Language is never just a neutral tool for communication. It is social behavior that carries complex cultural messages, and this is especially true for writing, which usually has very special social status due to its roles in formal learning, science and technology, cultural history and record keeping.
In South Asia, for example, Hindi and Urdu are mutually intelligible in spoken form, but are often seen as distinct languages. Hindi is written in the Devanagari script and Urdu with Perso-Arabic. Urdu, an official language in Pakistan, is associated with Islam and draws on Persian and Arabic for academic vocabulary, while Hindi, one of India’s official languages, is linked to Hinduism and has taken many words from Sanskrit.
These two closely related spoken languages have very different symbolic associations reinforced by their written forms.
The Romanization of Mandarin Chinese in Taiwan presents an interesting case. Chinese, of course, is usually written in characters representing a meaning unit of one syllable, with the majority of contemporary characters include a vague hint to pronunciation. For the purposes of Romanization, however, despite various central government guidelines, citizens, government agencies, businesses and local governments appear relatively free to use any system, or their own ad hoc spellings.
According to the Guidelines for Transliteration of Chinese, an Executive Yuan directive that took effect Jan. 1, 2009, “Hanyu Pinyin is the system that has been officially adopted for the Romanization of Chinese, unless otherwise regulated.”
In these guidelines, some details follow in accordance with the actual rules of Hanyu Pinyin, which has been the standard in mainland China since 1958 and has been adopted as the international standard, such as the use of an apostrophe before a syllable beginning with a, o, or e, unless the syllable comes at the beginning of a word. In Taiwan, however, one more often sees a hyphen in place of this apostrophe, as in the name of Su-ao Township, Yilan County, or Chang-an East Road in Taipei City.
The rules also say that two-character personal names should appear as one word, as in Chen Zhiming, but this form is rarely seen, a hyphen normally being inserted between the syllables: Chen Zhi-ming.
Perhaps this is because the guidelines say that for Romanizing personal names, “the choice of the concerned party shall override the abovementioned principles.” Individual preferences on Romanizing one’s name have long held sway, as the Romanized names of many currently important figures in politics, business, the arts and sports show.
People may also choose to Romanize their names based on other varieties of Chinese, especially Holo or Hakka, instead of Mandarin, and aborigines may spell their names according to their own languages.
In news stories, the hyphen in personal names can tell readers that the person is from Taiwan, while a name with no hyphen probably belongs to someone from mainland China.
The Executive Yuan rules also allow spellings not based on Hanyu Pinyin for “special terms or those which have been accepted internationally or have been used by convention such as the names of the Chinese dynasties, names of certain places, terms of customs and traditions, and terms of culture.”
The Regulations for Standardized Place Name Translation, issued by the Ministry of the Interior Nov. 9, 2009, in accordance with Article 30 of the Land Surveying and Mapping Act of 2007, also call for the use of apostrophes, although without specifying Hanyu Pinyin as the Romanization standard.
As already mentioned, however, place names such as Wang’an Township, Penghu County, are more often seen as Wangan, Wang-an or Wang An.
The uses of hyphens in Taiwan violate the rules of Hanyu Pinyin, in which hyphens are used for other purposes, such as to separate the parts of coordinate constructions, as in hei-bai, “black and white,” abbreviated forms like Tai-Da, short for Taiwan Daxue—National Taiwan University—or ordinal numbers, with a hyphen after the prefix di, as in di-er, “second.”
Like the Executive Yuan guidelines, the place name regulations also provide an out for different forms according to local history, language, customs, religious beliefs, customary international usage or other special reasons, although exceptions require approval by the central government. Thus major place names such as Taipei, Keelung, Kinmen, Kaohsiung and Pingtung retain old spellings, instead of the Hanyu Pinyin forms Taibei, Jilong, Jinmen, Gaoxiong and Pingdong, respectively.
Readers with knowledge of Chinese will realize that this discussion has so far neglected the rare inclusion of diacritics to indicate tone in Romanized forms. Mandarin and other varieties of Chinese are tone languages in which the pitch of individual syllables is used to indicate differences in word meaning. Likewise, the u with an umlaut, necessary to distinguish the high back rounded vowel /u/ and high front rounded vowel /ü/ in the syllable pairs lu/lü and nu/nü, is hardly ever used.
This laissez faire situation with Romanization could result from the fact that for most people in Taiwan it is not an issue. Romanization is not taught in school, where Mandarin Phonetic Symbols, which look more reminiscent of Chinese characters, are used to with great success to aid the acquisition of literacy. MPS and other methods can be used to type Chinese on a computer efficiently.
If citizens have even heard of the systems that have been official at different periods, they know little about them: Gwoyeu Romatzyh, 1928-1986; Mandarin Phonetic Symbols II, 1986-2002; Tongyong Pinyin, 2002-2008; and Hanyu Pinyin. Thus for the overall state of affairs to change, regular folks will have to somehow come to feel some urgent need for Romanization.
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