No parking sign in Taiwanese

July 17, 2023 @ 9:42 pm · Filed by under Signs, Topolects, Transcription, Writing systems

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Photo taken outside a casino in Tainan, Taiwan:

If you were a monolingual Mandarin speaker and tried to read this sign in your language, even though it looks like it is in "Chinese", it would be a meaningless mishmash:

jiā měi dàng tíng qiā

嘉美蕩停掐

"excellent beauty swing / sway stop / park pinch"

Right up front, I will tell you that there are two schools of thought about this way of writing Taiwanese with Chinese characters:  pro and con (for the details of which see below).

What the sign really says, using the Sinographs to transcribe Taiwanese sounds, except for the fourth one, which also conveys meaning, is this:

Word-for-word explanations:

Basic rule: the hanzi are read in Mandarin, then use the sounds to jump to Taiwanese equivalent sounds, and match them to words of the same sounds with the intended meanings.

嘉 = MSM ㄐㄧㄚ/ jiā (in sound =) Tw [chia] 'here' 這裡

美 = MSM ㄇㄟˇ / mĕi (after de-nasalization > *bĕi) > approx. bē = Tw [bōe / bē] 'may not' 不能 / 不可 (N.B. This word, bōe, is a contracture of bô + ōe/ē, and is often written as [勿 + 會].)

蕩 = MSM ㄉㄤˋ / dàng = Tw [tàng] 'allowed, permitted' 當 (Thus, 美蕩 = MSM 不應當)

停 = MSM 停 ㄊㄧㄥˊ / tíng = Tw thêng

掐 = MSM ㄑㄧㄚ / qiā (in sound =) Tw [chhia] 'car' 車

Therefore, the "no parking" sign goes as follows:

嘉美蕩停掐

jiā mĕi dàng tíng qiā

chia bē tàng thêng chhia

'Here not allowed (to) park car(s)'

Regarding the two sides of arguments 兩派討論:

The Pros –

This kind of language is eye-catching, causing a double take in people who would stop and think about the content of the warning. The premise is that no one would pay attention to the normal sign,「禁止停車」.

The Cons –

A public sign should be understandable to all people.  What if people who don't know Taiwanese read the convoluted sign, it's useless to them. They would just park their cars here.

(courtesy of Chau Wu)

You pays your money and you takes your choice.

Selected readings

[Thanks to Mark Swofford]

July 17, 2023 @ 9:42 pm · Filed by under Signs, Topolects, Transcription, Writing systems


8 Comments

  1. Ross said,

    July 17, 2023 @ 10:59 pm

    Casinos are not legal in Taiwan; "arcade" would be a more accurate description.

  2. AntC said,

    July 18, 2023 @ 5:01 am

    Casinos are not legal in Taiwan

    Ha ha! So there wouldn't be in Tainan a place advertising itself as 'Casino Hotel'? Just one of many advertising themselves blatantly. I can point you to plenty of "arcade"s [**] in any of the big cities — and I wasn't even looking for them. You can tell by the numbers of young 'ladies' in smart pastel-coloured suits (with extremely short skirts) going into them early evening; and the numbers of drunken businessmen going into them later in the evening. Or am I mixing them up with Karaoke hostess bars? (I rather think they're overlapping categories. Excuse me while I wipe my browser history.)

    You'll be telling me next gambling on Mahjong is banned.

    [**] "Arcade" to me signifies those ubiquitous highly-lit small shops at the edges of night-markets with penny-in-the-slot machines to try to grab a brightly-coloured cuddly toy etc.

  3. AntC said,

    July 18, 2023 @ 5:12 am

    the convoluted sign, it's useless to them. They would just park their cars here.

    If this is one of those places that doesn't exist (allegedly) and it's anywhere near business hours, there'll be a parking attendant. Their job is to whisk away that sign upon payment of an adequate bribe. They'll probably whistle up an underling to go park your car off-street, so they can repeat the trick.

    (Lest you think I'm down on the joyful commerciality in Taiwan, it's exactly the same game in any number of S.E. Asian countries. The laws are there so the police can collect their commission.)

  4. Jonathan Smith said,

    July 18, 2023 @ 2:18 pm

    Worth pointing out that the actual difference between this and "regular" signs in Mandarin or Taiwanese is no more than convention — i.e., the characters in this sign work exactly the same way as Chinese characters generally do, with the impression that there are "two steps" to figuring out this sign, and that the character "停" "conveys meaning" while the others don't, arise simply from the fact that *we are used to* "美", "停", etc. being used in other, particular ways.

  5. Jonathan Smith said,

    July 18, 2023 @ 2:46 pm

    Oops — should be, "美", etc. being used in other, particular ways; "停" being used in just this way — thus the (wrong) impression that the last "conveys meaning.

  6. Taylor, Philip said,

    July 19, 2023 @ 2:32 am

    Re.

    The Cons –

    A public sign should be understandable to all people. What if people who don't know Taiwanese read the convoluted sign, it's useless to them. They would just park their cars here.

    "A public sign should be understandable to all people" — almost certainly impossible to achieve. "All people" don't speak the same language, so the choice of language (and orthography) normally reflects local norms and proctice. Even a pictograph depicting a stationary car with a red cross overlaid would not be meaningful to someone from a remote tribe who had never seen a car in his life.

    Thus I would argue that there is no "con".

  7. Terry K. said,

    July 19, 2023 @ 11:01 am

    While I agree that "understandable to all people" isn't truly to be expected, there's also the idea of maximizing the number of people who will understand something. (Or, more specifically, maximizing the number of people in the target audience who will understand it. That person from a remote tribe who had never seen a car in their life is not part of the target audience.)

    Not being able to be understood by those who don't know Taiwanese is a con if there's another way of writing the sign that will be understood by more people than writing it that way.

    If I understand right, one needs to know both Mandarin and Taiwanese to understand the sign. If so, would, then, a sign in Mandarin be understood by more people?

  8. John Swindle said,

    July 20, 2023 @ 3:24 am

    So they're pronouncing it like Mandarin?

    於坎來聽古黎司來大。花可勾讓？
    Yú kǎn lái tīng gǔ lí sī lái dà. Huā kě gōu ràng?

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