Fili’s world

Foreigners living in Taiwan love to joke about the mess Taiwan has with how to romanize Chinese. Travel guides make jokes about how a single street in Taiwan can offer three completely different looking names, from the three different methods used to romanize Chinese. While I was in Bangkok, trying to adjust to the fact there’s a ticket to Taiwan in my pocket, I was looking for a Chinese phrasebook to prepare me for what was described to me as an “English-less country”. I did the awful mistake of buying a second-hand Lonely-Planet phrase book, from a series that helped me wonders with my Vietnamese while visiting Vietnam. It was an awful mistake because the book’s author suggested that all Romanization methods thought up so far were bad, and that he wanted to create a new one that’s closer to what he believed was more natural. It wasn’t natural, it was just irritating, and after a few lousy attempts I threw it away. I struggled for a week with my Chinese class to understand Hanyu Pinyin and that has proved to be a much better system. Taiwan, ofcourse, doesn’t use Pinyin at all but rather po-bo-mo-fo, and when it does - it has its own version of Pinyin. They don’t really seem to care about that mess, and indeed - why should they?

Lately, I keep reading that the Taiwan authorities are making an effort to transform Taiwan’s own Romanization system to the Romanization system used in Singapore and Main-Land China. It’s a slow and painful process, with great difficulties. Consider, for example the name of Taiwan’s capital - Taipei. That name has also translated into other languages as the formal name, like in Hebrew the name is “Tai-peh”. Hanyu Pinyin, which Taiwan is moving into, actually writes the more correct way of Tai-bei. Now, how easy do you think it is changing a country’s capitol name world wide? It’s just frustrating.
Also, when I wanted to send a Taiwanese’s romanized name abroad, I wanted them to refer to her name correctly so I thought I’d better send the Hanyu Pinyin name, but then she made me realize that the name she had on her passport was using the other Romanization system. It’s just confusing.

My foreigner friends in Taiwan, especially those from English speaking countries, were quite annoyed by this. Well, then… at least Taiwan and China have somesort of a system that makes sense. When I saw a Chinese word translated, I could at least recognize what system it used and then maybe try and use that. But, the Romanization method for Hebrew is completely messed up. I don’t think Israelis that speak Hebrew consider the Romanization of Hebrew words often. Sure, I was confronted with this problem before when giving away my address. Do I live in Iben Ezra st, or Eben Ezra, maybe Even Ezra? but did I really care?

Touring a gorgeous place in Jerusalem this morning where, rumor has it, St. John the Baptist was born (My link) - I saw tourists struggling with the name. Is it Ein Karem… ? maybe Ain Carim or even Ein Karim? I saw at least 6 different variations to this one name and on the web I discovered a few others. There is, so it seems, a standard method for romanizing Hebrew, but no one in Israel really cares about that (Wikipedia has a whole historical explanation about it here). In Israel, it gets even more complicated since Israel writes everything in both Hebrew, English and Arabic, sometimes even adding Russian to help the recent 1 million Russian Jews arrivals since the USSR fell.
Trying to help out a Japanese guy lost in city center I saw that his book contained really bad Romanization for the streets’ names, with which I’m sure he wouldn’t be able to find anything. I thought he should just ask people rather than trying to compare his book’s name to the signs posted on street corners, but that’s no solution for the English-shy nationalities visiting Israel, like the Japanese folks.

In Taiwan there’s a movement to try and promote the use of Hanyu Pinyin. Maybe I should start something similar for the Hebrew Romanization in Jerusalem.