5 ms·

I'm curious, how popular is the bible in Taiwan? And why does it use Taiwanese characters not commonly used elsewhere?

oh_sigh 9y ago
About 5% of Taiwanese are Christian, but culturally Christianity has played a bigger role than you might expect based on that number.
- yorwba 9y ago
  If the Taiping Rebellion had been successful, China might have become a (very unorthodox, not accepted by any Western church) Christian theocracy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiping_Rebellion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiping_Rebellion
  - meric 9y ago
    One quarter as many deaths as World War 2, all of it in southern China.
    - B1FF_PSUVM 9y ago
      When I first learned of it, years ago, I was stunned at two things - the scale of loss of life, and how little known it was ...
  - pavlov 9y ago
    The short description of Taiping's policies [1] makes them sound like a Christian Taliban, or the society of Margaret Atwood's "A Handmaid's Tale". [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiping_Rebellion#Taiping_Heavenly_Kingdom's_policies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiping_Rebellion#Taiping_Heav...
dwohnitmok 9y ago
I don't know about the former, but I can answer the latter (and the presumably implied question of why doesn't Unicode cover what should be a fairly common use case?). This Bible is not written in Mandarin, but rather Hokkien/Min (I suppose it's more correct to say "Southern Min," but I'm used to saying Hokkien and you'll see Taiwanese Hokkien as a term appear). And this is actually a kind of interesting statement about the written language. If you've ever talked about languages/dialects in the Chinese language family you might have heard something like "They might sound different but they all share the same underlying written language and are hence dialects" or the opposite "They're entirely separate languages akin to the Romance languages with their own spoken and written languages that might occasionally be similar/have cognates across different languages." The situation is a bit muddier than either of those statements might suggest. As this example demonstrates, it's certainly NOT true that if you just wrote down any language/dialect in the Chinese language family it's intelligible to a Mandarin speaker. Chinese Unicode caters towards Mandarin and as you can see there's certain characters here that essentially never show up in Mandarin (and hence a Mandarin speaker might not recognize them). There are also characters that a Mandarin speaker might recognize but not understand its meaning in this case (e.g. some of the pronouns for example the third-person pronoun 伊 which is normally 他/她/它 or 其 in standard Mandarin depending on how formal the setting is). And certainly any Mandarin speaker can attest to the fact that there are certain languages/dialects that are not verbally mutually intelligible. However, there often exists a written "embedding" of Mandarin into these dialects/languages that doesn't really have an analog among e.g. the Romance languages. For example, Cantonese pop music is often written in Mandarin, but sung in Cantonese, which means that each Mandarin character has a proper Cantonese pronunciation. It comes off as "Mandanrinized" and it's not the way people normally speak, but there's a standard, well-defined way of doing this, and it's intelligible (well at least in certain settings; if you speak like that normally you're going to have a problem). There isn't really a similar way of doing this for French and Spanish. You can't just take a Spanish work, pronounce it using a French pronunciation, and then voila have a French work. It's not even entirely clear for all words what "pronouncing it with a French pronunciation" means. Nonetheless it's not the same thing as having a shared written language. Standard written Cantonese is going to be tricky for a Mandarin reader to read, just as this Hokkien Bible is going to be tricky for a Mandarin reader to read. And even this "embedding" I'm talking about isn't perfect since there are some Chinese characters that show up commonly in Mandarin but rarely in, say, Hokkien and vice versa. Having a shared set of characters only gets you so far when they can have somewhat divergent meanings and very divergent pronunciations. And it's not even the case that all dialects/languages have standardized written forms. Regardless, despite the fact that there are many named languages/dialects in the Chinese language family, the mutual