Commencement speech of Korean student at National Taiwan University (NTU)
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In almost perfect Taiwan Mandarin, you can see and hear Song Meina deliver her graduation speech here. A transcription of her speech may be found in this newspaper article. The article has four pages, and her speech begins at the bottom of the first page. It is sprinkled with a small amount of Korean and a bit of Taiwanese, but it is otherwise fluent, idiomatic Taiwan Mandarin.
Particularly noticeable was that the transcription wrote the Mandarin phonetic symbols bo po mo fo ㄅ、ㄆ、ㄇ、ㄈ as the beginning of her learning Mandarin at an overseas elementary school in Korea. I was also struck by the use of the phonetic symbol "e ㄟ" several times, once as an exclamation and the other times as the Taiwanese grammatical particle indicating possession pronounced ê [e].
It is a moving speech, one that brought tears to my eyes. With her parents present in the large audience, Song Meina spoke eloquently, including giving voice to this inspiring motto:
Kùnjìng bùshì zhōngdiǎn, ér shì zhuǎnwān de qǐdiǎn.
困境不是終點，而是轉彎的起點。
"Difficulties are not the end, but the starting point for a change."
Selected readings
- "Graduation speech by a West African student at National Taiwan University" (6/10/20)
- "French girl sells crêpes in a Taiwan market" (4/9/20)
- "No character for the most frequent morpheme in Taiwanese" (12/10/13)
- "Our Taiwan" (11/19/13)
[Thanks to Chau Wu]
Chau said,
June 3, 2025 @ 9:08 am
I noticed that Ms. Song pronounced 日 (as in 今日是禮物 at 1’56” into the video) very much like the Korean il (日). My study of lexical correspondences between the West and East suggests that the origin for this Korean word is Greek: Ancient Greek hélios > first syllable *hél- > (h- dropping) *él- > (e/i exchange) Korean il. When this Greek word came to Asia, Korean ancestor speakers borrowed it first (they got the first cut). Subsequently, an innovation occurred in converting European initial h- to a nasal n-, so that *hel- > *nel- > (final -l > -t) *net > Later Han *nit (Coblin, Schuessler). The latter leads to Japanese nichi and Taiwanese (denasalized) jἱt. Thus, Taiwanese jἱt and Japanese nichi may also be derived from hélios.