Dueling Lăowài: Tone Marks on Roadsigns- Part 1
September 21st, 2006 by MarkDueling Lăowài is a new feature on Toshuo.com. Each “duel” will consist of four pieces by two writers: each writer will write one opening argument and one rebuttal.
Mark’s Opening Argument:
As any student of Chinese knows, learning enough characters to really become literate is no small task. For some, such as myself, it’s proving to be a sisyphean ordeal. Fortunately for me, and everyone else who isn’t fully literate in Chinese characters yet, street signs and subway signs are often romanized. Operating under the assumption that signs are indeed romanized for the benefit of the people who need them, as opposed to purely for political ends, and drawing on my own experiences, I’ll explain why it would serve the best interest of the most people to include tone marks on the signs.
Like many westerners, I arrived in Taiwan knowing a only a little bit of Mandarin. Communication of any sort was difficult. At the beginning, I had to stay close to other foreigners, my English speaking co-teachers, and I had to approach things with quite a bit of patience. After a while, though, my spoken Chinese improved and I was able to do things like ask people for directions and take taxis with confidence. Now, I very rarely have any serious communication difficulties, but my reading is still pretty weak.
I know I’m not alone in this. I know many, many westerners here who can speak well enough, but only read 1000-2000 characters. That’s enough to get by in day to day, life, but there are many, many street signs that my western friends mentioned above can’t read. We can all read pinyin, though. In fact, just about anybody who’s taken even a single semester of Chinese can read pinyin and at least sound it out. Unfortunately, we don’t get nearly the mileage out of this pinyin ability that we could.
As we all know, the state of romanization in Taiwan is less than ideal. I remember wasting an hour once asking people where “tingshi” MRT station was before realizing that what I was really looking for was dĭngxī (頂溪). In the end, I was frustrated, I was pissed off, and I’d missed an interview as a result of getting lost. A few months later, I found Mark S.’s useful site, Romanization.com, and never had a problem with saying the names of MRT stations again.
In the three years that have gone by since then, most of Taibei city’s street signs and MRT stations have adopted standard (i.e. hanyu pinyin) spellings, and the whole nightmare of newcomers not knowing if they’re looking for “kuting”, “guting”, “kuding”, or “guding” MRT are over. However, I feel that there’s one more step to be taken that’s both inexpensive and useful to a large number of people for whom the romanized signs are intended, i.e., the people who can’t read Chinese characters with full literacy- street signs should have tone marks above the pinyin.
Even with the current, standardized pinyin, there’s no way for a person who reads “Guting” to know if the word is gŭtíng”, gūtìng, gùtíng, or one of thirteen other possible tone combinations. In the case of the Guting MRT, this isn’t a big problem. Even though character-illiterate foreigners will have no way of knowing how to pronounce the stop, there aren’t any other stops with ambiguous names. Sometimes, though, we aren’t so lucky. There are many streets, such as TóngĀn Jiē and TōngĀn Jiē[1], which share identical romaniations unless tone marks are used. In fact, I’ve personally wasted cab fares as a result of not being quite sure of the tone of a street name. While I haven’t had this problem in quite a while, I don’t have any sort of desire to see every new crop of beginning Chinese students here suffer all the same misfortunes I did.
The Costs of Adding Tone Marks
- Remaking road signs would be expensive. However, for new signs being made, adding tone marks would incur very few additional costs. The government is already paying consultants to romanize the signs to begin with. For anybody qualified to work as a “pinyin consultant”, converting characters into romanized text with tone marks should be no difficulty at all.
- Adding tone marks above each syllable could increase paint costs by a small amount.
- People who don’t know any Chinese whatsoever could just ignore the tone marks. However some may find the tone marks visually unappealing. Conversely, those who didn’t ignore the tones might even pick up a little bit more Chinese through regularly seeing romanized Chinese words that they hear frequently.
