2004-02-07 Dan Jacobson * >>>>> "F" == Fung-Ing Lee / funginglee at yahoo com/ writes: F> Dear Danny: How are you? I majored in Chinese from Fu-Jen Catholic F> U 20 years ago and have a M.A. in TESOL. I've been teaching F> Mandarin to American adults in MA for eight years since January F> 1996. My students have trouble of memorizing Pinyin alphabets. From F> leaning and liguistic point of view, I think Pinyin is the worst F> system and needs to be revised at least close to modern F> English. zh, c, z, q, x, and i represent retroflex and dental F> sibilants vowels not only "odd" but also "vulgar" as Mao F> Zetong. How did they even come up with these alphabets to translate F> Mandarin at the first place? My students all prefer MPS II because F> it makes sense to them. Actually, MPS II was revised in 1972 to F> replace Guoyu Romatz and finalized in 1984?? because Taiwan F> government was at a loss which one to follow? And they are too F> stupid to implement MPS II in Taipei or in other places in F> Taiwan. When I visited Taipei few years ago, I saw the inconsistent F> street signs I almost fainted. They don't even know their MPS II is F> the best system. What kind of government is this? We try to unify F> the language but they try to segregate the country! I recently F> teach a 10 year old white boy. I teach traditional MPS [bopomofo];, F> and only took him three classes, three weeks of time to memorize F> them all. He is learning and writing chinese characters at the same F> time. What I want to say here is Pinyin maybe popular on the F> bookshelf, but is not a good system for Mandarin teachers to F> introduce in the classroom. The reason why MPS II is not that F> popular like Pinyin because Taiwan government never did a good job F> to advocate it. What Non-Mandarin speakers know is only Pinyin, but F> once they know there are other systems to learn Mandarin, they will F> abandon Pinyin all at once. I hate politics and political F> propaganda. I am writing to you on behalf of all non-Mandarin F> speakers who want to learn Chinese language. Sincerely, F> Emma Lee Consider an English teacher who might "revise the spellings of English" for whatever reason. I would rather have a traditional teacher. Certainly English is more messed up than Hanyu Pinyin. Wang2 Tian1chang1 at Donghai Univ. was the principal inventor of Zhuyinershi, he now supports Hanyu, at least as of 1999 when I last saw him. The current Taiwan Gov't system will hopefully go away at 3/20/04 election. I have no objection to bofomofo. Use that 100%... good. But if you teach any other romanization than Hanyu Pinyin, you should get their signed written consent that they know they are using a system used by only .0001% of Chinese speakers worldwide. Yes, Zhuyinershi is very American, yes yes yes, it is a masterpiece, I admit, etc. etc. but that isn't important to us users... we want to use the world standard! Hanyu Pinyin is used in Taibei, and hopefully all of Taiwan after 3/20/04... 2003-08-16 Dan Jacobson * Mail from zhaoyeyu at yahoo.ca I am a native Beijinger who study in Vancouver now. I happened to look at some of your stories about Hanyu Pinyin and Tongyong Pinyin on the Internet. I'm just writing to you to say I completely agree with you on this issue. I am not into politcs at all, but usualy interested in cultures. I've got a couple of Canadian friends who are studying Mandarin now. They all use Hanyu Pinyin. Actually, people here in Canada just call it Pinyin rather than Hanyu Pin coz I guess they assume there is no other Pinyin systems. At the University of British Columbia whose Chinese department is ranked among the best in the world, all the Chinese courses are using Hanyu Pinyin. The textbooks are mostly from Beijing although the coordinator of Chinese courses is a Taiwanese. I've been tutoring/teaching Mandarin for one year here and I find that most Canadian students refer to Beijinghua or Putonghua(although slightly different) as the standard of Mandarin, which is quite good to my little business. Anyway, I think this makes sense. We Beijingers have been speaking Mandarin or Beijnghua for thousands of years, which is more natural than the Received Pronunciation in Britain,which is taught to most people rather than being people's mother tongue.As far as I know, more and more educational institutions in the world are using or switching to Beijing standard in Mandarin. It's also used by UN. Besides politcal reasons, I cannot see any point of sticking to the system they invented while one other system is really prevailing. Anyway, I dont know much about linguistics although I am massively interested in languages and different Chinese cultures. sorry if I've said something stupid. 2003-01-27 Dan Jacobson * 嘉義英譯 縣市準備統一 【2003/01/25 聯合報】記者葉長庚 太保報導 嘉義兩字的英文譯名拼音混亂，縣市政府下周一連繫會報將提案統一為「Chiayi」； 但交通部在東西向快速道路路標嘉義拼音Chiai少了y字，會讓外國人誤為不同的地名； 縣府表示，會請相關單位改正。 嘉義英譯混亂，共有 Chiayi、Chiai、Chia Yi、Chia-Yi、Chia-I ，除拼法不同， 大小寫有異，數種拼法，讓人眼花潦亂。 交通部八十五年十二月編印的「路街地名統一中文英譯使用手冊」用的是 Chia-I， 縣府計畫室主任洪耀福說，交通部使用的拼音系統為「國語注音符號第二式」，並非 沿用已久的地名，目前使用於公路新設指標，與其他公共設施名稱不同，極易讓外籍 遊客混淆。 縣府計畫室表示，依內政部規定，地名英譯以通用拼音為原則、國際通用或沿用已久 的地名維持原譯名，格式採第一字母大寫，其餘小寫，不插空格，中間不劃短線，因 此嘉義應以「Chiayi」為標準英譯，縣府下周一將在縣市連繫會報提案由縣市政府共 同確認「嘉義」的英文譯名，並行文周知各界，以利國際化和拚觀光；市府已同意統 一嘉義的英譯為Chiayi。 不過，嘉義縣政府網站昨天用的還是CHIA YI，中間有空格，且縣內有多處路標音譯 不一，交通局表示會督促改善。 Dan says: How stupid. The answer is Jiayi 才不必遲早再改， 恰亦跛腳通用拼音法。 2002-10-27 Dan Jacobson * From: Louis Epstein Subject: Death to Pinyin! Came across your website on a search...I've never before encountered a Westerner who LIKES pinyin,even if few share my conviction that its use is a pro-Communist partisan political statement to be avoided whenever possible. (Whenever I refer to a mainland place or person,I do so in Wade-Giles to the best of my ability). Dan says: ah the communists... forgot about them. Let's look long term here. It's an insult to the Roman alphabet,using characters as code to convey sounds they DON'T convey.I agree that Wade-Giles can be improved upon,but pinyin is NOT the answer...we need something that reflects how Roman alphabet users use their letters,as transcriptions of Chinese sounds. Dan says: didn't the experts prove that they can convey what one wants them to convey, etc. I deplore ALL adoption by any Western media of pinyin. 2002-10-01 Dan Jacobson * 曹逢甫，黃榮村，陳水扁，等等若領通用拼音的護照， 名字正好會拼的像大陸人！ 2002.7.12 + 各位媒體朋友： 歡迎直接用本站的一切， 也歡迎打電話聊一聊。 + 「給你看一個網頁（即 jidanni.org），積丹尼這老外本來跟余伯泉感情非常 好的，結果 余伯泉把通用拼音改得越來越不相容漢語拼音，他們才鬧 翻的。」 + 「 積丹尼的人格,你要先確定沒有問題, 我懷疑他有精神分裂」 + 「積丹尼的弱點在於中文程度不夠，用字尖銳， 讓政治信仰掛帥的人 一看就產生排斥， 即使他說得十分合理。」 + 「建議你可以去讀讀積丹尼的文章。 我第一次讀他的文章時，老實講 是不太適應， 他在同一篇文章中有嚴謹的舉證推論，卻也同時夾雜著 對余伯泉等人的人 身攻擊， 我是不太喜歡這種人身攻擊的東西，不 過99年第二讀雙方論戰的東西時 因為有第一次的底子 就比較能瞭解 積丹尼的憤怒 我上面舉的例子只是其一，余用部分的事實來「證明」 通用的優越性 身為一個學者用這種障眼法來服務自己的意識形態 我 覺得很低級 更別提積丹尼所提的其他例子了」 + 講甚麼語言平等法，都不尊重我們外國人。 講甚麼轉換系統， 自己 轉換就好， 路牌跟眼睛之間怎麼轉換？ + 連一本字典尚未，仍猛推動。 They don't even have one dictionary made, but still blindly pushing their plan. 另罵姓 會變如共匪， 忘了自己主委姓曹 (=Cao)。 2002-05-15 Dan Jacobson * http://oriented.org/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=29&t=000390 > I will accept no less than 100% consistency in a Romanization even if > I have to start using the Martian alphabet The goal is to use the Roman alphabet, ABC... plus say Ch, Zh, etc. > I personally find it 100% unnecessary to modify Hanyu Pinyin as a > Mandarin Romanization, as I said above it is a perfect system in > this regard. I will not modify it for this purpose in any way, I Yes, this is my thinking. It also has the most users worldwide. One would think that they should be counted. Unless one were to go out of one's way to throw a monkey wrench in, as Yu does. > will attempt to use it as a basis for a Minnanyu Romanization. I am > considering using Bh for the soft B, gee that took me 5 seconds to > think of, and I won't have to use Hakka's V whatever that is You will arrive at http://jidanni.org/lang/pinyin/19970607tai_ke.html . I used bb. > sorry you're on your own with Hakka adding hakka is the simplest part. Yu also claims to cover the Yuan2zhu4min2 languages, but I opened up the book and saw he was just using somebody else's system, inconsistent with his other hodgepodge, and calling it also tongyong too, one of his favorite habits. > of all the digs that Taiwan gets from China over totally mindless > nonsense, just unbelievably petty garbage taken to the 800th degree, I > can understand this type of mindset. what if one day China accepts Taiwan independence just like the UK accepts the US. Won't it seem silly for Taiwan to have crippled romanization just because some silly squabble years ago? Anyways, if you're like me and don't wish to change the overloaded "i" of hanyu pinyin [si vs. xi], then you'll have to do something very ugly to Minnanyu, if you want to use s there... but wait, there is a bigger problem, because of the overloaded i in hanyu pinyin, if you declare hanyu pinyin to be the mandarin component of your personal "tongyong" system, you will already have violated the "tongyong" guiding principle of "one to one sound to symbol" mapping, even "across different languages". My solution at least now is "tell the user that just like Spanish and English, you got to remember what language you are reading a specific symbol in". With this relaxation it is much more easy to design things. Of course the tongyong sales pitch is that he