Notes on Taiwan

There is a lot which I find frustrating in this article. Starting with the first clear tell:

> But, as we will see, the question of how unified China and Taiwan ever were to begin with is a fraught one.

Only to people in mainland China. This was the first abundantly clear head scratcher in the article. I’m boggled at how you could visit Taiwan and not see at first glance it is an ENTIRELY different country from the mainland.

I’m posting this from Taiwan. No one considers this an uncertain question. The only discussion is over what form that separation from mainland China takes, and whether to emphasize it or downplay for pragmatic reasons.

> Most of the time, when I hear someone tell me about the ostensible benefits they got from learning a language, they justify it with Whorfianisms about how ‘language shapes how you think’ which I think has been convincingly refuted by modern psycholinguistics.

I learned a second language as an adult, and my kids are bilingual. I have many times made this claim, and you are misunderstanding it. This is not the strong version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. It is simple: language is at best a pointer towards meaning, with nothing in grammatical structure or vocabulary choice being intrinsic. There can be and are meanings that are hard to express in certain languages. Learning a second language, especially one very different from your mother tongue, makes you CONSCIOUS of this fact at every moment.

> The creation of Hanyu Pinyin was an example of that rarest thing in history: Chairman Mao actually doing something good. The adoption of pinyin allowed Chinese people to type in a standardised way, and thus the introduction of keyboards and the computer wasn’t complete chaos.

Pinyin is a horrible crutch with a ton of issues both for native speakers and learners. The choice of letters is poorly thought out, and some sounds are badly undifferentiated in pinyin, and others that are very very different from the use of Roman letters in other languages.

As you note in the article, Taiwan has a perfectly fine phonetic script that works better for mandarin speakers, is easier to type, and is well established. The only use for romanization is for foreigners, largely the printing of place names on signage. There the importance is phonetic accuracy as read by a foreigner with minimal exposure to chinese. For that, pinyin is the absolute worst choice.

Otherwise, thank you for bringing some attention to this beautiful island.