cut....

Taiwan has a proficiency certification system for every language, including Mandarin, Hakka and indigenous languages, but not Hoklo. What message does this send? That Taiwan has a barbarous government that is trying to eliminate Hoklo.

Hong Hsiu-chu, who happens to be my least favorite female KMT legislator, and who has in the past made completely ignorant statements regarding both Mandarin and Holo education (especially in regards to the standardization of the Holo spelling system), sent an editorial to the Apple Daily on the 21st to respond to the fury of the Holo language protection advocates. Below is a rushed translation of most of that editorial, titled "Of course I want to save the people money." It is full of factual errors and distortions I will point out when I get the time in a follow up post.

Language is an important tool of transmitting culture, and knowledge of every native language is worth preserving. For many years people have been encouraging people to speak their "mother tongue," to speak "the language their mother spoke," and this is something I encourage and have never opposed. But what language does mother speak? For example right now there are already more than 100 thousand children of mainland Chinese and foreign brides in our middle schools (mainland Chinese, Vietnamese and Indonesians are the largest groups). If Taiwan's new immigrants wanted to insist that "the mother language is a human right," than please tell me if the Ministry of Education would be able to implement [necessary protection measures]? The mother tongue is not the same as native tongues, and for this reason I have never opposed promoting our native tongues, if not mother tongues, in our school education system.

In the final analysis, 70% or more of people in Taiwan can use Southern Min [Holo Taiwanese], and Southern Min is a strong language in Taiwanese Society [A-gu: not for long]. Being able to speak and understand Southern Min makes life more convenient in many ways and allows for creation of more social relationships, and learning any language is always a good thing. But we cannot force people to learn native languages, and we certainly cannot increase the burdon on our children, and this is a view I am sure most parents and teachers share with me.

Sadly, since native language education started in on our schools in 2001, it has suffered from a lack of qualified teachers, poor and varied textbooks, and lack of a unified writing and spelling system. This made learning the languages difficult. And when former Education Minister Du decided to unify Southern Min's writing and spelling system, he forced through a mixed character & romanization system. He also wanted first grade to learn the Southern Min spelling system and fifth grade children to use Southern Min in composition. These sorts of policies drove children crazy, and invited a lot of criticism [A-gu: how is it that she finds the idea of writing in a language you've been studying for five years to be preposterous?]. Further, there were too many textbooks, a few newly created "Taiwanese characters," the use of characters and romanization together and other bizarre orthography. Most people not only couldn't understand but couldn't even guess the meaning [of the written Taiwanese], and some students at Taipei Municipal Jianguo High School joked that the writing system "was more difficult than Martian." These policies were long ago labeled by experts to be an unnecessary burden on the students.

Former Minister Du in 2008 started to research holding a Southern Min proficiency test. The budget for that year was NT$8million, and was slated to be NT$50million in 2009 (NT$40 million of which the ministry said it would create the proficiency test for teachers ). After flipping through the Education Ministry's budget, the Department of Elementary Education and Department of Social Education already had a large budget for language related fees (the Department of Elementary Education was slated to have NT$90 million). This seemed suspiciously redundant, and that is why I proposed to cut the Southern Min proficiency budget while at the same time asking the Ministry to please present a more complete, well organized budget. But the more important reason this: holding a Southern Min proficiency test would cost NT$40 million. Doesn't that leave one speechless? And half of that money was going to be spent before anyone had signed up for the test or a test had been held. Why was so much being alloted before there was even a test? Isn't the planning for this test too careless?

Further, at this time native language education uses four writing systems -- bopomofo, torroba (?), Tongyong Pinyin and Church Romanization [aka Peh-oe-ji]. I asked the ministry which system would be used on the test? The official could not respond. After this I got to thinking, last year the ministry held a practice test for research purposes, which revealed problems. In other words, the whole testing plan is still not mature. If the budget were allowed to pass now, it would be a most wasteful, lazy and irresponsible act.

It's about time!

Taiwan's ministry of education finally announced the publication of the second round of Holo Taiwanese characters that may form the basis of a standard Holo orthography (I say 'may' because I'm not sure how the new government will treat this effort).

The first round of characters, released last year, totaled 300 characters.

The second round of characters, originally slated to be be 1,200 characters long. It can be viewed here (pdf).