doesn't need this relaxation. Of course he uses the relaxation anyway, except in the case of mandarin, where he pulls out his aforementioned sales pitch as the reason why he must throw in his monkey wrench, and like he told me "it has come the turn for mandarin to bend [rang4bu4] in favor of minnanyu." How about nobody bending for anybody else, or else you must still make the systems conflicting to a small extent because you have a limited set of symbols and don't want something too ugly. So, what we are using for local hakka is Luo Zhaojin's system, where sii=mandarin si, which frees si and xi to coexist ... anyway, all we said is that no, we don't need to change hanyu pinyin for mandarin, and yes, our system conflicts with hanyu pinyin, but only for the finals [yun4mu3], where apparently it is OK for hanyu pinyin to conflict with itself. No, we don't conflict with hanyu pinyin's initials [sheng1mu3], which I think is part of the hanyu pinyin philosophy which seems: sheng1mu3: very strict. yun4mu3: can be overloaded [i, u], or abbreviated [uei->ui]... >>>This may be true but that doesn't change the fact that a Romanization will be required and that with all the demands on schoolchildren's time the burden of learning it should be reduced to the absolute minimum degree possible. Which is why the result i think the eduaction ministry ended up with is zhuyinfuhao extensions to cover minnanyu and hakka, which is a much more consistent way of doing things that the romanization exercise... especially when, can you believe this, tongyong was advertised to be consistent all the way to English too. It was promoted as being an implementation of one of the mumblings of overall expert in everything, Li Yuanzhe, President of Academia Sinica. You see, that's one of Yu's problems, once you sign one of his petitions you never know where your name will end up. In http://jidanni.org/lang/pinyin/1999letters.html I ask "It's 11 PM, Li Yuanzhe, do you know where your signature is?" Since my goal is to make sure when a romanization system is used for mandarin, it is hanyu pinyin, one may ask how I feel about zhuyinfuhao? zhuyinfuhao for mandarin is not a competitor and indeed buys us more time until the recent phony mandarin other leading brand systems fade away. Anyways, "the kids won't be able to learn Taiwanese unless the spelling of Mandarin is changed." Sounds like some pretty weird kids. And oh what a coincidence, "it has to be changed anyway because it is China Pinyin". Can someone please go to Academia Sinica and check on the mental health of Dr. Yu. It would only be a few km. trip for most of you. >>> try using Mandarin characters for writing Taiwanese!!! that is a minefield you don't want to get into and shouldn't. a good romanization will make the whole thing much easier, you apparently don't seem to think this is very important though. sure, I'm all for it, as long as a "good romanization system for Taiwanese" isn't used as an excuse for throwing a monkey wrench into hanyu pinyin for Mandarin. I say "you leave my Mandarin alone, and I'll leave your Taiwanese alone." "I won't come up with any more plans on how to spell Taiwanese, and you don't come up with any more plans on how to spell Mandarin." Now is May 2002, the month when the Mandarin board [www.edu.tw/mandr] will be rechosen. I say appoint Yu as the Taiwanese romanization czar, as long as he can keep his hands off those Mandarin road signs. But oh darn, his program not only is to implement his miracle spelling system ["hard at work working it out" still I bet], but also to get all those commie ZH's off the signs [which he used to think were neat when he hung them up and www.smcbook.com.tw helped him print all those tiny textbooks. Anyway, if you don't figure a way to be different than hanyu pinyin for your Mandarin part, then the tongyong team will find little use for your work. "What? Be different just to be different? That doesn't seem like something a humane linguist would engage in. More like an evil scientist." 2002-05-13 Dan Jacobson * http://oriented.org/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=29&t=000390& > cannot communicate directly with their own grandparents because And what if we ask them how do I spell their name... gee, Taiwan students can't spell their own name and because it is a "landmine" to the education minister, they apparently will never know until they make some wild guess on a credit card application at some market, and that sticks for the rest of their life. > they have not been taught their mother tongue. the efforts that are > being made towards taiwanese education are great and if students can > learn a single romanization system to cover all dialects, I find that Bet you 1000 NT's that you can't make one without some compromises, or otherwise you'll need the full Intentional Phonetic Alphabet. > to be of inestimable value. furthermore it is not in any way > impossible as has been suggested above. believe me this is not rocket That's what they all say. Then when I ask to see their plan they realize the impossibility. You won't get much closer than some of my abandoned plans on my webpages. > science we're talking about here. I'm sure this is true for the hakka > tongue as well. unfortunately tongyong pinyin is not the right > system. this thread has forced me to look into it further and i have > to say that it sucks. what a shame can you continue to look even further and do the exercise of trying to come up with your own system. You will probably want to chose a well known system as a basis. You will probably start with Hanyu Pinyin, like even Yu did [else where did he get ZCS?] then you will say "can we regularize the i vs. ii thingy, uei vs. ui, etc... OK, then we hit Minnanyu. What do we do with the BB/B/P delemma? Do we accept BB or do we force a P, Ph into mandarin? or is it somehow fair to borrow Hakka's V? etc. etc. Wait, isn't English spelling reform much more in need of our services? Or how about fixing up all those Chinese chars. whose phonetic part has "drifted". Wait, why is it OK to make bold revisions to Hanyu Pinyin? Must because nobody really uses it, at least nobody we know. I hear that there are a lot of users, but that might just be communist propaganda. Good thing the government is still blocking their books and tourist visits. If there really were a lot of people using it, then wouldn't we get laughed at, just like if we were to declare that "7" is called "six". Anyway, give it a spin. Can you justify why one would fix hanyu pinyin before English spelling? It could only be that hanyu pinyin users are so few that it wouldn't inconvenience them if we adjusted their system... ok, they don't have to use our revisions ... that's funny, a lot of work to make some changes to the symbols to represent the _same_ language... it is so much more same than the various Englishs, also the whole definition of Guoyu was an effort to be the same. Same same same no matter what little quibbles Yu makes. Anyways, I'm 100% for Taiwan Independence, Republic of Taiwan, etc. but I think the whole "figure out some way to be different" pinyin exercise is stOOpid. Anyways, my man, where's your pinyin plan? It's like the USA, still can speak "English" and not be England. There, that's not rocket science. So why don't they ban Mandarin instead of playing some spelling jokes? Why don't they rid Taibei of all the streets with China place names instead of arguing how to spell them? Anyways, in your exercise you will be faced with several choices, shall I use letter 1 or letter 2. Letter 1 will be the hany pinyin usage. To support letter 2 one would need to lean back on supposed "uniform western spelling habits"... anyways, you will slowly see why one ended up with hanyu pinyin, and why it is better than a "compromised system not to offend tourists". Anyways, give it a whirl. P.S. pinyin or A or B will have little effect on kids learning the mother tounge. I help do the pinyin for retired teacher Xu's local Hakka textbooks and we know very well that pinyin or zhuyin is the last thing the kids would ever actually look at. > taiwan exists in a complicated political environment in which such > issues do have a deeper context I think we could get farther along the road to Taiwan Independence if those in charge would realize what China things are good and what China things are bad. Hanyu pinyin is good. It comes in very handy when one uses Mandarin. There is no good reason to not use it if one insists on talking Mandarin. You see, they [DPP] haven't lived anywhere else, and still think that language==nationality. Well, in that case, we'll never fit in, and even if we do, we won't have black hair still then. Why don't we instead educate them that where we come from, they already found out that language and passport are independent... 