Politicization of script in Taiwan
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This was inevitable:
Kaohsiung university faces backlash over simplified Chinese exam:
Education ministry says faculty member's business card listing ‘Taiwan Province, China’ is ‘inappropriate’ by Charlotte Lee, Taiwan News (1/3/25)
The language is the same; it's only the script that is different — but that really matters: Think Hindi-Urdu, Serbo-Croatian, Hangul-Hanja, Maltese-Arabic.
TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — National Kaohsiung University of Science and Technology is facing controversy after a final exam in its Department of Aquaculture was in simplified Chinese, while a faculty member's business card listed “Taiwan Province, China.”
The Ministry of Education said that using simplified Chinese in exams is “inappropriate,” and the business card “clearly undermines the nation's dignity.” The incident will be recorded as an administrative flaw and used as the basis for reducing subsidies, per CNA.
AntC remarks:
Aquaculture is a huge part of Taiwan's economy. Every local market sells a bewildering variety of shellfish and crustaceans. I find it hard to believe there aren't teaching materials in Traditional script. Flinging "ethical standards" into the issue sounds like there's more going on here.
The article raises implications of plagiarism, fairness of student assessments, and attempts to divide the community.
Selected readings
- "Eruption over simplified vs. traditional characters in Hong Kong" (2/24/16)
- "Simplified vs. Complex / Traditional" (4/23/09)
- "Simplified Bomb" (6/9/09)
- "'Chinese — Traditional'" (1/30/11)
- "Of toads, modernization, and simplified characters" (8/16/13)
- "Simplified vs. complicated in New York state" (3/18/16)
J.W. Brewer said,
January 3, 2025 @ 2:14 pm
If the business card said "Taiwan Province, Republic of China" it would fully accord with still-on-the-books nominally-official ideology, although of course the winner of the most recent presidential election is from the side of current Taiwanese politics less enamored of that ideology. Just make sure you write "Taiwan Province" in traditional characters!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwan_Province
As I may have said before, I don't think this is a biscriptal situation parallel to Serbian/Croatian or Hindi/Urdu but is instead more like the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antiqua%E2%80%93Fraktur_dispute. Which certainly doesn't mean it can't be as politically loaded.
Bob Ladd said,
January 4, 2025 @ 2:21 am
I agree with J W Brewer that the simplified character issue is a lot more analogous to the "Antiqua/Fraktur dispute". No one doubts that it's the same basic writing system. As he says, the politics are largely independent of how different the two are. In fact, even after German largely settled on Antiqua, the disputes about Großschreibung (capitalization of nouns, roughly) still give people plenty to argue about.
J.W. Brewer said,
January 4, 2025 @ 2:37 pm
Another somewhat analogous example might be in Belarusian, where there are still rival systems of spelling (both in Cyrillic glyphs) that have taken on ideological/factional connotations, with the continuing partisans of 1918-standardized system that was officially replaced by the still-current rival standard in 1933 tending to be in diasporic/exile communities or among those domestic nationalists hostile to the present government and to the legacy of the man who was running things in 1933 (viz. Stalin). See, e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tara%C5%A1kievica.
David Marjanović said,
January 5, 2025 @ 8:53 am
Cyrillic vs. Latin isn't between Serbian and Croatian, it's entirely within Serbian. And there, people are capable of writing without noticing which alphabet they're using, because they line up 1 : 1 letter by letter*, so they're more like Antiqua vs. Fraktur than like two different scripts.
*…because nj, lj and dž each count as one letter in the Latin version… that's taken seriously, though: they go into a single square in crosswords and even in vertical writing on the sides of shop buildings. In Croatia, too.
Those are different standardizations of the language, with (slightly) different grammar and vocabularies; more like Catalan vs. Valencian. (But, yes, they come with somewhat different spelling systems, so the differences look larger than they are.)