The China Post
Date: January 2, 2017
By: Sun Hsin Hsuan

President Tsai Ing-wen’s unusual use of Taiwanese for an annual spring couplet on Sunday has come under fire — not for its language, but for what literature critics have described as its “incorrect” structure.

National Museum of Taiwanese Literature head Liao Chen-fu (廖振富), while praising the president for “bringing public awareness to Taiwanese literature,” gave a poor review of the couplet itself, saying: “The president’s spring couplets could probably count as two lines of new year greetings, but couplets? Not so much.”

Spring couplets are two of lines of poetry that are governed by a set of complex rules.

Couplets are required to have the same number of Chinese characters in both lines, while the lexical category of each character must be the same as its corresponding character, and the tone pattern of one line must be the inverse of the other.    [FULL  STORY]