5 ms·

No offense and not to sound political here, but there isn't a such language as "Taiwanese". People in Taiwan write in Traditional Chinese characters and use Man

• jessriedel 8y ago
  He didn't claim the language was Taiwanese, only the characters. That seems reasonable for Chinese characters that were used predominantly in Taiwan, no?
  • dwohnitmok 8y ago
    This is a somewhat confusing way of putting it. This Bible isn't written in Mandarin (PRC or Taiwanese dialects thereof) and that's why it's using these non-Unihan characters. A Taiwanese Mandarin version wouldn't be using these characters. This Bible is written in (Taiwanese) Hokkien and that's why the GP is having issues with finding these characters in Unihan. EDIT: I do appreciate that "Taiwanese" as in Taiwanese characters is ambiguous. I initially also read that as a "characters used in works written for a Taiwanese audience in Taiwanese Mandarin."
  • kristianov 8y ago
    The characters are all Chinese. Same characters can be found in written Cantonese dialect of Chinese.
• subway 8y ago
  GP never even implied there was a separate Taiwanese language, only that the characters were Taiwanese.
  • ptaipale 8y ago
    And in fact there are a number of Taiwanese languages, or Formosan languages, as Han Chinese settlement of the island is a fairly recent thing. The Taiwanese aborigines are Austronesian people - and in fact many historical linguists consider Taiwan to be the original homeland of the Austronesian language family. These have of course nothing to do with the Chinese character set issue raise in above comments. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwanese_aborigines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwanese_aborigines
    • jhanschoo 8y ago
      It's really cool how advanced the Austronesians were in maritime navigation! I like to imagine that if history went down a slightly different path, we would be talking about Austronesian imperialism!
      • ptaipale 8y ago
        They were indeed impressive navigators - I think the most amazing feat is that they were the ones who first settled Madagascar, and just look at the distance from Southeast Asia - but I think they lacked most of the technological and societal prerequisites for building actual empires. Particularly, writing. Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel is obviously the go-to book in this area for introduction of why some people built empires and others did not.
  • volgo 8y ago
    There's no such thing as Taiwanese characters. The island uses Traditional Chinese characters
• dwohnitmok 8y ago
  Eh... "Taiwanese" is usually pretty well-understood to be Taiwanese Hokkien/Min, both in English and Mandarin Chinese (台语/台語/台湾话/臺灣話).
  • dwohnitmok 8y ago
    At least as a noun. When used as an adjective ambiguity definitely exists as to what language you're referring to.
  • volgo 8y ago
    Hokkien is a type of Chinese dialect. The only reason people rush to call it "Taiwanese" is because of politics, not cultural.
    • dwohnitmok 8y ago
      There's certainly a ton of political baggage around the Chinese language and layered on top of that there's a crazy amount of political baggage around China and Taiwan (e.g. is it called 正体字 or 繁体字?). I don't think that's the case here though. Plenty of Taiwanese people I've spoken to are happy to (and often do) call it Hokkien (or Taiwanese Hokkien). Taiwanese as an adjective is usually ambiguous (Taiwanese Mandarin, Hokkien, or aboriginal Taiwanese languages are all possibilities). Taiwanese as a noun is usually less ambiguous (although the confusion in this thread makes me rethink that). Hokkien (Fujianese) is to Southern Min what Cantonese is to Yue and to some extent Shanghainese is to Wu. They are place-name terms that nominally refer to a specific subset of a dialect family that are now used in informal speech to refer to the entire dialect family. But for example Macaonese (澳门话) is still a place-name term you'll hear even though it's within the Yue family and therefore you could (and people do) call it Cantonese. Taiwanese is a similar case (place-name term) here.
      • volgo 8y ago
        There's certainly a fair amount of people from Taiwan who call it Hokkien as a matter of accuracy I don't think that's the case here though. There's nothing specifically different from the Hokkien spoken in Taiwan. It's a dialect of Chinese and certainly cannot be called linguistically different. It would be like saying someone spoke Texan instead of English with a Texas accent. The written language is traditional Chinese, nothing else. This is a common misunderstanding
• intro-b 8y ago
  colloquially, most english speakers would recognize "Taiwanese" and "Traditional Chinese/Traditional Mandarin" as interchangeable
  • jhanschoo 8y ago
    Actually, that's not what parent comment meant. By Taiwanese he meant the Taiwanese Hokkien dialect, which is what is spoken by many Taiwanese at home that is mutually unintelligible from Mandarin. It has words that do not correspond neatly to Mandarin or classical Chinese, and so historically, writers have invented characters specifically to write Min languages. It's unfortunate that awareness of the many Chinese dialects/languages is pretty poor in the Anglosphere, and parent comment could be clearer with what he meant by Taiwanese. It was obvious to me that it was Hokkien that he was referring to, but that is only by virtue of me having familiarity in the matter.