Ch.8-3
Mother Tongue
vs.
National Language
Based on Victor H. Mair. 2003
How to Forget Your Mother Tongue and
Remember Your National Language
授課老師：蘇以文
I-wen Su
【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”.
Population profile of Taiwan
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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?)
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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
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漢語 han4yu3
普通話 pu3tong1hua4
The sole official written language
One national language of Taiwan (2000?)
Accepted norms for writing
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Unwritability of the nonstandard Sinitic languages
No established conventions for writing out TSM
Various idiosyncratic, ad hoc methods for writing TSM in
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Chinese characters
Japanese kana
Mandarin phonetic symbols (bopomofo/zhu4yin1 fu2hao4)
Roman letters
Some combination
Why is it so hard to write TSM?
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The characters are perfectly suited for writing
Literary Sinitic (LS)
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Regional vernaculars: absence of a tradition of writing
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1200 BC-800 AD: restrict use of LS
Until mid-Tang
Buddhism, koine, > early Mandarin > modern MD (May 4)
Strong scholarly bias against crude and vulgar writing
Political prohibition
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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
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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
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Arbitrary homophones
Near homophones
Completely irrelevant meanings
The name “Taiwan”
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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
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萬華 wan4hua2 “Multitudinously Floriate”
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艋舺 meng3jia3/ bang-kah
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An old word of the non-Sinitic indigenes for ‘boat’
Sinographic form of the name changed during the
Japanese occupation banka
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Monga, the movie
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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 1986-87, primarily an
exploration of the ties that bind a group of sworn
brothers
Monga, the place
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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
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http://mongathemovie.com/en/trailer.html
“wrong” characters
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Lo5-moa5
流氓 liu2mang2
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鱸鰻 lu2man2 “perch-eel”
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Gangster
Fish radicals?
Fishy cognitive dissonance
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Replacement Mechanisms
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Vulgarisation:
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stigmatization via debasement
negative stereotyping
Pursuit of prestige
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雅致 ya3zhi4 ‘refined’
好聽 hao3ting1 ‘pleasant to the ear’
流暢 liu2chang4 ‘fluent’
Vulgarisation
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stigmatization via debasement
negative stereotyping
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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
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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
Work
p.1
Licensing
Author/Source
Victor H. Mair. 2003 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