The Benefits of Adding Tone Marks
- With tone marks, pinyin is a fully-functional writing system. Anybody who has learned pinyin, which takes orders of magnitude less effort than becoming character-literate, can read any Mandarin word written in pinyin.
- Many, many foreigners here would have a smoother time asking for directions and getting around the city.
- Tone marks on street signs would be a boon to students hoping to learn Chinese from the living environment here.
- Identical street names would be disambiguated.
Closing
In my opinion, writing Chinese words with the Latin character set and neglecting tone marks is the equivalent of writing English words with dots in place of the vowels. Yes, it’s possible to guess the missing information from context, but it’s not a very complete writing system.
Be sure to read Prince Roy argument in favor of not putting tone marks on road signs!
Tone Marks on Roadsigns Part II- Prince Roy’s opening argument.
Notes
[1]ICompletelyAgreeWithMarkSThatInnerCapItalizationIsAVeryVeryBadThing. CursesUponJavaForEverPopularizingSuchAnAbomination.
September 21st, 2006 at 9:38 am
Interesting subject for a debate. I’ll be following this with great interest.
For a list of street names that appear the same without tone marks, see Taipei street names and tone marks.
September 21st, 2006 at 11:00 am
Hey Mark,
I’ll have a response up sometime Friday…need to consult with my legal team.
September 21st, 2006 at 12:50 pm
btw, did you want to post it here, or should I do so on my site?
September 21st, 2006 at 1:47 pm
Prince Roy, it’s up to you. Now that you’re in Taiwan and blogging about Taiwan stuff, it might be more interesting if you put it up on your site and we can link back and forth.
September 21st, 2006 at 2:09 pm
I look forward to reading the rest of the debate. I don’t have a particularly strong opinion either way.
The day that they start publishing newspapers in Pinyin is the one that I am really waiting for!!!!
September 21st, 2006 at 8:04 pm
David, are you hoping for a learning tool for foreigners, maybe like a 國語日報 that uses pinyin instead of zhuyin? Or do you mean you’d like to see Taiwanese people learning and reading pinyin?
September 21st, 2006 at 9:22 pm
I want to see the 自由時報 become the Zìyóu Shíbào. I am not just talking about something for children to read. I don’t think it will happen in the near future and most Taiwanese would find even the idea of it crazy.
September 21st, 2006 at 10:35 pm
David, I think there’s a reason they find ‘even the idea of it crazy’: because it is. Personally, I hope it never happens. (And I’m not the least bit worried that it ever will). The Chinese as a people, culture and language will lose their inherent uniqueness should they ever abandon characters. I believe the language and culture are inextricably combined, and a lot of the Chinese identity lies in 漢字. Long may they reign. I also understand that the desire to see characters go is a strange Western obsession that will never completely go away.
September 22nd, 2006 at 12:40 am
I don’t know if the desire to get the Chinese to abandon their writing system for ours crazy or not, but I do think it’s imperialist.
One of the first things Mac Arthur did after becoming “shogun” in Japan after WWII was set up an American educational mission to investigate Japan’s education system and propose measures for its reform. Within less than a month, this mission presented GHQ with a report suggesting that the Japanese abandon kanji in favor of the Roman alphabet, and from that point, the Mac Arthur administration pestered the Japanese Ministry of Education about script reform incessantly until after the failure of a pilot project in an elementary school in Osaka.
Later Japanese language scholars, including renowned linguists such as 鈴木孝夫 (Takao Suzuki) lambasted the occupation government for its attempts to re-work the language. In the decades following WWII, no people on earth made the economic or technological progress that the Japanese made, all the while using their “inefficient” writing system. I for one am very grateful that kanji weren’t replaced in Japan and I’d be saddened to ever see characters replaced here. I wouldn’t mind a version of the 自由日報 with pinyin or zhuyin along side of the characters for people like me to learn from, though.
September 22nd, 2006 at 9:36 am
David. Bulk pinyin is pretty bad. A whole newspaper would be impossible to read. Pinyin isn’t anywhere near good enough to be a replacement for characters, it’s just an aid to pronunciation.