intelligibility situation isn't quite as fragmented as it's occasionally made out to be. There's a handful of large families that share a pretty high degree of mutual intelligibility among dialects/languages within them. A few examples are the Mandarin family of dialects (of which Standard Mandarin is a member), which probably has the broadest geographical distribution, running mainly in a diagonal from the Southwest of China (Sichuan) up to the Northeast (HeilongJiang), the Cantonese family of dialects, the Wu family of dialects, and the Min family of dialects. Returning to this Bible, the funny thing here is that the preface to this Bible is written in Mandarin, but the Bible itself is written in Hokkien (which hints at some of the weird interconnectedness among Chinese dialects/languages). In turn the Chinese characters here are a transliteration of a previous Romanization of an Amoy (Xiamenese Min) translation of the Bible. This post ended up running away from me a bit, so just to recap the original Unicode answer: Chinese Unicode caters towards characters that show up in written Mandarin and this isn't written Mandarin.
- meric 9y ago
  I tend to think of it as classical versus Vulgar Latin. I can write Cantonese phrases word for word (with a few Cantonese only characters) and mandarin only speakers won’t be able to understand it, or I can rephrase it into a “classical” way so that any literate Chinese person from any dialect can read it.
  - dwohnitmok 9y ago
    Just to clarify for future readers, "classical" here presumably does NOT mean Classical Chinese (文言文).
- jolmg 9y ago
  > There isn't really a similar way of doing this for French and Spanish. You can't just take a Spanish work, pronounce it using a French pronunciation, and then voila have a French work. It's not even entirely clear for all words what "pronouncing it with a French pronunciation" means. I guess this is similar to how every written english word has a well defined spanish pronounciation as if it were written spanish. You wouldn't always get something intelligeble from an english listener's point of view, but by the rules of spanish pronounciation, many english words have similar pronounciation when read as spanish. I don't think I've ever heard a song do something like you described between these 2 languages, though, and I'm not sure how it could be made to sound good either.
  - dwohnitmok 9y ago
    The rather interesting features about this particular "embedding" is that it results in a written language that is intelligible for both Mandarin and Cantonese speakers and that it also happens quite frequently in certain settings. In fact, it even comes off as "correct." That is it's not as if you're reading broken Mandarin or broken Cantonese and are able to piece together the meaning, as a speaker of a parent language of a pidgin language might feel when reading the pidgin. It's a full-fledged language that reads entirely naturally to a Mandarin speaker and just feels "Mandarinized" but otherwise "correct" to a Cantonese speaker. The Spanish-English example you give really only is a result of Spanish's regular correspondence between spelling and pronunciation (as far as my limited Spanish knowledge allows me to understand), that allows you to unambiguously pronounce most combinations of Latin letters. For example, there's a "Spanish pronunciation" of the Quecha written Latin script, but it's basically an unintelligible mess of sounds that violates a lot of Spanish sound rules. If you use some conventions to group letters together and settle on a single pronunciation of each of those groupings, you can do the same in English with any Latin letter combinations as well. Generally speaking, pronouncing written English as Spanish results in something that neither Spanish speakers nor English speakers understand nor accept as part of their language. While there is a subset of vocabulary (most notably -ion words) that shares the same or similar spelling between the two languages, there isn't really a cohesive subset of the written language (that is imagine writing entire sentences and paragraphs) that can be shared.
jhanschoo 9y ago
Something to think about is that in many languages and dialects, the Bible is frequently one of the premier pieces of vernacular literature written in the register that it is spoken. In the case of already-literate societies, until modern nationalism, typically what they write is a classical version of what they speak, which they regard as not prestigious enough to put to pen.