2002-05-03 Dan Jacobson * http://oriented.org/ubb/ultimatebb.php?ubb=get_topic&f=29&t=000390 I can't believe that the DPP might choose Li Yingyuan, current secretary of the Executive Yuan, to possibly be Mayor Ma's opponent. I mean isn't this just playing into my hands, which are armed with evidence like http://jidanni.org/lang/pinyin/images/19990729xuanxia.png where he holds a news conference against the use of China's X, little aware of the X that his team hung on XuChang St., steps away from Taibei Main Station [can somebody please take a photo for our web presentation?] this and other backtracking of their Laurel and Hardy team means that almost one third of the 600 Taibei street names must be changed from the ones they themselves originally hung back when mayor A-bian let them go wild. E.g. "ZhongSiao" now must become "JhongSiao" because "ZhongSiao" apparently wasn't far enough from communist "ZhongXiao" in retrospect for them, even after they hung kilometer after kilometer of signs. But wait, why no X in Siao, but yes X in Xu? Well, as their mastermind Mr. Yu was busy getting his signs hung, his scheme was evolving, as I am sure it is still today. Unlike my stale hanyu pinyin, which just stays the same. Their same team brought you "HerPing Rd.", which also please somebody find a sign if any are left, and take a digital picture or scan it in, as it is great for "Is this how you want to spell Heping Rd.?" "No" "OK, then why is it hanging there? Who hung it?" "I don't know" "Your team hung it, Sir. See, right there in your documents... do you think it is environmentally sound to hang signs and then later change how you want to spell them? One third of them?" Anyway, this Li Yingyuan must be stopped at any price. We must not let Taibei street signs "get all messed up on drugs" again. 2002-04-30 Dan Jacobson * http://oriented.org/ubb/ultimatebb.php?ubb=get_topic&f=29&t=000390 I was criticized about my beautiful looks by some one with out even an image file to their name. To reexamine just how wonderful I do or don't look, one may flip on Public TV [Gongshi, www.pts.org.tw] Sun May 5 2002 21:00, rebroadcast May 6 10:00 AM Hakka news, where I act like an expert about Chinese dialects, for perhaps 10 whole excruciating minutes. See me in several real life time action exciting outdoor situations too. Feiren feels bad about complimenting Ma Yingjiu about finally giving us hanyu pinyin, mainly apparently because Ma Yingjiu also likes China or something. And also: China is bad. China uses hanyu pinyin. Therefore hanyu pinyin is bad. I say one who grasps Taiwan independence [at least the way I grasp it] would say true Taiwan independence means not having to check each time to make sure the neighbor's kid Larry doesn't like something before it is OK for us to like it. Aren't you still being controlled by Larry that way? Do I not take the Subway just because [shudder] _you_ happen to work there? For all I know Ma Yingjiu might also like classical music whereas I prefer rap's EPMD. By the way sorry, I don't have the patience to look up how he actually likes to spell his name. Hmmm, not hanyu pinyin, whoopie. Anyway, I can't hold a press conference to praise Ma Yingjiu's pinyin policy because he belongs to the set of people who like unification. So anything any of those people do should never be complimented. And I suppose on the other hand anything the opposite set of people do should be complimented. How about Zhao Shaokang's UFO radio program. [Sorry, again I remember he spells it "Jaw" but I'm not on line as I write this so I'm not going to go looking it up.] Though he has some wacko unification underfeelings, his program is still positive in many respects. I suppose it wouldn't be politically correct to say any good words about him. Feiren says: There is no need for each letter or groupd letters to correspond artifically to one sound. We use more or less the same letters to represent French and English sounds without to much confusion OK, then why isn't it OK for us to use hanyu pinyin to spell mandarin, and let what ever the Tongyong dudes finally cook up be used for Taiwanese [Minnanyu]? Feiren then says: By the same token, there is no reason we can't use one set of symbols to represent Mandarin, Hakka, and Minnan. Of course, the symbols will represent different sounds and some extensions will have to be added for sounds like the liquid 'b' in Minnan that doesn't exist in Mandarin. Can you please show me how this is done? Can you please gather all the Tongyong stuff you can and tell us if they actually have done this? Can you please check under the hood or at least turn the keys before recommending the car to your friends, p-l-e-a-s-e? P.S. I thought the Tongyong idea was same symbols for same sounds, different symbols for different sounds. If I can use the same symbols for different sounds then where is the supposed big bonus for the school kids forced to study this stuff? Why can't I just use hanyu pinyin for mandarin, and let the rabble rousers go wild designing Taiwanese pinyin. P.S. did you know that they are still arguing about that B? Some of them want to use V. If they use V then isn't that a slap in the face of the Hakka? Mr. Yu told me "Mandarin must yield to Taiwanese": first design Taiwanese. then look at mandarin. if any letter is found to be already used differently in mandarin, it must be changed in order not to conflict with taiwanese. of course such strict rules needed be imposed then also on hakka. because our goal is to mess up mandarin pinyin, not hakka. Anyway, I don't see why hanyu pinyin would hinder Taiwan independence any more than using English hinders American independence. I see hanyu pinyin as a handy tool that really hits the spot here. P.S. to the Tongyong folks: why are q and x bad and c good? Dan Bloom sent me his book. He read Qing Fu street on my website, but wrote Quing fu St. on the envelope. The Jiayi post office's first guess apparently was Guang Fu St. Luckily my local post office is already hip to the scheme. If lost mail, lost friends, lost potential soulmates, lost business contacts, etc. etc. are cool and ok, then I suppose "any old" pinyin will do. However if you feel this is unacceptable, then you will feel like me, that only many years of using a world standard, available inside and outside taiwan, is the only way to slowly clean up the mess. [nothing to do with simplified chinese here, don't bring that up]. 2002-04-24 Dan Jacobson * http://oriented.org/ubb/ultimatebb.php?ubb=get_topic&f=29&t=000390 > Originally posted by Dan Jacobson: We could say "even those of us who > support Taiwan independence support mayor Ma on this". Please don't - > you'll just lose credibility. I still remember the rolled eyes and > barely suppressed groans when you pulled that one at the meeting at > Taipei City Hall with the various foreign representatives of > multinationals and foreign governments. No matter how we feel about > it, nobody wants to hear our political views. We have a little bit > more leeway with language issues, let's not blow the opportunity. OK, but I'm often branded as a unificationist for favoring hanyu pinyin. If I just smile and change the subject, that means they are right. So I say "see, the US is independent of England but still can use English". But then they say that it is spelled differently bla bla bla. > Also, if you are concerned about building credibility and making Ma > and Hanyu Pinyin look good to the rest of Taiwan, shouldn't you dress > a little bit more ~ahem~ formally than you did last time? That's just > good manners. Taiwanese tend to not take too seriously those with an > unkempt appearance. http://jidanni.org/lang/pinyin/images/19990407twrb.jpg nice white shirt, http://jidanni.org/lang/pinyin/images/20001013tv.jpg nice plaid [faded vertical along buttons???]. Nice red in this shot with Lo Fuzhu's son: http://jidanni.org/lang/pinyin/images/19990406dan_luomingcai.jpg Anyway, Hartzell is more kempt http://jidanni.org/lang/pinyin/images/20001012lhb.jpg however he is liable to make embarrassing pinyin mistakes. Anyway, mom bought me a new pair of sneakers, however she said they were not to be used for going to Taibei for silly endless arguments. > quote: I know multiple forms of pinyin--Wade Giles, Hanyu Pinyin, the > French sinological Pinyin (used in Needham), and the one James Legge > used in his translations. All of them work well when applied > consistently as will Tongyong. How can the word consistently be put in the same sentence as the word Tongyong? http://jidanni.org/lang/pinyin/images/19980718shifu_rd.jpg is a picture of Yu Boquan, Mr. Tongyong, all thumbs up about this sign he just had hung. I am all thumbs up too because it also happens to match hanyu pinyin. Now Mr. Yu wants to change his sign along with the spelling of 1/3 of the streets of Taibei from what he hung last time. This sign he wants to change to Shihfu instead of Shifu. He is not forthcoming about this. E.g. his fellow commission members don't know that what he hung last time, "ZhongSiao" is now no good and must be rehung with JhongSiao. And so on for 1/3 of the signs in his system. On the job training. Great. > quote:Small markers of identity and difference are important to small > countries with large neighbors. > quote: There is also a long historical tradition in East Asian > countries that associates legitimacy and sovreignity with regimes have > the power to dictate the form of the written language. isn't it the "emperor's new clothes" to argue about the spelling of Nanjing, Beiping, Tianjin, Xuzhou, etc. etc. roads without instead first removing the China worship in the place name? Me? Content: whatever you like, but use the international spelling standard for whatever characters appear. > If Taiwan can't distinguish itself