September 22nd, 2006 at 3:44 pm
Mark, I have already noted that the the true history of what happened in script reform in Japan after WWII is not as you have stated (see comments). Yet you continue to repeat such incorrect information. Did you not read the book I referred you to? Literacy and Script Reform in Occupation Japan is the definitive work on the subject. As I noted earlier, the introductory chapter is available for free on my website. I also recommend a much earlier work by Unger, The Fifth Generation Fallacy: Why Japan Is Betting Its Future on Artificial Intelligence. Again, my site has a significant excerpt available for free: The Price of Tradition.
Prince Roy, the only strange obsession I see is the one that leads to such an attachment to Hanzi that it leads to such flights of fantasy.
Since Hanzi rather than what they are used to write are required for this “inherent uniqueness” to be preserved, that’s a real bummer for the rest of us whose languages use the roman alphabet. Alas, the poor cultures of Britain, France, America, Germany, Italy, Turkey, etc., etc. All using the same alphabet, we must all have gone through the homogenization machine and now have nothing to call our own.
Laoban, you simply don’t know what you’re talking about.
September 22nd, 2006 at 5:59 pm
Mark S., I studied the occupation and the script reform as part of my studies for my Japanese degree. I don’t think you present both sides of the story on your site. Even the excerpt from Unger that you reproduced on your site concedes that
Suzuki Takao is far from the only noted Japanese scholar who would disagree with your ideas about script reform, either. However, in your comment above, you said:
Which information I’m repeating do you consider incorrect? Do you dispute that the Mac Arthur administration supported an educational mission to investigate Japan’s education system and propose measures for its reform? Do you dispute that the mission drafted a report suggesting that Kanji be eliminated for reasons of efficiency and western indoctrination? Obviously you must not disagree that Suzuki lambasted the occupation government since you put that information up on your own site. Just which part of what I wrote was incorrect?
P.S. Maybe we should start a Dueling Gaijin feature after this Dueling Laowai series is over
September 22nd, 2006 at 8:00 pm
Mark S, it is disingenuous of you to mischaracterize my statement, as well as a logical fallacy on your part. Just because Chinese characters are a unique and irreplaceable feature of Chinese culture does not make non-character cultures less unique because they share a common orthography.
If you really are going to deny that Chinese characters form an integral part of the Chinese cultural and linguistic identity, then we have little to discuss.
Maybe you should place a call to the Palace Museum and tell them to call off the forthcoming calligraphy exhibitions next spring. Better yet, volunteer to white-out the characters and replace them with Hanyu pinyin.
I’d be interested in hearing how Chinese respond when you inform them that their culture wouldn’t stand to lose anything if they dispensed with 漢字. I can imagine their response, but who knows, one day maybe they’ll come around and thank you for pointing out the error of their ways.
September 22nd, 2006 at 10:01 pm
[...] Note: I’ve agreed to participate in a friendly debate with Mark of Doubting to shuō. The topic is whether romanized roadsigns in Taipei [first Taipei, then the world!] should contain tone marks. Before continuing with this post, read Mark’s opening salvo. [...]
September 23rd, 2006 at 3:46 am
I’m going to start a guerilla graffiti campaign and add the tones myself.
and @ Mark S:
Laoban is right. Large amounts of pinyin, with or without tones, is retarded. You don’t have to know much about Chinese to know that.
September 24th, 2006 at 5:28 am
Prince Roy said:
This is not so much a “belief” as it is unavoidable truth. Mark S., do you realize that what you said is incredibly offensive and arrogant or are you just having some fun?
—
Otherwise, Jason S beat me to it… I think you should just go out in the middle of the night and start systematically painting in tone markers on all traffic signs in Taiwan.
