Eryk Smith rails against the unconventional spellings that plague Taiwan’s southern streets.
The News Lens
Date: 2017/11/27
By: Eryk Smith
愛河流經高雄市區。｜Photo Credit: Henry Trotter＠Wikimedia Commons Public Domain
Here’s a true story: as a teenager learning elementary Chinese, I thought Hanyu Pinyin was crap. “What’s this ‘X’ and ‘Q’ stuff? – Preposterous!”
Here’s another true story: I was a pretty stupid teenager.
Today, 99 percent of the planet has adopted Hanyu Pinyin, a system credited to Zhou Youguang, a scholar who passed away in January 2017 in Beijing at the age of 111. Hanyu was adopted by the People’s Republic of China in 1958, the International Organization for Standardization in 1982, and finally by the United Nations in 1986.
Oh, it was also adopted by Taiwan’s Ministry of Education in 2008 as the official standard for the Republic of China (Taiwan), beginning in 2009.
Taichung City begun the swap in 2004, years after Taipei had already replaced ‘SinYi’ with ‘Xinyi.’
As far back as 1605 there were those who saw the need to repurpose a letter or two of the Latin alphabet for a workable Chinese romanization system. That year a Jesuit missionary in China published The Miracle of Western Letters [西字奇蹟], rendered by the priest as ‘Xizi Qiji.” A few decades later, another Jesuit wrote [西儒耳目資], which he romanized as ‘Xi Ru Ermu Zi’. But the trend didn’t catch on until centuries later – probably due to people like my stupid teenage self. [FULL STORY]