Local languages are finding their way onto the
pages of books and other publications.
For teachers and magazine editors of Taiwanese languages like Tan Hong-hui , who specialize in Holo or Minnanese, Taiwan is an illiterate society. Many Taiwanese have no idea that the first collections of fiction and prose works published in Taiwan in the 1920s were neither written in Chinese nor in Japanese, the languages of the colonial ruling class. Rather, they wrote in a romanized version of Holo, the language of Taiwan's largest ethnic group, accounting for more than 70 percent of the population.
Few Taiwanese know that an independent Holo orthography has existed for more than one and a half centuries, and even fewer realize that it is a sophisticated system capable of expressing deep thoughts.
"Our language education has placed little emphasis on romanization, even for learning pronunciation," Tan says. "What people have are often very vague and even wrong concepts about the romanization of Holo."
Responding to the widespread belief in Taiwan that many Taiwanese words cannot be written down, Tan points out that what they are really saying is that they do not have Chinese characters. The romanized equivalents, however, are there for anyone who cares to look.
In Taiwan, all elementary students learn Mandarin through a set of 37 non-roman phonetic symbols that are derived from radicals, or the basic pictogram building blocks, of Han characters. Designed and accepted by the Nationalist government in the 1910s, this system, usually called bopomofo in English, gave way about four decades later to the new Communist administration's Pinyin system, which was adopted in 1979 by the International Organization for Standardization as the standard romanization for Modern Chinese. Meanwhile, the old system lived on with the Kuomintang (KMT), who retreated to Taiwan in the late 1940s after being defeated by the Chinese Communist Party.
The result in Taiwan is that very few people have any sense of how useful romanized systems can be. Despite an early push by the KMT government to develop a romanized system for Mandarin, which in 1928 resulted in Gwoyeu Romatzyh, few people in Taiwan were aware of its existence. Even after being revised and officially recognized in 1986, it was never taught at schools and more often than not was even overshadowed as a transliteration approach by foreigner-designed systems such as Wade-Giles.
"The worldwide-used roman alphabet was one of the greatest human inventions," says Li Khin-hoa, a professor of linguistics at National Taiwan Normal University's Graduate Institute of Taiwan Culture, Languages, and Literature established in 2003. "But instead of embracing it as a property for all human beings, our culture tends to guard itself from such an alien influence." In a preface to a spelling textbook for Chinese languages, Lee Yuan-tseh, president of Academia Sinica, says he thinks that Taiwanese students' scant knowledge of romanization is a major shortcoming of Taiwan's educational system.
Romanization of local languages is essentially an integral part of Taiwan's social, cultural, and literary history. The first known example came from the Dutch colonial period (1624-1662), when missionaries romanized the Siraya language spoken by Austronesian dwellers of the southwestern plains to teach them and convert them to Christianity through textbooks and translated testaments. More than a century after the Dutch left, the Siraya people continued to use the romanized system to write down mortgage bonds, sales contracts, or leases.
As for the peh-oe-ji (POJ) colloquial-writing model that Holo poets and writers like Li employs, the history goes back to the first half of the 19th century, after a significant number of Han Chinese people had come to settle in Taiwan. In sharp contrast to the classical tradition of Han characters that these emigrants brought with them, the roman scripts were designed to record everyday speech by Christian preachers, especially those of the Presbyterian Church.
Missionaries came to Taiwan in larger numbers after restrictions on missionary activities were loosened around the mid-19th century under the rule of China's Qing Dynasty. They translated the Bible into the romanized Holo, Hakka, and indigenous languages, compiled dictionaries, published newspapers and textbooks for learners of the new writing system, and wrote POJ essays on topics such as math and medicine. In 1926, Te Khe-phoan (1896-1951) published his POJ novel Line Between Life and Death, heralding an era of modern Taiwanese literature at a time before any significant literary works written in Chinese characters had staked their claim on Taiwanese literary history.
Despite POJ's origin as a tool of religious instruction, church followers, like Siraya people, were not hesitant to apply it to everyday use such as taking notes and writing letters. Many women who had no formal education were perfectly literate in roman scripts. Among the elder generations, there are still people who can read and write in the romanized scripts.
Until the 1970s, this writing system was forbidden for public use by the government, which was promoting Mandarin as the one and only national language. Sermons and Bibles in any of the local dialects were expelled from the church. One of the reasons for the censorship was fear that the non-character scripts might foment social unrest in what was a society under martial law.
Since the 1980s, roughly corresponding with the abolition of martial law in 1987, the POJ, or revised versions, have resurfaced in the Tai-bun (Taiwanese writing) movement, and is no longer just restricted to religious believers. It has been adopted by most of the Tai-bun periodicals, of which there are currently around 10, such as Tai-bun Thong-Sin, launched in 1991 and Tai-bun Bong Po, launched in 1996, where Tan is a senior editor.