September 24th, 2006 at 6:59 pm
It’s not terribly relevant to the matter of street signs, but it might be worth pointing out that the mainland provinces 山西 (Shānxī) and 陕西 (Shǎnxī) have been problematic for Western publishers, forcing a system otherwise consistent with (toneless) pinyin to use “Shaanxi” for 陕西.
September 25th, 2006 at 3:43 pm
Mark, I’m a little puzzled how you managed to focus on that excerpt without noting the context surrounding it. The same paragraph begins, “Finally, there is a great deal of outright misinformation about what happened during the Occupation that passes for honest history.” Unger does not concede what Suzuki said, he notes it and proves in his book that it simply isn’t in line with the facts, many of which were buried. That’s what the book establishes carefully and thoroughly, using some information not previously unearthed by scholars.
Also, immediately after the sentence you quote is the following:
“Yet what really happened between 1945 and 1951 was anything but a simple black-and-white story of arrogant Americans versus powerless Japanese. Japanese government and business had been working on plans for script reform for decades, even during the war; what the Japanese eventually did was nothing more than what they had been on the verge of doing anyway. Some Japanese may have believed that, by appeasing the Americans with a reduction in the number of kanji in general use, they could prevent them from ordering something more drastic, like across-the-board romanization, but they were mistaken: even before the surrender, American policymakers had largely rejected the concept of radical script reform. During the Occupation itself, the Chief of the Civil Information and Education Section (CI&E) of GHQ/SCAP and several of his subordinates took such pains to maintain the appearance of absolute fairness that they became de facto allies of those conservative Japanese who opposed all but the mildest script reform measures.”
And the paragraph that follows contains:
“the way in which the occupying Americans and the Ministry of Education treated the experiment was extremely shabby. Contrary to what opponents of script reform had hoped, the experiment showed that students who used romanized materials exclusively did not fall behind their peers and strongly suggested that, in more favorable circumstances, they could easily have made faster progress in school than students who did not use romanized materials.”
In short, the real history is not at all as it has been portrayed in the past.
Here is the publisher’s summary, which accurately covers the main points:
“This book challenges the widespread belief that overzealous Americans forced unnecessary script reforms on an unprepared, unenthusiastic, but helpless Japan during the Occupation. Unger presents neglected historical evidence showing that the reforms implemented from 1946 to 1959 were both necessary and moderate. Although the United States Education Mission of 1946 recommended that the japanese give serious consideration to the introduction of alphabetic writing, key American officials in the Civil Information and Education Section of GHQ/SCAP delayed and effectively killed action on this recommendation. Japanese advocates of romanization nevertheless managed to obtain CI&E approval for an experiment in elementary schools to test the hypothesis that schoolchildren could make faster progress if spared the necessity of studying Chinese characters as part of non-language courses such as arithmetic. Though not conclusive, the experiment’s results supported the hypothesis and suggested the need for more and better testing. Yet work was brought to a halt a year ahead of schedule; the Ministry of Education was ordered to prepare a report that misrepresented the goal of the experiment and claimed it proved nothing. The whole episode dropped from official and scholarly view — until the publication of this book.”
For details of this, see the book itself. (Academia Sinica has a copy, though it’s checked out right now.)
++++
Matt quoting Prince Roy: “I believe the language and culture are inextricably combined, and a lot of the Chinese identity lies in [Hanzi].”
Matt writes: “This is not so much a ‘belief’ as it is unavoidable truth. Mark S., do you realize that what you said is incredibly offensive and arrogant or are you just having some fun?”
Matt, I’m most certainly not having fun. I hate arguments. I’d much rather sit down with Mark and Prince Roy, with whom I suspect I have much in common, and talk pleasantly about all this over a beer.
And I’m not sure what you’re referring to in your reply. Nothing in my reply was in reponse to the statement you quote, with which I generally agree. There seems to be an eagerness to attribute to me viewpoints that do not correspond with anything I’ve said.
