LANGUAGE - Goodbye, Tongyong Pinyin! 再见,通用拼音!

Meanwhile, in Taiwan, news reaches this blog (hat-tip to Omniglot) of an orthographic reform. Taiwan uses traditional Chinese characters (rather than the Mainland China simplified characters) to represent the Chinese language. When rendering the language in the Roman alphabet, however, Taiwan has been using a system (which I've never heard of until today) called Tongyong Pinyin. I thought they used Wade-Giles in Taiwan, and I partially was right, as although Tongyong Pinyin was made official in Taiwan, it was not universally implemented in Taiwan, so the decision has now been made to officially switch from Tongyong Pinyin to Hanyu Pinyin.

Hanyu Pinyin has been widely documented in its usage in mainland China, and it is interesting that Taiwan has switched. It has been perceived as perhaps a political decision by some. Perhaps one of the biggest decisions is that Hanyu Pinyin is widely used already, and Tongyong is a localised (non-Global) transcription method whereas Hanyu is the transcription method favoured by the UN, whereas Tongyong is not even taught in the schools. One thing in Tongyong's favour though, is that it was easier for the untrained foreigner to read and pronounce it, without the problems of q [tɕʰ], and x [ɕ], which are found in Hanyu Pinyin, but are unlike most expected phonetic renderings of the symbols. The preceeding two sounds by the way are rendered c and s in Tongyong.

So, it just leaves me to say....

再见,通用拼音!
Zaijian, Tongyong pinyin!
Goodbye, Tongyong pinyin!

And for the picky ones out there, yes, the Chinese characters rendered above are in the simplified form, not the traditional form as used in Taiwan. I suppose now it's only a matter of time before Taiwan switches over to simplified Chinese characters as well.