through its democracy and culture, > some romanization system by a local "scholar" just ain't gonna do the > trick. Yu Boquan is a particularly sorry one. For each language he offers[d?] several plans, that way you are certain to find one you like. "Vote for me and I will make the minimum wage $1.23, $3.21, or $2.31!" what does that mean? > quote: Hundreds of thousands of school children would benefit if a > system could be devised that would cover Hakka and Minnan (if you > think Tongyong can't do that, prove it to me with specific examples > rather than just saying it can't be done.) > > I'm not in the mood to do other people's homework tonight. You show me > the comparison charts for the Tongyong schemes of Hakka and Minnan and > Mandarin. And don't forget to add in the schemes for all the languages > of Taiwan's tribes as well, because Tongyong has been touted as a > one-fits-all system. If you're advocating the system, show it to > us. But you might have a hard time finding information. why can [several of Tongyong's many Minnan schemes, which they never reached a conclusion on] borrow Hakka's V while at the same time not allowing any borrowing by Mandarin? Why are the rules so strict about Mandarin and then the R freely used elsewhere even though it sounds different? And if it's OK to sound different than why Tongyong in the first place. Why is "China Pinyin"'s ZH so bad when C is OK, and ZH was OK as can be seen by him hanging "ZhongSiao" Rd. Anyway it is embarrassing that a fellow foreigner [linux dude, infact] has been taken in by the billuious arguments of the Tongyong camp, without first checking the facts to see if it is indeed Tongyong after all. You see, not everything Green is good. For instance, with Peng Mingmin, last presidential candidate, one never hears about any inconsistentcies. However, as you can see on my website, Yu Boquan is loaded with them. Anyways, Tongyong is an oxymoron... with only so many alphabets and so many sounds, you just can't do it. That's what the International Phonetic Alphabet is for. However the IPA is not for road signs. > quote:Why the obsession? Is it related to our general > disenfranchisement here in Taiwan? No sh*t, good luck trying to get even one foreign representative at the ministry of Education meetings where these things are decided. How would we know what is good for us anyway. In contrast, Mayor Ma seems to listen. Go ask the Civil Affairs chief, Lin Zhengxiu. At first they were apprehensive about hanyu pinyin too, until we all told him over and over that's what we want. There, that rules out a unification plot by the Taibei city gov't. No, Yu isn't a bad person. He just is like some of those idealists "too busy with the campaign to worry about paying the bills or taking out the trash or using other peoples' land"... 2002-03-22 Dan Jacobson <> * oriented You will find a lot of Taiwanese road signs in Yilan County, particularly Jiaoxi township... As our goal in the hanyu pinyin sign romanization campaign is for standards, what does one do if the town is 50% hakka and 50% minnan? And how does one guess the romanization from abroad? How does one automate indexing systems... I must have a special flag to produce a certain romanization depending on the ethnic mix of the area... and what to do when the mix changes, or race X does not want X language road signs. No problem with countrywide Minnanyu [Taiwanese] road signs. But first the government should prove its commitment, by making it the spoken language for use in schools --- which I don't see happening. 2002-03-11 Dan Jacobson <> * Newsgroups: tw.bbs.lang.english Subject: 漢語拼音路牌萬歲 hengchun 兄， 我們何必向北京看齊 --- 應該叫那個通用拼音的人我們不要 他將北京音貼到我們的路牌，包括 ㄓㄔㄕ -- 我聽很難過， 感覺阿共馬 上到。 [I'm being sarcastic.] ================================ 最新消息：中國民主了，答應我們的一 切了，不再想併吞了，要建交了，一邊 一國就 OK 了。可以了。免擱驚了。 那時「通用拼音」還有什麼屁作用？ 最舊消息：余伯泉他們還有台語通用拼 法上的內鬨，遲遲未決定方案。請問「通」 有通到那裡去？ 客家人也無人要那套， 羅 肇錦的則較熱門。 你看過洪惟仁在自由時報寫的嗎？ http://jidanni.org/lang/pinyin/19990420hongweiren.html 上次朋友請客他說如果我去他不要去， 結果我就回家了 --- 他恨我「口袋都 是人民幣」，但我還將其文貼於我站。 ================================ 我說本白人在芝加哥長大沒注意英文的 英就是英國的英。 Oh, "English" is called "English" because it comes from England. Oh, hmmm, never occurred to me? Oh, I see. I am using "somebody else's language"... 用他國語言因不愛國... 對！ 我立刻通知那些國家，如美、加、澳, NZ 叫他們注意。 「可是他們沒敵人在旁邊」... 可見您還沒把握真正的獨立思想，真正 的獨立思想中我們的行為， 我們的選 擇不會因為鄰居在叫叫叫而改變，與其 起舞。 ================================= 你們若摸黑我們要簡體字，我就會摸黑你們要 廢除注音符號。 ================================= 國王新衣地換個字體、拼法、「方言」， 仍有濃濃中國味，怎辦？ 怎辦？怎辦？全國講台灣。糟糕， 中 共看到，說「乖，可愛，他們都要講廈 門話。讚！大家要本土我們一起本土， 只要該土為祖國的土。」 怎辦？怎辦？ 你怎麼弄他們還會說你還是 愛國，乖。 唯一辦法是像同志出櫃， 下定決心， 不理中共說好說壞， 要講什麼話就講 什麼話，愛寫什麼字就寫什麼字， 愛 怎麼拼就怎麼拼。 那麼， 拼音？我選國際牌，因為家裡 的拼音很亂， 上次被小朋友吵架弄亂， 聽說只有那個國際牌的漢語拼音才夠強 把我的路牌洗乾淨。姐姐叫我下次不能 到夜市買。不要聽什麼水管包「通」。 字體？聽說那國際牌也很強但是，真歹 勢，家裡已經有一套，卡無方便換，下 次再來，真歹勢。 話？你講你的，我講我的。暗時講他媽 的。 ================================= > 您大概是居留在台灣的"外國人"吧. 而 > 若沒具有公民權,本來就沒有投票權. > 不然,不就可以稱為"干涉內政"了.當 > 然,您的意見也是很寶貴的參考來源. 多謝大人。 請不要檢舉我。 多謝。 ================================= > 若是地圖上的名稱問題.給您一個建 > 議,出門前先找地標找好.像我在美的 > 生活也是這樣的. 人家會笑我不用自己的地圖集， http://jidanni.org/geo/taipower/sunriver/ 拜託。 > 只是台北市馬市長推行的第幾大街, > 第幾大道是不是讓您更便利了呢? 那是因為他要掛拼音你們叫叫叫。 到 http://oriented.org 可見我們外 國人中公認該套為失敗的。果然。好， 考你，第某大道在那裡？ 自己不想用 的東西不教我用。 順便考考總統府前凱什麼大道本國人都不 會唸。 2002-03-10 Dan Jacobson <> * Newsgroups: tw.bbs.lang.english Subject: 漢語拼音萬歲 h> 對於英美系國家來說(不知道歐洲如何) h> ZH...可以說是沒有辦法發音的吧,因為 h> 我想沒有幾個英文字是以zh開頭的 那麼叫那些外國人去讀一點書；反正不 是世界漢人比什外國人多？ 另外，有人罵漢語拼音某符號，自己從 未試過作一套，一整套比漢語拼音更好。 會發現選這個會影響剛選好的那個。 他們像余伯泉，亦即所謂「通用拼音」 的主謀，邊做邊修，逾做逾修。 昨日掛 X 字路牌， 今日請李應元幫他 開記者會反對 X. 證： 去台北車站對面 XuChang St. [許昌街] 看其路牌， 然後問余伯泉記不記 誰掛的， 然後問他 http://jidanni.org/lang/pinyin/images/19990729xuanxia.png 是否也是他搞得， 還我捏造？ 乖孩子， 邊做邊學， 陳水扁市長請了 工讀生做路牌。 請陳水扁國長不重蹈覆轍。 > So yes, the early Americans were > eager to break even linguistic > ties with the "old country". Yes, but those reforms were never continued throughout the rest of English. And what did they buy us? Having to search twice in google. And what should Jamaicans do? Does their spelling need reform to? So Mr. Yu Boquan brings this up, "oh look, the canadian/american/british difference!" however, it is much sumaller than his differences, and not actively pursued anymore, all the more evidence that it didn't help much. Anyway, if Yu Boquan uses this as a sales point isn't that like saying "try DDT" because you're not up to date on pesticide facts. 我（旁聽久）的老師王天昌（東海中文 系已退休）為注音二式核心人物， 現在也支持漢語拼音。你看，如果當時 漢語拼音准放於話下，能省多少麻煩。 2002-03-09 Dan Jacobson <> * oriented: Hobart: I told my relative that when I go to Taibei, I do not ever ride the [Jieyun] rapid transit, because SHE works there. Clever, aren't I. Who knows or cares if the 'Pro-China unification mainlanders KMT Ma and PFP Song' support whatever pinyin. Actually Ma supports it mainly because we [foreigners] told him to, hence I support Ma, even though I am pro independence. It is so clear that Ma's brain is much better than Chen Shuibian who let Yu Boquan go wild with Taibei street signs, however, one does wonder if Ma were mayor at the time, perhaps we would be stuck with Zhuyin Ershi, so gotta hand it to Yu for finally breaking the "anti-communist grasp" on those signs... indeed when he first started it looked very much like hanyu pinyin, which is why you see photos of me hanging out with him on my website. However, the brain tumor increased [else how do you explain it], causing his system to get further and further out of line [my party hearty line]. Here's my secret new system that has 'I love Taiwan' screaming out in every syllable: T-Yu T-Bo T-Quan, T-Wo T-Ai T-Ni ---Not! Actually when I called former Ed. Minister Zeng Zhilang on the phone back when he was vice pres. of Yangming Univ. he said "it is impossible for the Taiwanese to accept hanyu pinyin" ... interesting how his thoughts changed later as he had a chance to think further about the issue. * oriented: There were questions about the earlier versions of Tongyong that Yu Boquan [Tongyong main conspirator] tries to destroy the evidence of. I copied 19971022ybq_taipei.zip from his account before he could delete it, and stuck it on my website, which is physically offshore, so sue me. Other version history should be on the site of my secret admirer, Prof. Qiu Yaochu of Dongwu Univ. (Chinese) By the way, self-proclaimed pinyin controversy expert me says: Zhuyin fans: do not fear, zhuyin is not a target in my campaign. We are not out to kill zhuyin [well, ok, unless we get bored 25 years later], we are only trying to prevent some crackpot trying to fog things up with counterfeit [= Tongyong] pinyin, because they secretly envy hanyu pinyin. [Indeed, since I know Yu Boquan very well, if someone told him how to write such a successful system as hanyu pinyin, he would have promulgated himself, despite the x's and q's that he hung around Taibei and now rails against. ---remember, the whole thing is to "make a unique identity", too bad those commies claimed those cool X's and Q's first. P.S. The tongyong turkeys like to say in ominous tones "hanyu pinyin was invented by the soviets". Dan says: I thought it was Zhou Youguang, Wang Li, etc. anyways, what if it were true, _It doesn't matter_, because we scientist types don't check to see that the grandma of the transportation division chief didn't use organic molasses before we ride the bus. Wait, the character 5 has unclean origins. I shall