Despite the list totally only 400 characters now, instead of the originally intended 1,500, most of the most contentious issues have been resolved. Perhaps 1,100 more was deemed unnecessary. A third list of at least another 300 characters is planned for release by year's end, at which point a dictionary will be compiled.

Another document (pdf) shows the difference in karaoke lyrics using the new standard versus the song's original subtitles. This is probably a great way to introduce the new characters to people who might otherwise be turned off to learning about Taiwanese orthography (widely considered useless).

Update: A number of articles in the local press about the character choices. The commentary is largely negative, even hostile, thoughtless and full of outright errors. No surprise there. Here we go:

統一教材家長批大人都看不懂 (蘋果日報)
愈改愈亂教部公布台語字 (蘋果日報)
鄉土語言教材也要統一用字 (中國時報)
教部閩南語正字鎖定KTV歌詞 (中國時報)
乎乾啦→予焦啦唱卡拉OK會卡到 (聯合報)
台語推薦用字有看沒有懂 (華視新聞)
閩南語這樣說：無較縒你會念嗎？ (聯合報)
愛情限時批請你跟我這樣唱 (聯合報)
教育部公布台語卡拉OK推薦用字 (中廣新聞網)
海浪↓海湧教部推薦100個閩南語用字 (軍事新聞網)
教部閩南語推薦用字推出五十首歌曲歌詞 (Sina)
閩南語推荐用字增至400個 (國語日報)
尪婿變翁婿？台語文學者這樣用 (聯合報)

UDN opens up front in anti-Holo propaganda war

Update: Tailingua has a great critique of an English language editorial on this subject in the China Post.

UDN went all out today:

閩南語新課綱》楊青矗：台羅拼音不如ㄅㄆㄇ
閩南語新課綱》用ㄅㄆㄇ拼　別為難孩子（民意論壇）
閩南語新課綱》字音難統一 也沒有師資（民意論壇）
閩南語新課綱》民主社會 應讓拼音並存（民意論壇）
閩南語新課綱》新課綱研修 激辯沒結論
閩南語新課綱》孩子怨：沒人問我們想學什麼
閩南語新課綱》拜託！「難道台語也要補」
閩南語新課綱》「用閩南語MSN」 教部草案腰斬
閩南語新課綱》國中生要會用閩南語寫部落格
閩南語新課綱》不妥！「會干擾語言學習」

China Times:
小一拼音學台語教師：羅馬拼音沒打下基礎
閩南語正名「台灣」 課綱審委無共識

From the Guoyu Ribao:
小一學臺羅拼音教長：不宜
小一學臺羅拼音？ 爭議大未過關
缺師資　勉強上路反效果
學三種拼音　學童說會混淆

Obviously Liberty Times was more forgiving:
拼音學台語專家不同調
閩南語正名、小一學拼音未定案

The arguments against? Romanization sucks; you can't read it anyway (never mind you've never tried); neither can the teachers; nobody asks the students what they want to learn; teaching Holo will hurt other language education, including Hakka and Aboriginal languages; the academics working on the program can't agree on anything; the whole effort's a waste of time and resources.

As usual, I'm depressed at the enthusiasm UDN has for attacking Holo language education. Not to mention the load of distorted or false information in the articles.

There is one bit of truth in the articles that helps explain why this situation is so difficult: unqualified teachers. As the education system early on favored mainlanders and those fluent in Mandarin, and disparaged other languages, a great number of teachers speak very poor Holo Taiwanese or don't speak at all. Even those that can speak well have no clue how to read or write it on the whole. It's very difficult to use these teachers to give your kids real working fluency. I think you just have to bring in and train more teachers.

And as I was saying to my wife the other day, people are allowing Holo Taiwanese to die. It would take most native speakers less than an hour to learn some form of romanization or phonetic system for Holo Taiwanese; some systems, like the modified bopomo, I think you could teach in 20 minutes. But few ever make the effort to learn one, and most figure it's totally unnecessary. They have no idea there's Taiwanese literature and poetry. They wouldn't spend 10 minutes trying to struggle through a Taiwanese article or short story because it would take some effort.

With cultural attitudes like this, a top down plan is almost the only real option if we want to save these endangered languages. And since nearly everyone's starting from scratch anyway, I see no need to bicker over which writing system is used. Just pick one and move on to the next step.