As opposed to all-character or all-romanized models, these writings use a mixed model. In a society dominated by the circulation of Han characters, complete romanization is unacceptable to most people, but at the same time the Chinese tradition does not suffice either. "At least 15 percent of the Holo language does not fit into the Han tradition," Li says. "These are residuals that survived the assimilation process under which Holo was finally tamed by the Han Chinese who invaded from northern China." In addition, Holo Taiwanese has borrowed and absorbed a lot from other languages such as Austronesian indigenous languages, Dutch, Japanese, and English. "Writers who used only Han characters would at best produce very awkward pieces," Tan says.
Alternating Han characters and roman script saves the trouble of coining Han characters on the one hand, and illuminates Holo elements that differ from the dominating Han language on the other, according to Li For him, the mixed model represents only a transitional phase, allowing people to get accustomed to romanized script, before ultimately romanizing the language and breaking away from the Chinese Han tradition.
For many Tai-bun promoters, romanization is also a more effective way to preserve Taiwanese people's mother tongues. "It is much easier to learn than Han characters," Tan says. "I won't say that Han characters are good or bad, but they apparently take much more time to master."
In 2004, Li and Tan helped found the Global Coalition for Taiwanese Languages to promote the Taiwanese-language education, among other things. The organization is particularly concerned about the inconsistency of romanization among different textbooks. For the Holo language, there are three major systems that are competing with each other: the POJ; the Taiwanese Language Phonetic Alphabet, a revised form of the POJ which uses numerals next to each word to indicate tonal values rather than diacritics; while Tongyong Pinyin, or general transliteration, is the government's official Mandarin romanization system, which is being extended to all Taiwanese languages.
Most linguists agree that the three systems are in fact very similar to each other, and some maintain they just need time to integrate. Toward the end of last year, the Ministry of Education's National Languages Committee took an important step by completing a list of 300 recommended Holo words or phrases for junior high and elementary school textbooks and also for general social use. "This list includes Han characters and roman scripts that would take the place of controversial or inappropriate Han characters," says the committee's head, Robert L. Cheng. "I won't say they're absolutely correct items, but they represent an adequate agreement among scholars, writers, teachers, and practitioners."
For Cheng, local agreement is far more important than Holo's position in the classical Han Chinese tradition. And like Li, he sees no need for Taiwanese languages to fit into that unifying force. "Language is first of all a phenomenon of cultural specifics," he says. "And we have to respect the unique possibilities of each language."
A Holo Backgrounder
Holo Taiwanese is similar to Hokkien, also known as Min, which is spoken in China's southeastern province of Fujian, from where the ancestors of many Taiwanese migrated during the 17th to 19th centuries. As a branch of the Southern Min, or Minnan, languages, Holo comes in both colloquial and literary versions. The literary version, based on ancient and medieval written Chinese, dates back to the 10th century. Literary Holo was formerly used in formal writing, but is now largely extinct. Scholars have found connections between aspects of colloquial Holo's deep structures and basic vocabulary with the Austronesian and Tai language families.
Holo Taiwanese is a tonal language, retaining seven of ancient Chinese's eight tones, with extensive tone sandhi rules--the rules that govern how the tones interact with each other. In an utterance, only the last syllable pronounced is not affected by tone sandhi. In the POJ system, the original tone marker, such as /a/ for the second tone, /a/ for the third tone, and /a/ for the fifth tone, is kept for each word instead of indicating the changed tone. A double dash (--) is used to denote the neutral tone of the syllable that follows.
Holo's phonetic features also include its abrupt tones, aspiration, clear distinction between voiced and voiceless sounds, and nasal vowels. In his preface to a Holo pronunciation textbook, Li Khin-hoa, professor of Taiwanese languages at National Taiwan Normal University, points out that due to the usual nasalization, Holo should be considered, along with French, one of the sexiest languages in the world.
According to Li, among the three major romanization schemes of the Holo language, Tongyong Pinyin fails to reflect these phonetic values, while the numerals next to each word that Taiwan Language Phonetic Alphabet used to indicate tones would be absurd if this system was one day adopted for writing a math book for example. Its several modifications to the time-honored POJ system, however, are reasonable and could contribute to the final standardization of the Holo writing system.
Although many people in Taiwan speak Holo, it is in danger of extinction, like all the languages of Taiwan, such as Hakka and the languages of indigenous peoples, except Mandarin. There is a significant shift toward the dominance of Mandarin, which can be seen in increasing currency among younger generations even outside the public sphere. "Just take a look at female college students, from whom their children would normally acquire their mother tongues," Li says. "How many of them speak Holo?"