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GP never even implied there was a separate Taiwanese language, only that the characters were Taiwanese.

• ptaipale 9y 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 9y 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 9y 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 9y ago
  There's no such thing as Taiwanese characters. The island uses Traditional Chinese characters