Ch.8-3 Mother Tongue vs. National Language Based on Victor H. Mair How to Forget Your Mother Tongue and Remember Your National Language 【本著作除另有註明外，採取創用 CC 「姓名標示 －非商業性－相同方式分享」台灣 3.0 版授權釋出】 The “Work” under the Creative Commons Taiwan 3.0 License of “BY-NC-SA”. 授課老師：蘇以文 I-wen Su

Population profile of Taiwan  More than 18 million of the 23 million population in Taiwan, the "native" Taiwanese, are descendants of Chinese who migrated from Fujian and Guangdong Provinces on the mainland, primarily in the 18th and 19th centuries.  The "mainlanders," who arrived in Taiwan after 1945, came from all parts of mainland China.  About half a million indigenous peoples inhabit the mountainous central and eastern parts of the island and are believed to be of Malayo-Polynesian origin.

National Languages Committee, MOE  TSM - one national language of Taiwan (2000?)  Dictionary of Commonly Used Words in Taiwanese Southern Min (TSM)  Romanization of Taiwanese Southern Min  Input method of TSM characters  List of the top 700 recommended words for TSM learning  Daily column on learning TSM words

國語 guo2yu3  漢語 han4yu3  普通話 pu3tong1hua4  The sole official written language  One national language of Taiwan (2000?)

Accepted norms for writing  Unwritability of the nonstandard Sinitic languages  No established conventions for writing out TSM  Various idiosyncratic, ad hoc methods for writing TSM in  Chinese characters  Japanese kana  Mandarin phonetic symbols (bopomofo/zhu4yin1 fu2hao4)  Roman letters  Some combination

Why is it so hard to write TSM?  The characters are perfectly suited for writing Literary Sinitic (LS)  1200 BC-800 AD: restrict use of LS  Regional vernaculars: absence of a tradition of writing  Until mid-Tang  Buddhism, koine, > early Mandarin > modern MD (May 4)koine,  Strong scholarly bias against crude and vulgar writing  Political prohibition  Until July 14, 1987, the lifting of martial law

Koine Greek ‘common’ Random House Webster’s College Dictionary  1. (n.) koine (usu. cap.) the form of ancient Greek, based mainly on Attic, that supplanted other dialects in the Hellenistic period and became the standard language, from which subsequent stages of Greek developed. 2. koine any language or dialect, often in modified form, in widespread use in an area where other languages were or still are spoken; lingua franca.

obstacles  Many of the most frequent morphemes, gram particles, cannot be written with Chinese characters: 20-25%  Higher percentage if one were to write in a more purely colloquial TW – perhaps less than 40% of the morphemes can be written with the “correct” characters  Substituted by  Arbitrary homophones  Near homophones  Completely irrelevant meanings

The name “Taiwan”  Originally from the ethnonym of a tribe around Ping-an, the southwest of the island  1636AD., Taiouwang (Dutch)  Tayowan, Taiyowan, Tyovon, Teijoan, Toyouan (Portuguese)  台窩灣 Tai2wo1wan1 “Terrace Nest Bay”  大灣 da4wan1 “Big Bay”  台員 tai2yuan2 “Terrace Officer”  大員 da4yuan2 “Big Officer”  大圓 da4yuan2 “Big Circle”

Wan4hua2  萬華 wan4hua2 “Multitudinously Floriate”  艋舺 meng3jia3/ bang-kah  An old word of the non-Sinitic indigenes for ‘boat’  Sinographic form of the name changed during the Japanese occupation banka

Monga, the movie  Taiwanese gangster pictures  This nostalgia-tinged saga of wayward youth is the first to seriously rival Hong Kong’s ability to combine technical gloss and pretty faces into a riveting commercial package.  Set in Monga (known officially as Wanhua), Taipei’s once notorious neighborhood in , primarily an exploration of the ties that bind a group of sworn brothers

Monga, the place  Monga, in the ancient native Ketagalan tribe's language, means "canoe“  A place where the tribe people used to trade goods at the intersection of Xin1dian4 River and Dan4shui3 River  where the City of Taipei was born

Movie strip 

“wrong” characters  Lo5-moa5  流氓 liu2mang2  鱸鰻 lu2man2 “perch-eel”  Gangster  Fish radicals?  Fishy cognitive dissonance

Replacement Mechanisms  Vulgarisation:  stigmatization via debasement  negative stereotyping  Pursuit of prestige  雅致 ya3zhi4 ‘refined’  好聽 hao3ting1 ‘pleasant to the ear’  流暢 liu2chang4 ‘fluent’

Vulgarisation  stigmatization via debasement  negative stereotyping  俗 su2 “vulgar”  土話 tu3hua4 “earthy speech”  閩 min3 (radical of 虫 chong2 “insect; snake”): a bug/snake inside a door > snake race  Ban-lam-lang 蠻南儂 “barbarians of the south”  Southern, barbarian, serpentine???

Prestige  Subjective  MD: -- with Mongolic, Turkic and other ‘barbarian’ features -- commanding position  Associated with military & political power and economic clout  Its designation as the official national language  Its background in the koine of more than 1000 years ago  A long history of written literature in a wide variety of styles  Large amounts of scholarly research and reference materials

Copyright Declaration WorkLicensingAuthor/Source p.1 Victor H. Mair How to Forget Your Mother Tongue and Remember Your National Language and used subject to the fair use doctrine of the Taiwan Copyright Act Article 50 by NTU OCW