not use 5. I shall exchange 5 and 6, creating a unique identity. Please read "6" as "five". Don't worry, we can write computer programs to translate them back if you have trouble. I have computer goggles to translate tongyong back to hanyu as you ride your motorbike. Wait, lets have a referendum. opps, Mr. Foreigner is not allowed to vote because he can never become a citizen, sorry. [actual themes on news:tw.bbs.lang.english this week, in Chinese, do a google search for things I posted there to find the thread] http://groups.google.com?q=jidanni+tw.bbs.lang.english might do it.] 2002-02-26 Dan Jacobson <> * Sorry, more: the "throw PRC a bone" idea is wrong if we are to sell this idea from the "I support Taiwan independence and also support hanyu pinyin" standpoint, as I do. We must say that in making our resolution to support hanyu pinyin, the PRC is not a factor; we look around and see no "PRC"... Math proof time: Taiwan alters pinyin to be different than PRC; PRC moves their pinyin over on the bench to sit next to Taiwan; Taiwan moves further away; PRC slides over again to sit next to Taiwan; Taiwan moves further away. From this it can be seen that indeed the PRC can manipulate Taiwan's pinyin at whim: all the PRC has to do is adopt Taiwan's pinyin, this will force Taiwan to change Taiwan pinyin to be different. Therefore Taiwan is dancing to the PRC music. Under the Dan Plan, by me, Dan, Taiwan adopts hanyu pinyin, and then sticks with it. As far as the PRC goes, they can turn blue in the face and we don't care. They can be all smiles and we also don't care. That j****ff Yu Boquan says "what if the PRC changes their pinyin?" while at the same time having changed his own pinyin so many times, even after getting his signs erected. That lesser j****ff, Dan Jacobson, [wait, that's me] says: Hanyu pinyin hasn't changed in the 40 years since release: stability you can invest on. But wait: won't it get stale sooner, you know, being 40 years old? Naw, look at English, several hundred years stale and still revision costs being too high to afford messing with it... therefore ensuring stability you can invest on. By the way, Mr. Yu also has added some special bonuses because "Taiwan Mandarin is different than Beijing Mandarin!" like Wen->Wun , [he didn't understand the syllable chart initial/final system here.] Feng->Fong, [this, like I told him in the restaurant, should be changed in a set: b p m f, not just one or two, unless you want to trap your self in mid-sound change which should affect the whole class sooner or later. I told him: there are several places in your tongyong pinyin that you have changed one or two members of a 3 or 4 sound class. Either change nor or change all or face even more ridicule from professional linguistics people.][anyway, indeed, he took my advice on many of these points --- except my main point: your contribution of forcing the pinyin issue onto the table [by actually hanging signs] remembered in history. Indeed, nobody had the guts except you. OK, now your historical role is fulfilled, OK? Time to step back.] 2002-02-26 Dan Jacobson * oriented: Sorry, got more: Let's examine calling the year 2002 "Year 91". Isn't that the same deal as needing a tongyong pinyin for the _same_ Chinese language? Doesn't this year 91 thing strike you as one of the most brilliant inventions of the century? If we stopped calling it year 91 would the nation crumble? Would the minions run around now confused about what country this is? [Or any less confused?] As I said in a rare letter accepted by the Liberty Times http://jidanni.org/lang/pinyin/1999letters.html [Chinese] Dueling pinyin systems for the _same_ language is just showing that one's brain is stuck in the phase of "I'm the real China, they are the fake China. Real China does not use fake China's pinyin. [Real China does not accept fake China's college degrees too.]" If one grasps better the meaning of independence, one would say "I am Taiwan, they are China. I will treat China like any other of the 200+ other foreign countries of the world." "I will stop sibling rivalry over the family name because I am not your sibling. I do not wish your China trademark. I am Taiwan, not China. I now have freed my conscious so I am able to use all international standards. I use volt watt meter ASCII ..., I do not check first to see what hairstyle their inventors had." "That I do not also choose to use simplified chars is because I already have my own. That I chose to use hanyu pinyin is because I have a mess and there is a current international standard ready made for free available." 2002-02-25 Dan Jacobson * more oriented: Noticing that both Feiren and I are both into Linux, we must explore "is hanyu pinyin like the evil giant, Microsoft, whilst tongyong pinyin like the heroic gladiator GNU?" Sorry, just the opposite: Hanyu pinyin is more like ASCII, the "owners" would have a hard time changing the standard now, even if they wanted to. Tongyong is like Microsoft trying to make special HTML proprietary "value-added extensions". One can see from Yu Boquan trying to move further and further from hanyu pinyin, even after hanging Zh, X, Q on Taibei streets. Rest assured that if one day China was on drugs and said "wow, tongyong is great, I'll adopt it, I've read the documents and it sounds like a great system... I'll junk hanyu pinyin"... rest assured that under the philosophical definition of tongyong pinyin, to be different than China, that tongyong must then change again. As is usual with shyster [sorry, my free spelling corrector doesn't have that word] schemes, the goal, to be different, is opposite from the name, tongyong. "But that was to be "tong1" amongst the dialects"... ok, where is Yu's final Mandarin--Taiwanese [Guoyu--Taiyu] proposal? Ok, hanyu pinyin is an international standard. The originators would have a hard time changing it now even if they wanted to. Does one look at international standards and say "I don't use any that were invented by people with German surnames", or "I don't use anything invented by the government of China"... well, considering that, what, 98% of people speaking Chinese live in China, it is not unexpected that there should be some inventions regarding the Chinese language coming from there. Isn't it odd that "the tongyong camp" prefer we still use Beijing language signs rather than, say the Taiwanese romanization street signs as often seen in Yilan County. By the way, I was supposed to be all burntout about this issue, but I found it just too odd that another fellow foreigner would "go in" for the tongyong sales pitch [despite a curious lack of interest of Yu toward trying to sell his ideas to us [perhaps sour memories of how our "love affair" ended [I told him I only liked him because he was real close to hanyu pinyin at the time, but noticing that his brain was splitting further and further from hanyu pinyin, I dumped him]]] [now I specialize in traveling long distances just for the 2 minute pleasure of making him look like a fool at conferences] [Wait a second Jacobson, it is obvious from your postings that it is you, not Yu, who has the mental problem. --- No your honor, get to know Yu, then compare.] 2002-02-23 Dan Jacobson * here is stuff I posted to oriented.org Feb 2002 Just as we do not require full pronunciation information on English street signs, we do not from hanyu pinyin. Hanyu pinyin without tone information is the only way a street name can be passed back and forth, mouth to mouth, or data system to data system, here and abroad, and remain intact. Even the capital letter in the middle: FuXing Rd. would not be stable, say, being passed through US Postal Service software, where all letters become capital. Anyway, we want data integrity guarantees, also giving the user the minimal burden while distinguishing separate streets. By the way, the majority of the users of a pinyin road signs wouldn't know how to properly use tone information. [For the case of a "lucky star" Rd. which would be a second Fuxing, luckily the district (qu1) is different, say in the Taizhong case.] Fufxingl Rd.: Using letters for tones is multiplexing two frequencies... two classes in the same classroom, who can hear what the teacher said? More importantly, it conflicts with the world standard, and is not just a subset, like our tone removal. Anyway, I see Taibei city gov't has put up FuXing Rd. signs. 