Editorial

World IssuesTaiwan Issues

Updated Thursday, June 16, 2011 10:53 am TWN, The China Post news staff

Writing does more to promote a language than arguments

What we call Chinese is actually a language consisting of five major groups of dialects: Mandarin, Hsiang, Yueh, Wu, and Min. Each group has a number of dialects. The major difference between a language and a dialect is that the former usually has a well-established writing system and is often considered the national tongue. Hakka, which is spoken by a fifth of the people of Taiwan, is a dialect of the Mandarin group. A greater majority of the Taiwanese people speak Hoklo, which is a dialect of Min. 

A well-known novelist, Huang Chun-ming, triggered a bitter controversy recently among writers, poets, academics, linguists and professors of Taiwan literature. Huang was talking about the difficulty in teaching Ban-lam (a local dialect) in a lecture, when an associate professor of Taiwan literature at Cheng Kung University in Tainan protested that the lecture itself was given in Mandarin.

Professor Jiang Wei-wen (Chiun Wei-bun) charged that it's “shameful” to speak about Hoklo in Mandarin Chinese. Mandarin is the national language of the Republic of China in Taiwan as well as the People's Republic of China. Flying into a rage for he thought he was being insulted, Huang shouted obscenities at the professor before the stunned audience. Subsequently, practically all noted men of letters entered the debate over whether Hoklo is the Taiwanese language or a dialect of the Chinese language and how the former should be written.

Professor Huang, who has created a unique “logogram-plus-Romanization” system of writing for Taiwanese language (Hoklo), may claim the popular vernacular in Taiwan is a language separate from Chinese. But the language he so claims is, in all its aspects, part of the Sinitic Chinese family of languages. Probably he doesn't realize Hoklo, which prevailed in China at one time, preserves the Tang pronunciation of most Chinese words, which was subsequently adopted by the Japanese at the turn of the seventh century. When reading Tang poems in Mandarin, the rhymes are often lost due to the different methods of pronunciation. These poems don't suffer the same problem when they are read in Hoklo. That means Hoklo was once Mandarin Chinese or a lingua franca, which could have been considered the national language at that time.