Home Gudgeon and gist Language Log Mixed script writing in Taiwan, part 2

Mixed script writing in Taiwan, part 2

Language Log 2024-05-29

[This is a guest post by Kirinputra]

To take a step or two back towards the Sad Cripples theme, I had the TV on the other day and the show host — echoing the guest, a dietitian — said this:

“Lán Tâi-oân lâng kóng ‘tāu-leng’; gōa-kok lâng kóng ‘tó͘⁺-nài.’”

(Can't remember if he used Tone 3 or Tone 5 on the last syllable.) This could also be written like this:

“Lán Tâi-oân lâng kóng ‘tāu-leng’; gōa-kok lâng kóng ‘豆奶’ (DÒUNǍI).”

= 咱台灣人講「豆乳」。外國人講『豆奶』（DÒUNǍI）。

Again, he wasn't making a point; he was just summarizing an offhand remark the guest had just made to the same effect. While he seems to be referring to Mandarin speakers as foreigners — and they are, in a meaningful sense — there is no way he meant that. Rather, he & the guest were ultimately both referring to the English word soy milk, but calqued into Mandarin as 豆奶 — also a word in Mandarin, but not generally used in Formosa.

What's interesting is that even though the show was in Taioanese, it never occurred to them to calque soy milk into Taioanese, upon which it would be clear that soy milk and Taioanese 豆乳 line up exactly. The comparison had to be mediated through written Mandarin ("Zhōngwén"), which in turn could only be voiced via spoken Mandarin. (Contrast this with Hongkonger instincts, where such a comparison might still have to be mediated through written … Mandarin, which could then be voiced via Cantonese for a kind of seamless experience.)

At this point we're just looking at this everyday phenomenon where most Taioanese speakers instinctively feel that the Taioanese language is — along with spoken Mandarin — an appendage of written Mandarin, and that it is unfit for a long list of purposes, such as for making sense of words in English.

A closely related phenomenon is translating names into English — which is also how romanization is generally conceptualized in Formosan society. Taioanese speakers instinctively feel that this has to be done via Mandarin — or, rather, formal names (incl. of places, businesses, etc.) & most nicknames are instinctively thought of as being inherently in Zhōngwén; while they can be voiced in Taioanese in local interaction, translation into English instinctively has to be done through Mandarin voicing (spoken Mandarin).

(I'll have to find & send a photo I took this year of a mullet roe shop here in Takow. The shop has its name in Pe̍h-ōe-jī on its sign, under the sinographic name; but there's also a name in English, romanized via Mandarin, as if the Taioanese romanization was unfit for that purpose — which is exactly what most Taioanese speakers instinctively believe.)

There is a martabak shop nearby named "A Liong" after its owner, clearly an Indonesian A-Liông. I "joke" (but not really) that if the owner was a Taioanese A-Liông, with the invisible weight of Chinese modernity on his shoulders, he would've been compelled to name his shop "Ah Liang" or "Ah Lung" for Anglo-Roman consumption (I forget which sinograph is associated, if any).

The other day a Taioanese-literate, not-entirely-unsophisticated friend asked me about a sinograph, which he referred to as the 金 radical with "the khit-chia̍h sinograph." Khit-chia̍h 乞食 is the word for beggar. 釳 came to mind, but I knew nothing about it. Friend B understood that he was referring to 鈣. Soon it became clear that Friend A wanted to discuss words for calcium in Taioanese, and 鈣 was a false start (but again, not entirely). However, he had somehow been mentally constrained to start both the conversation & his orig. inquiry with the Zhōngwén kokuji 鈣*, which is only tangentially related to words for calcium in Taioanese; the general word for calcium is kha-lú-siù-m̀, via Japanese & English. I knew he must have assumed that 鈣 was an ancient sinograph "meaning" calcium, and I tried to explain that this was probably not the case (I hadn't looked it up yet, but I was right), but this overheated their brains and ended that part of the conversation. Since Chinese Taipei trains people from the dawn of their literacy to peg "non-foreign" meaning to Zhōngwén sinographs, it is almost prohibitively brainpower-intensive for them to think of sinographs themselves as dynamic moving parts; even the idea that sinographs can be divorced from Zhōngwén (or that any number of sinographs preceded Zhōngwén, or that Zhōngwén was an early-modern invention) can be hard to grasp, and even harder to incorporate into dynamic thinking.

[*VHM:  Zhōngwén 中文 is one of the many non-specific ways for saying "Chinese (language).  "In Japanese, Kokuji (国字, 'national characters') or Wasei kanji (和製漢字, 'Japanese-made kanji') are kanji created in Japan rather than borrowed from China.]

The most "everyday-exotic" exhibits for this nerve I'm getting at are shop signs where Zhùyīn** are given on the side for sinographs that are not Zhōngwén. They might be Japanese or native Taioanese, or they might playfully require the application of an unschooled Taioanese, non-Mandarin reading in order for the light bulb to go off. (And I'm not talking about the great number of shop signs that require a knowledge of Taioanese, Japanese, Cantonese, etc., combined with a Mando-Zhōngwén reading of the sinographs.)

[**VHM:  All school children in Taiwan learn to read and write with the aid of what is commonly referred to as "Bopomofo ㄅㄆㄇㄈ "), after the first four letters of this semisyllabary.  The system has many other names, including "Zhùyīn fúhào 注音符號" ("[Mandarin] Phonetic Symbols"), its current formal designation, as well as earlier names such as Guóyīn Zìmǔ 國音字母 ("Phonetic Alphabet of the National Language") and Zhùyīn Zìmǔ 註音字母 ( "Phonetic Alphabet" or "Annotated Phonetic Letters").

I haven't figured out what to do with such stuff. I think the widespread inability to grasp & grapple with this stuff is at — or close to — the root of why Taioan-Formosa remains in limbo as something like another Hong Kong (yet in some ways less than) rather than another Korea or Vietnam, or another Japan (to give a sinographic example). However, any short treatment of such a topic would tend to miss or fall short of the target, with sympathetic readers pouncing on shallow, shadow side-issues and missing the forest. Long treatments turn people off first by being too long, and secondly by making many perceptive (a good trait in itself) people feel deeply disgusted at seeing somebody try so hard to dig up nameless things from the primordial muck for no reason that they can think of (which might be the problem). But I figure you might know how to make meaningful presentations out of small bites of this material. And it gets us closer to the heart of the matter underlying Sad Cripples, which is that even ("non-foreign") speech is subconsciously felt to be derived from sinographs, which means non-sinographic, "non-foreign" writing (as well as speech-centered sinographic writing when it happens to be "non-conforming") is a copy of a copy, doubly corrupt(ed). (I'll send some photos when I can.)

Selected readings