Holo education plans

TVBS, which hates the idea of anyone being lierate in Holo Taiwanese, is upset with an effort by the MOE to encourage those kids studying Holo to use it in practical, fun ways! That plan included:

• 3rd graders write e-mail in romanized Holo Taiwanese.
• 5th graders use Holo Taiwanese to chat on MSN.
• Middle schoolers use Holo Taiwanese to write a blog.

Obviously, this would be a big step toward widespread Holo Taiwanese literacy. The TVBS report further posits that bopomo ㄅㄆㄇ, aka Zhuyin fuhao (注音符號), English and romanizations for Holo, Hakka and aboriginal languages would make children "very confused" with all these crazy writing systems!

[The article fails to mention that children only have to, and indeed can probably only, pick a single native language (Holo, Hakka or one of the aboriginal tongues) to study at school, and that being able to write a language is sort of an obvious part of nearly all language training.]

The report starts and finishes by noting this plan is currently under review after previously having a green light (though no source is really cited for this assertion), and also speculates without evidence that Ma's election is the cause for the plan's delay/cancellation.

That makes no sense to me. I'd try to hurry it up if I were them, not slow things down!

Update: According to the Taigu-bang, this among other topics is simply under review and discussion at this point. There was a conference yesterday on these topics, which is apparently how TVBS came up with its report information (notice the blatant lie that the plan was somehow canceled due to Ma's election).

The romanization issue is also under review -- it appears the unified standard will be dropped to allow teachers to use whichever system they believe best. That, I think, will be a big mistake, though if a unified character system for all words is insisted upon, the disaster could be mitigated to some degree.

Holo Taiwanese

The web page that was hosting the Ministry of Education's announcements related to Holo Taiwanese is currently down.

That's a good sign as it should indicate preparations to post entire second group of proposed standardized characters for all future Taiwanese textbooks and writing.

As far as I know, the MOE never released the new CD with updated subtitles for the 50 most popular Taiwanese songs. And they may not get any time to do so.

Holo Taiwanese not very important

A recent survey on attitudes toward Holo Taiwanese that I pulled from the FAPA-YP mailing list, and originally from Talking Taiwanese. I find the data to be rather sobering -- it demonstrates that despite the relative current strength of Holo Taiwanese, it really is in rather immediate danger, and very little public will exists to save it in a comprehensive way.

1. Native language

Mother:
Taiwanese 61%
Mandarin 21%
Hakka 8%
no answer & other 10%

Father:
Taiwanese 63%
Mandarin 21%
Hakka 6%
no answer & other 10%

2. Language use of parents among themselves
Taiwanese 55%
Mandarin 35%
Hakka 3%

3. Language use of parents with their children
Taiwanese 46%
Mandarin 54%
Hakka 0.7%

4. Compared to Mandarin, Taiwanese is …:
more useful in Taiwan 5%
richer in culture 56%
my preferred language to express my emotions 44%
my preferred language to learn 29%
my preferred language to speak to my friends 23%

5. Compared to Mandarin, English is … :
more useful in Taiwan 59%
richer in culture 67% a
my preferred language to express my emotions 4%
my preferred language to learn 19%b
my preferred language to speak to my friends 9%


6. Self-indicated proficiency in the following languages:
Respondents answered this questions on a 4-point scale. Results can be read as "41% of respondents indicated that their proficiency in Taiwanese was very good."
Taiwanese 41%
Mandarin 76%
English 7%

7. The language I want my children to speak is:
Taiwanese: 56%
Mandarin 79%
English 67%

8. Mandarin language education is the responsibility of:
The government 69%
The parents 31%

9. Taiwanese language education is the responsibility of:
The government 17%
The parents 83%

10. Primary schools in Taiwan should offer the following languages:
Taiwanese 18% (of respondents say so)
Mandarin 61%
English 12%
No opinion 9%

11. The "best language" for Taiwan is…:
Taiwanese 12.8%
Mandarin 83.1%
English 4.1% a

Regular correspondence in Taiwanese and Mandarin initials

In Chinese phonological studies, there is a tendency not to talk about vowels and consonants, but rather to talk about initials, medials, and finals. This is because it is the framework used by Chinese scholars before Westerners scholars began studying the language. Also, it has to do with Sinitic syllable structure. I don't want things to get complicated here, but just know that all initials are consonants.