Prince Roy writes: “Maybe you should place a call to the Palace Museum and tell them to call off the forthcoming calligraphy exhibitions next spring. Better yet, volunteer to white-out the characters and replace them with Hanyu pinyin. I’d be interested in hearing how Chinese respond when you inform them that their culture wouldn’t stand to lose anything if they dispensed with [Hanzi].”
You forgot to mention how I must certainly support book burnings and probably like to club baby seals to death for fun, too.
I love shufa. It’s my favorite Chinese art form. (I’m quite serious.) Just because Chinese calligraphy and Chinese characters have been an important part of Chinese culture, however, does not mean that Hanzi — which have always been and will always be extremely difficult and time-consuming to learn, which represent a substantial barrier to mass literacy, and which as a system are fundamentally thousands of years out of date with the language they are used to write now — must continue to be used as the sole accepted orthography for Modern Standard Mandarin.
Although language, script, and culture have points of overlap, none of them are the equivalent of either of the others. Conflating these, as this thread has many examples of, can only lead to confusion.
September 25th, 2006 at 7:40 pm
Mark S: You forgot to mention how I…probably like to club baby seals to death for fun, too.
Do you mean (baby) small seal script? I do wonder…
Mark S: Just because Chinese calligraphy and Chinese characters have been an important part of Chinese culture, however, does not mean that Hanzi…must continue to be used as the sole accepted orthography for Modern Standard Mandarin.
I certainly agree.
Mark S: I’d much rather sit down with Mark and Prince Roy, with whom I suspect I have much in common, and talk pleasantly about all this over a beer.
I agree with this most of all; may it soon come to pass!
September 25th, 2006 at 7:47 pm
[...] When I’m not battling wits with brilliant (though misguided) friends like Mark, I relax by taking in the sights. This past weekend was no different. 辣妹子 aka Spicygirl and I went on an AIT field trip to the Lin Family Mansion and Garden 林本源園邸 Lín běn yuán yuán dǐ. Located in Banqiao (or as they put it, ‘Banciao’) it is one of the older and nicer existing examples of Qing period Taiwanese architecture. [...]
September 25th, 2006 at 9:27 pm
Mark S. said:
Those are words of wisdom if I’ve ever seen any.
September 25th, 2006 at 9:37 pm
This is hard for me because I can see both sides of the debate. I left Taiwan when I was nine years old. I’ve always read like a fiend even in Kindy and as a result I have no trouble at all now with reading comprehension. Recalling the characters for writing, however, is a totally different K. of F. I would say that I write at a pre-first grade level when it comes to character recall. To get a sense of what first-grade kids are doing, check this out. It’s the textbook I used 18 years ago when I entered first grade. Ah, the memories…
I used to think like Mark S to a degree: Writing characters is so inefficient that going to romanizations would realize tremendous gains as to make it worthwhile. I no longer think this now due to advances in Chinese typing programs like 嘸蝦米 that makes word processing fast and easy for skilled users. Sure, you still have to learn the characters, and that sucks for the kids, but then the initial cost in time is amortized over a lifetime.
Besides, this sort of change is so ‘personal’ (Can I say personal when I’m referring to a nation?) that the impetus can only come from within a culture, and I just don’t see it. The only people who are harping on about Pinyin making more sense are people like Mark S and I who’ve had to struggle with characters as adults. For most Taiwanese people, it’s just not an issue.
I’ve seen Mark S’s site and it seems he’s put a lot of effort into this Pinyin campaign. People who have invested this much into a cause don’t usually change their minds. However, I’d like to try, using only utilitarian considerations since others have already tried the “culture” tact. Mark S, nobody is doubting that Pinyin is easier to learn and to write, but how about to read? Chinese is full of synonyms. Puns are pervasive, used everywhere from bon mots to newspaper headlines to the signs on store going out of business saying 衣件不留. Without the ability to distinguish between different form of the same word, can you imagine how much reading comprehension would be impacted, either through ambiguity or decreased reading speed? When I read a Chinese Character, there is instant recognition. When I read a phonetic description of that character, I have to first check the sound of the character, then the tone. That instant recognition is not there, making it well-nigh impossible to “chunk” or skim.
