Language News and Notes from Taiwan
Excerpted from JTA articles by Dan Bloom
A new "Jew"?
A human rights group in Taiwan is calling on Chinese journalists
and academics around the world to stop the "discriminatory"
way that the characters for "Jewish people" are written
in Mandarin.
"There are many Chinese characters for 'you-tai,' or Jew,
but the combination that is currently being used refers to an animal
of the monkey species and has the connotation of parsimoniousness,"
Chien Hsi-chieh, the director of the Peacetime Foundation of Taiwan,
said recently.
Chien's remarks at a news conference in Taipei, complete with illustrations
of the offending characters and the new characters he recommends,
were widely reported in Chinese-language media across Taiwan and
China.
Chien said the biased Chinese characters were devised by Christian
missionaries in China around 1830, when they were translating the
Hebrew and Christian Bibles into Chinese and needed a term for "Jews."
"A better choice for the word 'Jews' in Chinese writing would
be one that is pronounced the same but written with a more neutral
character," he said…
Chien first brought the matter to the attention of the Taiwanese
government in 2003 and again in October 2004, where it was discussed
by officials in the Ministries of Education and Foreign Affairs
and the Government Information Office, according to Dennis Lin,
a public relations official at the Peacetime Foundation.
The Taiwanese government under President Chen Shui-bian said it
would help promote the new way of writing the term for Jews in books,
newspapers and on the Internet if local civic groups continued to
put forward the idea. But the government hasn't taken any concrete
action yet, Lin said, noting that the government prefers to let
the Peacetime Foundation, a private, nonprofit group, lead the international
campaign...
Jews are not the only people that written Chinese discriminates
against, Chien added. He also recommended that the Chinese world
community replace the current term for Islam, "hui," with
a better combination of characters, "yi-si-lan," because
the current term has a negative connotation of paganism.
Yiddish Spoken Here
S.H. Chang is a Yiddish specialist at Wenzao Ursuline College of
Languages in Taiwan. She may be one of a kind -- after all, you
don't find many Chinese academics in Taiwan studying and writing
about Yiddish. A soft-spoken Taiwanese woman in her early 30s who
has written about and researched the Yiddish language-she speaks
it as well-Chang is one of the few Yiddish philologists in the Chinese-speaking
world. She heads the department of German at Aiwan College in the
subtropical, southern part of Taiwan...
"When I set about learning Yiddish, I was merely opening up
a new door for myself," the professor says. With a doctorate
from Germany's Trier University under her belt, Chang has gained
world renown as an expert in German and Jewish literature, delivering
academic papers around the world. In addition, she has become a
Jewish historian for the Chinese and Taiwanese people, as well as
a philologist of German and Yiddish…
Chang plans to write a book for the reading public in Taiwan, explaining
the nuances of Yiddishkeit and the history of the Jewish Diaspora
-- and the meaning of such words as kvell, chutzpah and nachas,
she said.
Contact Information: Professor S. H. Chang, Department of German
& Yiddish, Wenzao Ursuline College of Languages, 900 Mintsu
1st Road, Kaohsiung City 807, Taiwan. TEL: +886 7 3426031 ext. 5703.
FAX: +886 7 3474683. EMAIL: changsh@mail.wtuc.edu.tw
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