So here is a table showing the regular correspondence between Holo Taiwanese initials (Tai-lo romanization) and Mandarin initials (zhuyin). Since Taiwanese is "older" phonologically, we show the split in relationship to the Taiwanese sound.
The area with the most unstable and unpredicable correspondence is marked in red.

p	ph	b	m	t	th	n	l
ㄅ、ㄆ	ㄆ	∅、ㄇ	ㄇ	ㄉ、ㄊ、ㄓ、ㄔ	ㄊ	ㄋ、ㄌ	ㄋ、ㄌ
k	kh	g	h	ts	tsh	s	j
ㄍ、ㄐ	ㄎ	∅	ㄏ、ㄒ、ㄈ	ㄗ、ㄐ、ㄓ、ㄕ	ㄘ、ㄑ、ㄒ、ㄓ、ㄔ	ㄒ、ㄕ	ㄖ

You'll notice some peculiar things about this. The aspirated initials are more stable than the unaspirated version; Mandarin ㄍ and ㄅ have an asymmetrical split ('g' does not generally become ㄎ while 'p' can become both ㄅ and ㄆ). Voiced initials that exist in Taiwanese but not Mandarin tend to disappear; 'n' and 'l' have easily cross over (but both are still relatively stable); and it is hardest to predict the pronounciation of the Mandarin retroflex initials in Taiwanese.

Note: I sorta made up the table data based on observations, so if anyone has something to add to it, please let me know.

Regular correspondence in Taiwanese and Mandarin tones

I got the idea for this post after reading Kent. A Lee's paper on Chinese tone sandhi and prosody.

Everyone knows that trying to study Holo Taiwanese can be difficult, even if you speak Mandarin. One of these difficulties is the complicated tonal system. But there is a quick and easy way you can guess a Taiwanese tone using the Mandarin (or the other way around). This little entry will only be useful, however, that you know how to pronounce the different tones of both languages, and I’m not particularly interested in getting into a lesson on that here.

In Middle Chinese, there were four tone categories: the level tone, (平), a rising tone (上), a falling or departing tone (去), and an entering tone (入), with the entering tone being marked by a stop at the end of the syllable such as –p, –t, –k, or –h.

At some point a little later, when some of the oldest rhyme tables were being made, each category had split into two different tones, and they were then marked Yin and Yang. The result is eight different tones.

Although tones in the Sinitic language family have undergone drastic different splits and mergers in each language, there is still an underlying unity that allows you to use an understanding of these original tonal categories to gain an understanding of the relationship between tones in these languages.

Take Taiwanese, for example. Most students know that the sixth tone merged with the second tone, leaving only seven tones in modern Taiwanese.

What they normally don’t teach you in Mandarin is that a very similar thing happened. The four mandarin tones correspond to traditional tone categories: Mandarin 1st tone to Yinping, Mandarin 2nd tone to Yangping, Mandarin 3rd tone to Yangshang, and Mandarin 4th tone to Yinqu. The other traditional tone categories were merged; the two separate shang categories merged, the two qu categories merged, and the ru category disappeared as Mandarin lost final stops. Old ru category words mostly merged into modern day Mandarin second and fourth tone, but there are a good number of exceptions.

The following table should go a long way in helping you put the pieces together. Tones that disappeared or merged with others are marked by parenthesis.

M.C. Tone	Yinping 陰平	Yinshang 陰上	Yinqu 陰去	Yinru 陰入	Yangping 陽平	Yangshang 陽上	Yangqu 陽去	Yangru 陽入
Holo Tone	1	2	3	4	5	(2)	7	8
Mandarin Tone	1	(3)	4	(mostly 2,4)	2	3	(mostly 4)	(mostly 2, 4)
Examples	番	反	販	發	煩	反	犯	罰
	雞	狗	兔	鴨	猴	馬	象	鹿
	刀	紙	信	筆	糊	紙	字	墨
	瓜	果	菜	肉	魚	餃	豆	麥

You can see that 發's Mandarin pronounciation did not go to second or fourth tone, but rather to first. The entering (ru) category is the hardest to guess on things like this, but there is another hint that can let you know a modern Mandarin word was a ru word (if it ends in a vowel).