About 5% of Taiwanese are Christian, but culturally Christianity has played a bigger role than you might expect based on that number.

yorwba 9y ago
If the Taiping Rebellion had been successful, China might have become a (very unorthodox, not accepted by any Western church) Christian theocracy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiping_Rebellion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiping_Rebellion
- meric 9y ago
  One quarter as many deaths as World War 2, all of it in southern China.
  - B1FF_PSUVM 9y ago
    When I first learned of it, years ago, I was stunned at two things - the scale of loss of life, and how little known it was ...
- pavlov 9y ago
  The short description of Taiping's policies [1] makes them sound like a Christian Taliban, or the society of Margaret Atwood's "A Handmaid's Tale". [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiping_Rebellion#Taiping_Heavenly_Kingdom's_policies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiping_Rebellion#Taiping_Heav...

dwohnitmok 9y ago

I don't know about the former, but I can answer the latter (and the presumably implied question of why doesn't Unicode cover what should be a fairly common use case?). This Bible is not written in Mandarin, but rather Hokkien/Min (I suppose it's more correct to say "Southern Min," but I'm used to saying Hokkien and you'll see Taiwanese Hokkien as a term appear). And this is actually a kind of interesting statement about the written language. If you've ever talked about languages/dialects in the Chinese language family you might have heard something like "They might sound different but they all share the same underlying written language and are hence dialects" or the opposite "They're entirely separate languages akin to the Romance languages with their own spoken and written languages that might occasionally be similar/have cognates across different languages." The situation is a bit muddier than either of those statements might suggest. As this example demonstrates, it's certainly NOT true that if you just wrote down any language/dialect in the Chinese language family it's intelligible to a Mandarin speaker. Chinese Unicode caters towards Mandarin and as you can see there's certain characters here that essentially never show up in Mandarin (and hence a Mandarin speaker might not recognize them). There are also characters that a Mandarin speaker might recognize but not understand its meaning in this case (e.g. some of the pronouns for example the third-person pronoun 伊 which is normally 他/她/它 or 其 in standard Mandarin depending on how formal the setting is). And certainly any Mandarin speaker can attest to the fact that there are certain languages/dialects that are not verbally mutually intelligible. However, there often exists a written "embedding" of Mandarin into these dialects/languages that doesn't really have an analog among e.g. the Romance languages. For example, Cantonese pop music is often written in Mandarin, but sung in Cantonese, which means that each Mandarin character has a proper Cantonese pronunciation. It comes off as "Mandanrinized" and it's not the way people normally speak, but there's a standard, well-defined way of doing this, and it's intelligible (well at least in certain settings; if you speak like that normally you're going to have a problem). There isn't really a similar way of doing this for French and Spanish. You can't just take a Spanish work, pronounce it using a French pronunciation, and then voila have a French work. It's not even entirely clear for all words what "pronouncing it with a French pronunciation" means. Nonetheless it's not the same thing as having a shared written language. Standard written Cantonese is going to be tricky for a Mandarin reader to read, just as this Hokkien Bible is going to be tricky for a Mandarin reader to read. And even this "embedding" I'm talking about isn't perfect since there are some Chinese characters that show up commonly in Mandarin but rarely in, say, Hokkien and vice versa. Having a shared set of characters only gets you so far when they can have somewhat divergent meanings and very divergent pronunciations. And it's not even the case that all dialects/languages have standardized written forms. Regardless, despite the fact that there are many named languages/dialects in the Chinese language family, the mutual intelligibility situation isn't quite as fragmented as it's occasionally made out to be. There's a handful of large families that share a pretty high degree of mutual intelligibility among dialects/languages within them. A few examples are the Mandarin family of dialects (of which Standard Mandarin is a member), which probably has the broadest geographical distribution, running mainly in a diagonal from the Southwest of China (Sichuan) up to the Northeast (HeilongJiang), the Cantonese family of dialects, the Wu family of dialects, and the Min family of dialects. Returning to this Bible, the funny thing here is that the preface to this Bible is written in Mandarin, but the Bible itself is written in Hokkien (which hints at some of the weird interconnectedness among Chinese dialects/languages). In turn the Chinese characters here are a transliteration of a previous Romanization of an Amoy (Xiamenese Min) translation of the Bible. This post ended up running away from me a bit, so just to recap the original Unicode answer: Chinese Unicode caters towards characters that show up in written Mandarin and this isn't written Mandarin.

meric 9y ago
I tend to think of it as classical versus Vulgar Latin. I can write Cantonese phrases word for word (with a few Cantonese only characters) and mandarin only speakers won’t be able to understand it, or I can rephrase it into a “classical” way so that any literate Chinese person from any dialect can read it.
- dwohnitmok 9y ago
  Just to clarify for future readers, "classical" here presumably does NOT mean Classical Chinese (文言文).
jolmg 9y ago
> There isn't really a similar way of doing this for French and Spanish. You can't just take a Spanish work, pronounce it using a French pronunciation, and then voila have a French work. It's not even entirely clear for all words what "pronouncing it with a French pronunciation" means. I guess this is similar to how every written english word has a well defined spanish pronounciation as if it were written spanish. You wouldn't always get something intelligeble from an english listener's point of view, but by the rules of spanish pronounciation, many english words have similar pronounciation when read as spanish. I don't think I've ever heard a song do something like you described between these 2 languages, though, and I'm not sure how it could be made to sound good either.
- dwohnitmok 9y ago
  The rather interesting features about this particular "embedding" is that it results in a written language that is intelligible for both Mandarin and Cantonese speakers and that it also happens quite frequently in certain settings. In fact, it even comes off as "correct." That is it's not as if you're reading broken Mandarin or broken Cantonese and are able to piece together the meaning, as a speaker of a parent language of a pidgin language might feel when reading the pidgin. It's a full-fledged language that reads entirely naturally to a Mandarin speaker and just feels "Mandarinized" but otherwise "correct" to a Cantonese speaker. The Spanish-English example you give really only is a result of Spanish's regular correspondence between spelling and pronunciation (as far as my limited Spanish knowledge allows me to understand), that allows you to unambiguously pronounce most combinations of Latin letters. For example, there's a "Spanish pronunciation" of the Quecha written Latin script, but it's basically an unintelligible mess of sounds that violates a lot of Spanish sound rules. If you use some conventions to group letters together and settle on a single pronunciation of each of those groupings, you can do the same in English with any Latin letter combinations as well. Generally speaking, pronouncing written English as Spanish results in something that neither Spanish speakers nor English speakers understand nor accept as part of their language. While there is a subset of vocabulary (most notably -ion words) that shares the same or similar spelling between the two languages, there isn't really a cohesive subset of the written language (that is imagine writing entire sentences and paragraphs) that can be shared.

jhanschoo 9y ago

Something to think about is that in many languages and dialects, the Bible is frequently one of the premier pieces of vernacular literature written in the register that it is spoken. In the case of already-literate societies, until modern nationalism, typically what they write is a classical version of what they speak, which they regard as not prestigious enough to put to pen.