Finally, imagin how you would feel if a well-intentioned Chinese person starts a campaign to decrease the number of tenses in English because it is inefficient and leads to gross difficulties to English learners.
September 25th, 2006 at 9:54 pm
(By the way, I would recommend anyone who know how to read traditional characters to check out the textbook I linked to. It’s a blast. There’s hagiographic childhood vignettes of Chang Kai-shek enough to make you want to hurl. Chapter three is also good for a laugh. It’s like Taiwan had the fifties in the eighties: “Mommy gets up early to clean the house. Daddy gets up early to read the newspaper.”However, lesson 6: 爸爸打漁去 is a true classic forever that is seared into the brains of most 五年級生 and 六年級生 like me.)
September 25th, 2006 at 10:45 pm
Battlepanda, you just reminded me of something. I’ve often noticed Chinese, and especially Japanese people clarifying which character they meant in spoken conversations. They often “write” it on their palms or in the air at the same time as they say which 漢字 they’d meant to say.
September 26th, 2006 at 2:10 am
Exactly. That’s what I meant by retarded. (not totally tactfull, I admit) Characters are hard, but they make sense. Unlike a piles of pinyin. (oh, and it would render dictionaries useless.)
September 26th, 2006 at 6:46 am
It just seems to me that the characters serve as the fundamental basis from which language derives meaning in Chinese. What’s a language that can’t derive meaning? It’s not a language. And how can you have a culture from a language that is unable to derive meaning? You can’t! European languages derive their meanings in other ways, but they’re also closely tied up with the written scripts used throughout history. Simply imposing a much less differentiated script on an entire language with a very long history at the beginning of the 21st century is utter madness and absolutely reeks of a cultural superiority complex.
BTW, I am down for a beer too but really I think this “new orthography” idea is nuts! Wouldn’t you have a whole new set of problems when you pick up a newspaper written totally in pinyin???
September 26th, 2006 at 7:30 am
[...] 中文博客 « Dueling Lăowài: Tone Marks on Roadsigns- Part 1 [...]
September 26th, 2006 at 12:34 pm
This is not even considering the fact that there are still many Chinese people (especially in the diaspora) who do not speak mandarin, thus making the phonetic system completely unworkable for them.
Also, as a reader but not a capable writer of characters, I am confined to typing chinese in PinYin. I am constantly frustrated by having to stop my train of thought to pick which characters I really “mean”. Wouldn’t it be nice not to have to worry about it and just type the pinyin? Except, that frustration is now transferred to the reader, who have to try and figure out what you meant to say. A piece of text only needs to be written once, but they might be read thousands of times.
September 27th, 2006 at 1:17 pm
Little white rectangular vinyl stickers.
guerilla pinyin toning baby!….
September 29th, 2006 at 5:52 pm
[...] part 1: Mark writes in favor of using tone marks [...]
September 30th, 2006 at 4:17 am
[...] Tone Marks on Roadsigns Part I- Mark’s opening argument. Tone Marks on Roadsigns Part II- Prince Roy’s opening argument. Tone Marks on Roadsigns Part III- Mark’s rebuttal. Tone Marks on Roadsigns Part IV- Prince Roy’s rebuttal. [...]
October 1st, 2006 at 4:10 pm
I did’t read all the comments so someone might have brought this up, but a language like Chinese with so many homophones would be a total mess if you tried to write it with an alphabet (pinyin or some other system). Even using tone marks. Plus, lots of foreign language learners (including myself) tend to play fast and loose with the tones, yet are still able to make ourselves understood with a little persistance. I’m not convinced that tones are even important enough to warrant inclusion on road signs.
September 20th, 2008 at 10:08 pm
[...] Entry: Tone Marks on Roadsigns Tags: news, romanization, [...]