Now you’ll notice the beauty this system can have in helping you use your knowledge of one language to guess the pronunciation and tone in the other. Easiest of all, the 1st tone in Taiwanese and Mandarin almost always match, as do the Mandarin 2nd and Taiwanese 5th tone. For the others, there can be a couple of possibilities, but it’s still surprisingly helpful.

Let’s run an exercise both ways:

From Mandarin: 典, pronounced dian3; Mandarin 3rd tone corresponds to Taiwanese 2nd tone. Is 典 pronounced in 2nd tone in Taiwanese? Yes!

From Taiwanese: 語, pronounced gi2 or gu2; Taiwanese 2nd tone corresponds to Mandarin 3rd tone. Is 語 pronounced in 3rd tone in Mandarin? Yes!

I’ll make another post covering regular correspondence of consonants and vowels soon between the languages and tone sandhi. Between these three pieces of knowledge, you can really have an easier time improving your listening skills in the Taiwanese (or Mandarin) because you’ll be much better at guessing vocabulary.

More on Taiwanese characters

I made a post not so long ago on the Ministry of Education's latest efforts to standardize the Taiwanese system so that future students across the country are learning to read and write in the same way. It came on the heels of a(nother) unified romanization system.

Well, first of all, so far the efforts aren't finished -- the MOE merely made a suggestion list of 300 commonly used characters and put them out there for public consideration. They even provide a form on the Mandarin Promotion Council website for giving feedback on their suggestions. The next step is to consider revisions . You can view the full list here. At this time, several controversial characters have not been covered in the suggestion list.

But given the media's abysmal treatment of the suggestion list as absolutely trivial, I'd like to talk a little about the MOE's choices and why they picked certain characters that struck people as particularly odd.

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啉 lim (Mandarin readings lan1, lan2, lan4) v. to drink.
Most often represented in current KTV videos as 喝 or 飲. Although 啉 lim is not in common use and is not even listed in the online 國語辭典，there are historical and phonetic reasons for picking it. It's damn close to the Mandarin reading you might try on first glance, līn, and in second tone meant "to drink to completion." Most reporters, knowing nothing about this, simply asked people if they understood the character in isolation and used their blank stares as proof it was a terrible choice. That actually goes for all of these characters.

仝 kâng / kāng (Mandarin readings tong2, quan2) together (as in 仝款 kāng-khóan, "the same").
Often represented as 共. 仝 kâng is a historical varient of both 同 and 全.

佮 kah (Mandarin reading ge2) with/and (as in 我佮你, you and me). In Mandarin, this character is a varient of 合 he2, making this choice pretty good for both sound and ease of understanding just by looking. See the phrase 佮意 kah-ì, "interest" (有佮意 "interested [in]").

佇 tī (Mandarin reading zhu4) dwell or live at ;stay or wait at; be at
Historically meaning 久立, something like "to stand in one place for a long time." Chosen mostly because it's the most widely used candidate and there aren't many other good choices.

媠 súi (Mandarin readings tuo3, duo4) adj. beautiful
With the reading tuo3, this word did mean beautiful when in use in Mandarin; as duo4, it was a varient of 惰, lazy. At KTVs now, this character is most often represented with the unrelated 水 for sound or 美 for the meaning, but neither character is very well suited since they both have other Taiwanese pronunciations.

(亻因) in (No Mandarin reading, presumably also yin1 -- invented character) pron. them, their
The only character the MOE actually made up in the table. Since it doesn't really exist yet and you can't type it in, they suggested the alternate 怹 (Mandarin tan1) for now, and may decide to scrap (亻因) altogether.

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Hope that was interesting!

Mother tongue education day

Liberty Times also has several articles on mother tongue education day and how it's working. The idea is that on one day a week、kids use a mother language (Holo Taiwanese、Hakka、or an aboriginal language) for all classes that day.

The goal is to give the kids more of a chance to practice than half an hour a day for twice a week (the way elementary school does it now) and to extend the education through high school. It also aims to introduce this chance without adding a lot of homework、which you would get if you added another class.