3 cheers, big X or not! Note, the Xi- series are definitely done under mayor Ma. 3 cheers for Mayor Ma. On Xuchang St. one can see an example of the Xu- series that Yu Boquan hung 4 years ago, though he subsequently held news conferences screaming about X [his love affair with X was limited to Xu, though he tries to change the subject when asked.] Li Yingyuan, now the Secretary of the Executive Yuan, was the legislator who held his press conferences... [see my webpage]. To non pinyin believers: http://jidanni.org/lang/pinyin/images/20001012lhb.jpg is a newspaper photo of what will happen to you if you propose non-standard pinyin systems at this late date. Me and Hartzell will shout at you at the next public hearing. You will only be screwing up other peoples lives: boy/girlfriends that never got in touch ever again. Lost business contacts/opportunities. Even transportation disasters due to location confusion. My current wife wrote her phone number 518 instead of 581, causing me to almost give up trying to find here before leaving on my first visit to Taiwan in 1991. If I hadn't checked the phone book I would never have been able to find her again, and would have ended up back in Illinois perhaps to this day, thus not available here to correct your mistaken views. Luckily I could read Chinese phone books. [Tip: the new PARC card is not threatened by marital ups and downs, go to your local police dept. and upgrade your ARC today [some terms and restrictions apply.]] However, what if the only threads that bound us together were some romanized names and addresses? A pretty risky proposition here in Taiwan. Go to the post office and ask to see the pile of unresolved mail that even they of I can't figure out what street they meant, even though we thought we've seen them all... Most are correspondence from S.E. Asian laborers that outnumber us westerners many times here though we tend to forget. Your value-added romanization schemes might be intellectually stimulating, but don't expect foreign laborers to know about it ... the only information they might have, if any, is a book about "Chinese" that they bought to prepare before leaving for their job here. If this book is not in hanyu pinyin, it probably is not in your favorite system either. Of the foreign laborer source areas, only Thailand uses tones. For the rest, including us reading this board, tones are not in our repository, not in our mental tool kit... even after 20 years I still screw up 10 and 4 in Mandarin [tip: don't read aloud from books, inventing your own pronunciation, which becomes ingrained, use tapes from the start.] So, the majority of users of pinyin roadsigns would screw up tones anyway if given, or think they were French... [As far as X and Q go, I hope on the airplane tourists would thumb through a magazine that would tell them what to try instead, and if they have any further opinions about the world's No. 1 language population wise, they are welcome to investigate further.] And you want to put to risk the thin pinyin addressing information one might have, moving it away from international standards? Why don't you clean up English before you clean up pinyin? I was just reading the Emergency 911 Association site... we want addresses that don't get in the way. If you put tones on street names, a New York data entry worker will not process your order because she cannot enter it into the computer. If you throw extra letters into the words to show tones, why don't you fix "read" vs. "read", "record" vs. "record" in English, also good luck in getting anybody to translate your name card right overseas. Anyway, you will get shouted at by me and Hartzell in public. You will be doing us who've dealt with the mess for 20 years a disservice. You will look embarrassed and silly like Yu Boquan [Mr. Tongyong Pinyin] as you sit next to him at the next [hopefully never] hearing. Consider the professors of the Languages Dept. at Academia Sinica. They held out for "a better third option" until the argument got too hot and they finally wrote a letter to the newspaper saying that they now support hanyu pinyin [it was that or jerk "Tongyong Pinyin"]. So, why didn't they figure that out years earlier instead of wasting everybody's time. I'm all about standards and connecting people, better addressing systems for new development areas, real maps, and final pinyin solutions, which using proven international standards, we can guarantee won't need to be changed again. By the way I say "yes to Taiwan independence, yes to hanyu pinyin". Anyway, your exploration of romanization systems is great in theoretical, scholarly contexts, but I hope you value our unified effort at government hearings. I will defend any system, even broken [like English spelling is], if it has become a stable standard that can be relied on, and that can be invested in [learning time], with no worries that it might be replaced by a more widespread standard in the future. So, I hope you will support our Hanyu Pinyin [26 letters, no tones, case not significant [but I'm not going to make a fuss about it.]] Currently Mayor Ma is under the impression that foreigners want Hanyu Pinyin. If there are any differing murmurs from the foreign community, they will be seen by the media as "other foreigners don't want hanyu pinyin." This will spoil me and Richard's show. As Richard sometimes doesn't spell words in perfect hanyu pinyin, I am nervous already... that I forget when to say hanyu pinyin or Hanyu Pinyin, I am double nervous... [good thing upper/lower case will not get you onto different streets, though.] [I have problems posting my message. perhaps it is too big. I will try chunks.] Mr. Feiren, examine the case between the US/UK/Canada/India/etc. These countries are happily independent, however earlier there were independence struggles. Looking back, isn't it fortunate that English spelling didn't get splintered due to one country thinking English was the property of another country and thinking that it had to change it to show that they were a different country. Now examine the US/UK "color/colour" etc. gap. Note that 1. new differences are not being actively promoted anymore. 2. Any logic gained is a drop in the ocean vs. the remaining un"fixed" spellings. 3. pronunciation is a moving target over time anyway. 4. the loss shows up in the information age due to missed index targets, special search cases, etc. So, I wish Webster never bothered. Do you think publishers take much heed to government pronouncements on this issue? Mr. Su, head of LanBridge couldn't be bothered less. I told Mr. Wei, of SMC, "see, you printed those Tongyong textbooks... and then Yu changed his system... just like I warned you happened before and will happen again". Do you know that the zip-code system has been changed several times, and that many administrators cannot show that the latest revision to house numbers in their area will not have to be revised again if all open spaces get filled. [This along with several other basic requirements that go with a good house numbering system. I've got a web page on this.] So, the least we foreigners can do is recommend a street sign romanization system that won't need revision. I'd say we could get several hundred years out of hanyu pinyin, especially as if the sounds drift as a class, not individually, so the pressure to revamp will be even less... [ok, never mind that. I think costs will be to high to ever revamp it, e.g. English spelling.] [No change yet in 40 years, surely more stable than your pal Yu's Tongyong [and he's a psych major, any linguistics classes under his belt? erm, well must be even less than me [2 classes], judging from the Hakka stuff I helped him with back in '98 ... note, he wanted me to be a co-author on his stuff and sign this and that petition... luckily I never did, judging how free and loose he later uses peoples names: 4/1999 hearing, Prof. Xie Guoping of ShiDa: "Odd, my name is way on the top of this endorser's list, but I am named Xie, which has many strokes and should be further to the bottom" ... what an embarrassment to Yu, somehow the folks on his co-signers list stand up and publicly wonder what their names are doing used so prominently when they signed some earlier interest list a year earlier. As is usual in an Yu-embarrassment-situation, he just sits there with a little smile on his face and says nothing. ---- Feiren, do you know the man who's products you are supporting? Can you please go over to Academia Sinica Ethnology Dept. [ride bus # 212 :-)] and get to know him, and report back if I am all on drugs or not. Remember, your first impressions will be great, but do you see solid science or perhaps someone gifted with great energy to delve into short term projects or movements, and no responsibility to answer for every single scientific method nicety he runs ramshod over in his haste... What's really neat is those who support him thus also reveal shaky roots science-wise. Consider fellow Mandarin Promotion Board member and TaiDa professor Jiang Wenyu. She said former Gaoxiong mayor Wu Dunyi's supposed embarrassing tape was real... however when contradictory results came back from the lab oversees, well, she then refused reporters interviews [Taiwanese: longdiamdiam, gulp, she shut her mouth and hid from the press... some acoustics expert. The court also said "she lacked training in this field".] Anyway, she's the one who says Tongyong will save your left pinky from Hanyu's Q when typing! I'm the one who says "what about the key under the right pinky? Anyway, Feiren, get to know her, over in TaiDa's linguistics or English Dept. I forgot. Also get to know fellow board member Liang Rongmao, also in TaiDa, and a Paid Presidential Advisor, listed on the presidential website. He's chairman of the Chinese dept there, I forgot what exactly he did to offend me at the moment, however, do stop by his office. Nothing wrong with the President, except there are some issues that he um, demonstrates a, er, lack of understanding, e.g. letting Yu go wild with Taibei street signs last time [at the time the Q and X that Mr. Yu hung were indeed a welcome sight! Next time you are riding around in Yu's car, make sure you go up Zhongshan Rd. past