Wednesday, October 27, 2010

International Conferences on Taiwanese Literature -- Did you know about them?



Searching the blog links on the Siá Tâi-oân ê Oē "Write Taiwan's Languages" website, I belatedly found out about an international conference on Taiwanese Literature hosted this past weekend on October 23 and 24th. The site, litintaiwanese.blogspot.com/ reports on this years events and also links to prior years' 2005-2009 conferences.

Here is the title: "2010 Tē 6 kài Tâi-gí bûn-ha̍k kok-tsè ha̍k-su̍t gián-thó-huē." You'll note two things from the title:
1. They are using the Ministry of Education romanization instead of the more wide-spread POJ. This is particularly strange since most Taiwanese Literature is written in POJ. Fortunately, the MOE romanization so closely follows POJ that the reader of one can easily adjust to the other.
2. Note also that these conference organizers knew English well enough to capitalize the entire title in English, but did not have any specific standard for capitalization of Taiwanese. Probably, the conference title should have been done as follows: "2010 Tē 6 kài Tâi-gí Bûn-ha̍k Kok-tsè Ha̍k-su̍t Gián-thó-huē"

We would like to resoundingly cheer on these efforts and make the above notes to illustrate how the work needs to continue so we have completely functional and standardized writing systems for all of Taiwan's non-Mandarin languages. We hope there will be new literature and new conferences in the other languages of Taiwan.

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