The articles discuss both some of the progress and some of the problems that occur. As you can imagine、considering Taiwan's diverse lingusitic situation and the length of time these languages were supressed、it's not always easy to get qualified teachers and divide students into the appropriate groups.

Obviously、aboriginal communities have an especially big problem promoting the use of their tongue in a classroom for the whole day.

National Language Development Law

I'm rather upset about the way the press is talking about the new law on languages the cabinet wants to pass. Like this UDN article. (GOD that's annoying. And how can he complain about the law not setting a clear 'official language' [inherently political] while saying language should not be a political topic?)

The law does nothing to reduce or discourage the use of Mandarin. It merely says the government may no longer compel people to use any one language over another and that all languages are considered equal.

This takes away the official position of Mandarin as the "national language" and recognizes the diversity of Taiwan and its language scene. It's sort of a formal correction for the absurd idea that a language which was native to 15% of the population should be the only "official" language in Taiwan, while Taiwanese, spoken by 70-80% (not to mention Hakka or aboriginal languages) was oppressed.

You can read an official explanation of the new draft law here (.doc format).

This law has been under consideration and draft since 2002. I personally was volunteering for Professor Robert Cheng, head of the Ministry of Education's Mandarin Promotion Council, and translated a draft of the law at that time. At that time, it was called the language equality draft law. It is now the national language development draft law (國家語言發展法草案).

The most important thing the law does is elevate all languages used by the people in Taiwan (本國族群或地方使用之自然語言及手語) to the status of "national language" 國家語言. Mandarin will be called Huayu 華語 in official documents. What is often called is officially Southern Min (not just "Taiwanese," since calling one "Taiwanese" woudl be as useless as calling on the "national language," right? You don't see China Times mentioning that).

The bill says people have the right to use their language unimpeded, both in their private lives and in broadcasts. It says the government should help promote the languages (which they are doing for Hakka and aboriginal languages a lot lately). It says the government should establish prizes to promote use and make sure students can study their language in school. The Ministry of Education said today that the language kids understand will be used in class, but made no move to back away from Mandarin as the defacto class language. And if some places start having more classroom discussion in another language, what's the harm?

While the bill says people have a right to receive government services in their language, it makes no demand that the government publish documents in anything but Mandarin, but also does not limit the government's options to mandarin only. From a practical perspective, it would be some time before anything would be published in another script.

So in any case, screw the reports of "getting rid of Mandarin" and all the other sort of nonsense coming from the blue camp. The Liberty Times had a more friendly report (of course). And Taipei Times did a good job too.

Taiwanese Romanization Input Method

The Ministry of Education made it. So far it's output is just tone-marked romanization. This is a good sign since they'll be able to adopt this to a character input method once the characters are standardized.

Download it or read the manual here. Mac, Linux, and Windows versions available. Links to suitable fonts are also provided.

Standardized Holo Taiwanese characters

The Ministry of Education has been working rather quietly (or at least under most Taiwanese media radar) for many years on standardizing written Taiwanese characters/hanzi/kanji (漢字). They will publish a book called Character Suggestion List for 300 Frequently Used Southern Min Phrases (閩南語300常用詞用字建議表).

This has been anticipated for some time, and in several cases there have been reports that said its publication was just around the corner. It's been repeatedly delayed.

Well, I called the archaically-named Mandarin Promotion Council (國語推動委員會) about it yesterday to ask when it would really be out. They told me sometime in March or April. I'm guessing the end of April.

Since this is a controversial topic with a lot of information, let me clear something up. Taiwanese does have characters and can be written. The problem is that many of the most commonly used Taiwanese words or phrases have words that are probably not of Han origin, but that probably came from now assimilated minorities that lived in Fujian some time ago. That makes using an "authentic" character hard.

As far as I understand, the Council is publishing this first as a guide so that it can be publicly discussed (you can be sure that will happen. You'll read lots of complaints no matter what's in the list). Some of the suggestions will then be revised before actually rolling out mandatory use of those characters in future textbooks. The news is welcome to me, since it will mean increased Taiwanese literacy, uniformity in press publications using Taiwanese, increased use of direct Taiwanese quotations in print and online without translation to Mandarin, Taiwanese language localizations for software and more uniform results for Internet searches.

In cases where there is no easy way to pick a good character or get a consensus, the council may suggest using the Taiwanese Romanization system they've published.