Jiuquan St., and turn and ask Yu "Gee, a 'Q', must be that evil mayor Ma's plan to "unify China"... I don't think Yu even remembers that he even hung that, along with "XuChang St." still visible across from the train station. Why, after he hung that it was perhaps only a year later that he gets current Secretary of the Executive Yuan, Li Yingyuan, to call a press conference for Yu to rail against "Xuan, Xia, Xiao, Xi: who can read them?" http://jidanni.org/lang/pinyin/images/19990729xuanxia.png Feiren, do you see what I'm saying? Your man Yu in 1998 hung signs with X on them, then a year later he was railing about X in press conferences. Note 1: even before Chen stepped down as mayor, new signs were frozen... anyway, to this day [well, last time I was in Taibei, Jan. 2002] you can still see XuChang etc. St. that Yu is not allowed to touch anymore ... the evidence frozen on the pole for all to see ... you can "carbon date" that sign if you want, it's Yu's. Note 2: Yu is very unforthcoming about he being the one responsible for the first appearance of Q Zh X on Taibei streets, so much though that Cao Fengfu, Mandarin Promotion Board chairman, used a slide of "MuZha Rd." as an example of Hanyu pinyin, and I had to remind the audience that that was a photo from Taibei, and indeed the one who hung that sign is the fellow sitting on the panel with that little smile on his face, saying nothing in this case as usual [Yu]. Anyway Feiren, would you hang X's and then rail about them in press conferences a year later? Do you detect something bad here? Do you have a problem with this? Am I just old fashioned? Sure, "learn while growing", "improvement comes with change". However, just like other public works projects... expressways, if you keep repainting the lanes the public will get fed up. Using the Hanyu brand of pinyin, with it's 40 year track record of stability, would be our best buy. [P.S. Campaigning for Peng Mingmin in 1996 got me called into the Taizhong City police station for a 2nd warning... no more interfering in elections by me it seems][I'm hereby showing off my pro-independence credentials by mentioning this. But who knows? I might be a nut. Welcome to come to my hilltop hideaway to find out who's the bigger nut, me or Yu.] Anyways Dan [me] predicts that who knows, the China-Taiwan squabble might be short lived, with peace, harmony, and mutual understanding braking out... Ambassadors are exchanged... Pinyin? What was that squabble about? Electricity: 120 V. Cars: drive on right. Pinyin: Hanyu. Characters: each uses current standard [no simplified moving in]. Bla bla bla ----------------- the following i also was going to post before "60 sec. flood control" stopped me as the bOriented :-) software never assumed that I was using the wwwoffle offline reader on a batch posting from a GNU/Linux system [speaking about being politically correct, I leave all you in the dust with my GNU/Linux system. No Gatesware for me.] A poster says he still wants to use Tongyong Pinyin: do you see the pictures of me and the Tongyong mastermind on my website? This means I am familiar with the man... ask him "what about the street signs with the X and Zh that you hung last time?" "what about them?" "were they not hung by you"? he has a blank look on his face. So, don't look only at the promotional materials, also look at track records. And may we see the definition of the Tongyong you endorse? By the way, in my writings I'm now using hanyu pinyin with no compromises. I live on Qingfu St. and mail arrives addressed as I want it. Anyway, I can't believe there's an actual foreigner that supports Tongyong pinyin... hmmm "Feiren" it says... hmm, OK, but has he met Yu Boquan, does he know his track record? Can Feiren show us which version of Tongyong is his favorite. Did you know that for each language [Mandarin, Taiwanese, etc.] there were to be two main versions, and then what about the revisions... ok, for mandarin Yu never revealed his 2nd version, but still, what revision do you like? Does it sound like I'm smoking pot? Yu's plan was that with P/B and Ph/P versions, he could please both crowds... this is called zuo3you4feng1yuan2 which means getting supporters from both camps --- the fellow Yu Boquan does not operate via our usual scholarly moral system, that would only slow things down. Go to Academia Sinica and get to know him, he will seem like a pleasant guy, his literature might seem a tad unscientific ... if you want his track record, you'll have to ask us though. And Prof. Qiu Yaochu, is one of Yu's best pals, but he has to point out problems. The rest of the links are on my homepage. As far as politics go: I'm pro-independence, but I think any country that wants to change e.g. 0123456789 into 0123465789 just to be different is just making it difficult on users. "here we use the symbol "6" to represent the concept "five", you must respect this". Why doesn't Jamaica etc. spell English different? Canada/US/UK differences: miniscule, and _not_ purposely increasing. Simplified chars: wish they never started the split. Now it is too late. Now Taiwan wants to split pinyin, and for no good reason. You could expect that if China didn't invent simplified chars, Taiwan would do it instead, to be different. But wait, some chars are still the same --- what now? OK, Feiren, do you think it is good that I have to perhaps search twice for words like color and colour... what if somehow I missed an opportunity and my whole life ended up differently due to some political pickiness hundreds of years ago that didn't end up helping anything ... in the long run pronunciations change anyway... bla bla bla. Ok, your job Feiren is to teach the foreign community Tongyong Pinyin. You will be quite busy, where I can just tell somebody "go to any bookstore" to see an hanyu pinyin appendix. My main pain incentive was "I see the letter K, I want to aspirate it", I don't want to see another Wade-Giles road sign. I was taught that if everybody used the metric system, the world would be a better place... Anyway, Feiren, get to know Yu Boquan. You can be his English mouthpiece at the next stupid debate. The media will get lots of fun from foreigners debating foreigners... Anyway Mr. Feiren, did you know that of the 623 streets of Taibei [which Yu wants to still spell Taibei as a special exception --- anything to get accepted], that Mayor Chen allowed Yu to post last time, 2/3rds of them will have to be changed it we are to use "current Tongyong". So, your hero was given control of Taibei signs 4 years ago, and now if he is allowed to touch those signs again, 2/3rds of the very same signs he posted will have to be changed. At least one of the words on those signs must be changed. Is that good or bad.... i suppose not important? And I thought the tongyong guys were into showing that "oh no, it is not politics that matter, it is the connection with the dialects" OK, then where is their Taiwanese tongyong ---- oops forever delayed due to internal arguments... and what about Kejia [Hakka] --- well, it seems that all the Hakka action is centered around Prof. Luo Zhaojin. Indeed, I dumped my Dongshi Hakka system for an extension of his... even though I thought mine was even more loyal to hanyu pinyin... at least hakka finally is getting its act together --- without Tongyong Hakka, ha ha. Anyways Feiren --- get to know the parties involved. Or maybe you already know Yu. Do you want to defend his track record? Do you know what his former classmates think of him? Are you sure his scholarly articles are firmly based, if you manage to read through the contorted mess... See what Hong Weiren says [and Hong hates me for promoting commie systems][chinese:] http://jidanni.org/lang/pinyin/19990420hongweiren.html [By the way, that I have posted so longly now is no guarantee that I will still want to debate this topic much more. Darn... what's my problem, 230 lines, and I'm supposed to be watching my wrists.] Oh, also, many of you are language teachers --- you have spent much effort with the one goal of helping people communicate. Well, when you see someone come along with the sole real purpose of jumbling a communications system to hinder communications between two separate groups, doesn't that remind you of the Nazis? What if I have to good friends, to one I must have a government enforced communication barrier with, just because they have a different card in their pocket. Anyway, of all the linguistic scientist I know, any one trying purposely to degrade a human communication system is a Nazi scientist. How silly... doesn't the DPP know what a national boundary looks like? See the many photographs and links to national boundaries on my website. Gee, how can the US and Canada use the _same_ spellings [don't go bringing up those minor differences unless you are a chump, chump]. Gee, how can there be "Spanish speakers living in an English country". I suppose all this is beyond the pinyin dividers. How about the Taiwan govt. add special modulators to all outgoing telephone trunks to add a special Taiwan accent to all phone conversations. ----end of oriented.org posts 2000-10-09 * 謝謝來函。 1。1999年我與曾志朗通電話時，他堅決反對大陸的拼音〔併吞問題〕。 2。報紙寫的，國推會委員們是他最後親自選的??? oh: http://www.chinatimes.com.tw/news/papers/online/focus/c89a0910.htm 3。所以只是他被迫的兩案並送 4。大家大聲叫也許行政院不會讓他通過... ??? > -----Original Message----- > Sent: Monday, October 09, 2000 7:54 AM > To: Dan Jacobson=積丹尼 > Subject: 曾志朗會屈服的 > > Dear Mr. Jacobson: > > 今天早上曾志朗（教育部長）說該堅持的他會堅持， > 打算採取兩案併陳的作法。這個跡象顯示什麼？這表示 > 了通用拼音會通過。如果真的是該堅持的要堅持，從一 > 開始他就應該只送漢語拼音，因為他是直接負責政治責 > 任的人。范次長是他的手下，如果曾志朗要堅持范次長 > 的意見根本就不構成影響。那為什麼要兩案併陳呢？因為 > 范次長是總統的人，在實際全力上比曾部長大。 > > 先敬祝公聽會成功，另建議在您的網上公佈公聽會的時 > 間，讓我們這些有興趣的人有空時可以參與瞭解。 i will try > > 您用來製作網頁的軟體該換了，有很多wizard工具可以 > 做出四平八穩的網頁。 i know it is a mess, very bad.... i want to use free software... i will use linux soon 2000-10-08 * 我輸了，看所有的報紙 另外 <<< 而研發通用拼音系統的國語會委員余伯泉表示，通用拼音是最能準確表達中文注音符號的拼音系統，至於與國際轉換的爭議，也因電腦軟體的發明，一個按鍵即可完成不同語言的轉換，國際流通性並不是大問題。>>> 丹尼按：我頭腦上沒注意有什麼按健。 另外，他要用舊地名是小事情；主要是標準的音節不是國際漢語拼音的。而如軟體，差1 byte 就不能用 2000-10-06 * 最好笑，我到www.sina.com.tw 尋找 ’自然拼音’結果1 . 教自然拼音法 ( http://www.eltnet.com.tw/teaching/qa/skill/sq205.htm - count : 5 . language: Big5 date: 19970718 size: 4610 正好落到余伯泉最丟臉的CAT C字英文衝突。 謝謝http://www.ttimes.com.tw/2000/10/05/city_metropolitan/200010050367.html 中文譯音採「通用拼音」北市民政局有異見 !!!必看!!! 也可流言與聯絡記者！ by the way... this is a big web site http://www.ncku.edu.tw/~taiwan/taioan/bu-gi/pho-hoai/bugi-kisu.htm http://www.slhr.taipei.gov.tw/spell.htm 余伯泉騙人以為漢語拼音規定Road 必改寫Lu burnout: that's what will happen to all 拼音戰士 except 余伯泉 他要把大家累死希望大家全部給他算了 市／中央角色兌換得很有趣 現在我懂的為什麼有人想吃毒品 www.taipeitimes.com/ ... broken link news/2000/06/25/story/0000041391 2000-10-04 * 光是捍衛漢語拼音為台灣路牌，好像分數是 教育部，余幫：1 我：0 大家看我homepage http://jidanni.org/ 其實粵與宜問news:sci.lang 保證滿意。換妻後我無擱插粵語。 所謂方言拼音對我暫算 luxury.... 連國語拼音難保 ... 本人閩客方案只掛在網頁不打算再推廣 because it is just one big argument with those dummies. 一肚痛，市場決定好了 ok thanks 順便提：不管何單位宣佈何方案...不見得都那樣.... [大陸, 台灣] 2000-10-03 * > 收到了 > 且在 薛意梅輯的網頁中 > 看到了你的意見及相關的看法 > 同時查詢到大陸兩篇文章相當有趣 好像有三篇 check www.google.com . 有說觸犯著作法... 可能引起中共之憤怒... 大概余伯泉是故意的 :-) 如果是我我也會 ;-) > 顯然這是一個新的發表園地 2000-09-30 Statement from Dan Jacobson, acknowledged :-) world wide leader of Hanyu Pinyin for Taiwan Road Signs activists:-------------------------------- Dear Team, it seems we are about to lose as the evil Yu Boquan team has gained the upper hand at the Qiaoweihui [overseas council] and Guoyutuixingweiyuanhui [Mandarin Board] of the Taiwan government. I suppose this will end up like the #4 nuclear power plant, implement the policy for a few years and then change it... yes, we would like to save the government money by doing it right in the first place, but Dr. Yu is too good of a salesman. So, I guess let them put up their silly ziran/tongyong pinyin roadsigns, and one day maybe we'll get the oppurtunity to fix them... This problem has been going on for 50+ years so I don't think anybody has the final word on the issue yet... One must admire Dr. Yu though, without him the signs would be in the hands of a different Dr. Dr. Li Xian, former chairman of Guoyutuixingweiyuanhui now pushed off. Maybe one day the signs can be in the hands of Dr. Me instead. But wait, I'm no Dr., and I'm too lazy to go to Taibei and argue with them. 或者乾脆像朱高正打那五通電話統一中國算了 Then I will get my 路牌 real fast :-) 2000-09-28 * Dear friends: there are many articles about Yu Boquan's new chaned name product. Please go to www.google.com and search for 自然拼音 .也算首次有大陸的人加入討論！ there is one that says 早餐會上張富美開門見山，在各中 文學校校長發言之前即表示， 此行她帶來了中央研究院民族研究所余伯泉 研製的自然拼音（也稱 通用拼音或羅馬拼音）光碟，希望能夠在海外推廣。 I find this odd because in summer 1999 I visited zhang fumei at the jiancha yuan and I thought se agreed that Yu made a mess for the Taibei government with his street signs... so why is she so in favor of him now? By the way 我剛發現，通／自然拼音會引起娘娘腔！如qing->cing !!! I read: >>>>如純為標新而立異，卻不以現實為依歸，執意推廣自然拼音，而無視海 外華文教育之自然發展，恐將導致注音符號與自然拼音兩敗俱傷之戰果，並 可能影響海外華文教育之生態<<<< I say: good going Dr. Yu! Oh my god the languages board are already working on the street signs... I asked them which plan they were using, they haven't responded yet > -----Original Message----- > From: XXXXXX mail.moe.gov.tw > Sent: Thursday, September 28, 2000 9:31 AM > To: jidanni > Subject: 覆積丹尼君 > > 積丹尼先生您好； > 有關街道地名譯音問題，本部正研議「中文譯音統一規定 > 草案」，俟函送行政院核定後，據以實施，謝謝您的來 > 信！祝 > 平安快樂！ > > 教育部國語推行委員會 2000-09-27 * Maybe you are right... one might say Yu Boquan is actually working for us Hanyu Pinyin advocates again, whether he knows it or not. Just like his several versions of "Tong Yong Pinyin" brought X, Zh, Q etc. to Taibei street signs for the first time ever, even though he now hates Q and even rewrote his name to Yu Bocyuan... [what's your least favorite letter of the alphabet?] maybe he now has rewrote it a third time too. My website has got live action shots of him. Anyway, I'm getting lazy about running to Taibei every time there is some pinyin policy meeting, which they often don't let me into and I must crouch in the hallway. As you say, in the end we will win anyway... "OιO" 撰寫於郵件 news:3cXTLS$RLF@bbs.cis.nctu.edu.tw... > ==> 在 "Dan Jacobson" 的文章中提到: > > in 1999 now education minister Zeng Zhilang told me there was no way he > > was going to accept pinyin [HYPY].... maybe now that the language council > > members he must have picked are deadlocked, maybe he will think again... > > more info and photos of evil Dr. Yu, only on my home page > > I tend to be optimistic. If Yu Boquan's Tongyong Pinyin > should be chosen as the Taiwanese national standard, that is > fine. You can think of Tongyong Pinyin as a dialect of Hanyu > Pinyin. Once Taiwanese (outside Taiwan no one would be > interested in learning it) learn Tongyong Pinyin, the > incompatibility between the two systems will bring them > troubles when they try to communicate with people using > Hanyu Pinyin. And the only way to avoid troubles is to > abandon Tongyong Pinyin and learn Hanyu Pinyin. > > There is only one fate of Tongyong Pinyin. It is just a > matter of time. 2000-09-24 * > 你還會去關心教育部專案小組的會議嗎? 如果他們請我進去坐，我會去 如果只能蹲在走廊，就算了 因為他們做事非常機密，連有什麼小組我怎麼會知道 還是這次做個實驗：讓他們自己弄，反正兩年後再來收拾收拾 > 與你一樣漢語拼音系統支持者 > 現在還關心此問題嗎？ 只有我那麼笨還關心 ---------------- http://ofind.sina.com.tw/cgi-bin/news/mkNews.cgi?ID=1560665&Loc=TW 星島日報 08/13/2000 台擬推介自然拼音教學 北加中文教師不以為然 發言人稱，如果實施自然拼音教學法，只能使得中文學校流失許多學生，而多年來一 直力爭說服美國主流社會教育接納註音符號的努力也將功虧一簣，進而影響到正體字 在美國的生存。 ---------------- 2000-09-23 * current_status1.txt (From): , http://www.libertytimes.com.tw//today0922/today-c5.htm in 1999 now education minister Zeng Zhilang told me there was no way he was going to accept pinyin [HYPY].... maybe now that the language council members he must have picked are deadlocked, maybe he will think again... From: "Dan Jacobson" Newsgroups: alt.chinese.text.big5,sci.lang,tw.bbs.lang.chinese,tw.bbs.soc.hakka,tw.bbs.soc.taiwanese Subject: 漢語拼音、方言拼音 Date: Thu, 13 Jul 2000 05:18:52 +0800 Lines: 60 Organization: Taiwan is Taiwan is not China X-Priority: 3 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Newsreader: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.00.2615.200 X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.00.2615.200 > From: zhong@accton.com.tw > Sent: Tuesday, July 11, 2000 4:08 PM > To: jidanni@taiwan.c$o$m$$$noSpam > Subject: 漢語拼音、方言拼音 > > 最近有無漢語拼音新聞？ 我住的山頂沒報紙...我聽收音機報紙新聞節目再詳查報社網站，但最熱門拼音 新聞的台灣日報無網站。 > 此外，如果不太離譜，不用太遷就漢語拼音。 > 尤其漢語拼音也有“被變化過”的現象。 > 如漢語拼音的e e^都被簡化為寫成e， > u u"在很多場合都寫成u， > uei和iou被簡化成ui iu。 e, uei, iou：不影響一般的人；連ian在所有名牌拼音包括注音符號是假的； ien較對... u：保證什麼額外符號會被社會大眾弄丟，Wade 時代已玩過。lu, nu同, lu, nu 我沒資格改，只是說要心理準備兩點會不見。 > 所以，方言拼音，可以不用考慮迴避這些拼法。 哦，您是講方言 > 只要不和普通話差太多就可以了。 > 反正方言發音不能用普通話來猜。 對呀，方言不能用普通話來猜，普通話不能用方言來猜，這也是我漸漸感覺到的 事，1999年後我就不再堅持勉強100%三合一國台客產品... 現在只是希望後兩者 不要離開漢語拼音太離譜，為了後代還知道寫的是什麼。[因為後代遲早會懂漢 語拼音，不是因為中共武力犯台，而是市場決定的。] 我現在的政策是： 國語[華語...]路牌、地名全力[但跑台北也累]推動漢語拼音... 但如果新政府 不接受，我只好笑他們。希望他們選余伯泉做拼音部長，亂的週期就較快，沒幾 年大家就會回談判桌 :-) 學校用注音符號教國語：我沒意見，尊重生命，我的興趣在穩定漢英介面，鬧到 國小對我沒多少好處，我不要做基本教育派什麼都根除。 閩南語[台語...]拼音：隨便他們，其實如果這個在台灣社會站重要的位，為什 麼廣告裡一兩句台語還是用注音符號寫[當然要怪國民黨]。我1997文只是為了證 明漢語拼音可以合理寫台語.... 但是現在我’毋愛擱插’let them fight it out among themselves。Just give me漢語拼音[中英]路牌。我的重點都是用世 界標準。不喜歡漢語拼音就不要國語路牌。為什麼余伯泉不愛台語路牌，宜蘭礁 溪有.... .... ... 本東勢鎮客家話使漢語拼音最難看。我們印的課本[洽04-5873605徐登志]用注音 符號就沒有問題。 其實，大家都知道路牌比方言拼音重要1000倍，在三合一思考中是控制一切。 〔對不起讀者，用’方言’此名〕 > 鍾啟堯 -------------------------------- sep 20 2000 糟糕： http://ofind.sina.com.tw/cgi-bin/news/mkNews.cgi?ID=1645188&Loc=TW 中央社即時 08/28/2000 張富美贊成拼音讓海外僑民多元且較易學華文 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- (中央社記者黃文宗台北二十八日電) 僑委會委員長張富美說，僑委會長期主張使用注音符號學華文，根據長期居住國外的經驗，覺得這樣並不完全適用海外，華裔子弟在國外出生，以注音學華文反而有負擔，她贊成自然拼音能較多元和容易學習華文。 張富美表示，就任以來就希望僑委會同仁研究是否可採用拼音與注音並行方式推行華語文，讓海外僑胞能有多元學習華文的選擇，她表示，推行自然拼音絕不是要放棄注音符號，只是要更多元提供學習華語拼音的另一種選擇，如一味堅持用傳統的注音符號，面對海外從小就以拼音模式學習的華裔子弟，其實並不太能適應，而我僑教和華文推行就會因此受影響，讓中共的漢語拼音捷足先登。 僑務委員會海外華文教材發展諮詢委員會的書面資料指出，中共自八○年代起在海外推行漢語拼音教學，並藉外交影響力獲主流社會採用，也因漢語拼音系統並不能充分表現出華文發音的特質，因此我中央研究院另研發出「華語通用拼音」，同時也稱為「自然拼音」，供海外多元學習華文的另一項選擇，鑒於海外僑界時有反映注音二式不相容、不互相適用的情形，因此建議研討適用的替代方案。 僑委會海外華文教材發展諮詢委員李元貞建議表示，將自然拼音作為主要拼音系統，但注音符號依舊為輔助系統，且因自然拼音研發出來的時間在中共漢語拼音研發的時間後面，且做過更多改良，就如自然拼音中「ㄓ」、「ㄔ」、「ㄕ」、「ㄖ」的拼音方式優於中共的漢語拼音，更能準確將捲舌音發出，如何讓研讀華文的海外華裔子弟覺得好用、有學習效果，是推行拼音系統的重點所在。 僑委會主管業務官員說，僑委會長期以來一直站在第一線的位置傳承海外華語文的教育責任，研發一套新的拼音系統給海外華裔及想學習中文的海外人士多元的選擇使用是必須的，其實眾多的拼音系統就好比市場行銷模式般，因為有不同的拼音系統可供大家選擇，好的拼音方式自然就會吸引更多適合這種方式的人士大量、長期的愛用。890828 ------------------------------------ 積丹尼說糟糕，余伯泉把他的產品混入自然輸入法這個既有的名字，又騙張富美 推銷！？！ 9/20/00 沒完沒了： >>>>>僑委會海外華文教材發展諮詢委員李元貞建議表示，將自然拼音作為主要拼音系統，但注音符號依舊為輔助系統，且因自然拼音研發出來的時間在中共漢語拼音研發的時間後面，且做過更多改良，就如自然拼音中「ㄓ」、「ㄔ」、「ㄕ」、「ㄖ」的拼音方式優於中共的漢語拼音，更能準確將捲舌音發出，如何讓研讀華文的海外華裔子弟覺得好用、有學習效果，是推行拼音系統的重點所在。 不曉得連 sh 他在搞什麼 反正我已經講過，沒有好下場 http://www.ocac.gov.tw/id01.htm Local Variables: mode:change-log eval:(setq change-log-default-name buffer-file-name) End: