Links
Taiwan's romanization situation
Romanization
An earlier version of this site. It has some things not found here.
Chih-hao Tsai
His research page covers romanization,
psycholinguistics, the psychology of reading, and cognitive science, while his
technology page covers his computing
and programming work, which is primarily related to the processing of Chinese. An
excellent resource.
Dan "jidanni" Jacobson's latest pinyin battle.
Tailingua
An introduction to the Taiwanese language.
De-Sinification: Language and Nationalism in
Asia
A pro-romanization site that includes many interesting and relevant research
papers on languages, including Taiwanese, Mandarin, Vietnamese, and Korean. The
papers are in a variety of languages: English, Taiwanese, and Mandarin.
Taiwan's National
Languages Committee (formerly the Mandarin Promotion Council)
In the bad old days of martial law, this unit of Taiwan's Ministry of Education
used to be responsible for hastening Hokien ("Taiwanese"), Hakka, and the
languages of Taiwan's indigenous tribes down the road toward oblivion.
Fortunately, that has changed, especially under the administration of President
Chen Shui-bian. Unfortunately, however, this is also the group that allowed
Tongyong Pinyin to be adopted for Mandarin and Hakka -- what a mistake!
Bilingual Environment Service
System
The Taiwan government's Web site devoted to promoting a "bilingual" (i.e. English
and Modern Standard Mandarin Chinese) environment. Unfortunately, there is a
tendency here to fail to distinguish between English and using romanization for
Mandarin, which are entirely different things. I will give the Research,
Development, and Evaluation Commission credit, however, for holding some
interesting though limited seminars on the topic of romanization.
site at Academia Sinica on
Tongyong Pinyin
There's little left now of the English portion of this site, which was never much
more than a collection of things previously published in the Taiwan News,
including that newspaper's hilariously inept editorials in favor of Tongyong.
("Mankind, due to his diversity in appearances, cultures, thoughts, and language,
supersedes, if we may say so, other species on this planet....") There's more
material in the Mandarin Chinese section.
Taiwan news reports
mentioning pinyin
Searches the Yam.com Web site for news stories (in Mandarin Chinese, with traditional
characters) mentioning 拼音 (pinyin).
China news reports mentioning pinyin
Searches the Baidu.com Web site for news stories (in Mandarin Chinese, with simplified
characters) mentioning 拼音 (pinyin). Here are
the same
search results in English (as run through a not great but free machine
translator).
Pinyin-related software
Wenlin
Software for learning Chinese. The program incorporates the excellent
ABC Comprehensive Chinese-English Dictionary.
Asia Communications Québec
Inc.
Makers of KEY and other software products useful for the study of Mandarin
Chinese.
GoChinese
Educational software for learning Mandarin Chinese. GoChinese is founded on
word-based Hanyu Pinyin, which has proven highly effective for supporting the
learning of Mandarin.
Gowell Software
Gowell products range from Mandarin educational software to Chinese word
processors.
Pinyin Joe's Chinese Computing
Resources
Primarily user-friendly advice on how to set up a Western-language version of
Microsoft Windows to read and write Chinese characters, including using Pinyin
and Zhuyin.
Google Pinyin Input
There's also an
English translation for the directions.
Language-related sites
Adso Free Chinese-English Annotation and Gist
Translation
This site can convert Chinese Web pages or text into Pinyin (with tone marks) as
well as annotate Chinese Web pages. A wonderful resource.
Ocrat.com, an early site that unfortunately disappeared from the Net, taking with it plenty of useful material. Now it's back in a different location -- as a mirror of the much of the original.
cjvlang: the Chinese, Japanese, and Vietnamese writing systems
Zhongwen.com
This popular site has lots of useful information. Unfortunately, however, many
people tend to take the character etymologies there at face value. Most of the
etymologies so prominently available at this site are little more than fairy
tales. Use with caution.
the basic properties of Chinese
characters
"If English was written like Chinese," an article by Mark Rosenfelder.
Pronunciation of
Mandarin Chinese
Useful information on the proper pronunciation of Mandarin, with the examples
given in Hanyu Pinyin.
Marjorie Chan's
China Links
Annotated list of more than 600 websites related to the Chinese languages and
linguistics.
Chinese Language and Culture
Forum
Forums for studying Chinese include Reading and Writing, Speaking and Listening,
Grammar and Vocabulary, Textbooks and Resources, Universities and Schools,
Non-Mandarin Chinese, and Chinese Computing and Technology.
The Pear Stories
Narratives across seven Chinese "dialects."
Sino-Platonic Papers
Sino-Platonic Papers is an occasional series edited by Victor H. Mair of the
University of Pennsylvania's Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies.
Although the chief focus of Sino-Platonic Papers is on the intercultural relations
of China with other peoples, it also features challenging and creative studies on
a wide variety of philological subjects. All new issues are free, with the back
catalog also being released gradually in free PDF editions.
English, French,
German, and Chinese Romanisations of Chinese
Interesting disucssion of some romanization methods and issues.
Helmer Aslaksen
Aslaksen's wide-ranging site offers much of interest, especially his pages on the
Chinese calender and using pinyin on the Internet.
The Morrison
Collection
Information relating to the [Robert] Morrison Collection of Chinese books at the
School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). Robert Morrison was the compiler of
the first Chinese-English dictionary.
Language Log
Victor H. Mair is a frequent contributor on Sinitic languages.
Sinoglot
Home to Beijing Sounds (audio & discussion on Beijing dialect and culture), Yǔwén (Mandarin acquisition by native speakers), Nothing Undone (literary Chinese study and discussion), Echoes of Manchu (information & discussion on the Manchu language), the Naxi Script Resource Center (information on Naxi writing and language), Annals of Wu (audio & discussion on Wu/Shanghainese), and xiǎo ér jīng (life & language among China's Muslims).
Abecedaria
A great blog about keyboarding in diverse scripts, literacy and digital literacy,
and random quotes selected from the history of writing system theory. Inactive
since April 2006.
Hanzi Smatter
Dedicated to the misuse of Chinese characters (Hanzi or Kanji) in Western
culture. Much of the time, the focus here is on tattoos.
J. Marshall
Unger
Unger is the chair of the department of East Asian languages and literatures at
the Ohio State University and the author of several important
romanization-related books.
Taiwan-related sites
Taiwanease: Taiwan-related forums, event listings, and directories of restaurants, shopping locations, etc.
Forumosa.com: a Taiwan-oriented BBS.
The Taipei Times
Taiwan's best English-language newspaper ... most of the time.
Taiwan Headlines
A good compendium of material from the English-language papers, along with
several translations from the local Chinese-language newspapers. New material
every weekday. The searchable archives are an excellent resource.
Government Information Office
Taiwan's official information agency -- and my former employer. The site has an
enormous amount of information about Taiwan.
David on Formosa
Commentary on all things Taiwanese.
The View from Taiwan
An amazing amount of commentary, plus links to the many, many Taiwan-related sites
I haven't mentioned.
Computer and Internet-related links:
Dreamhost
My Web hosting company. I've been happy with their prices and service -- and I
get a minor kickback I can use toward maintaining Pinyin.info if you sign up with
them by clicking on the link here (so please do). But I wouldn't put this link
here if I didn't think Dreamhost is good.
HTML Tidy
Checks, cleans, and organizes your HTML. No one with a website should be without
it. There's also a somewhat old
Windows version for those
who don't like working with DOS prompts. Note: If your pages have Chinese
characters that aren't encoded as NCRs, be sure to set the character encoding to
"raw" before using Tidy. Freeware.
NoteTab text editor
A great text editor. Much of this site was written the old-fashioned geek way, by
hand, using NoteTab Light, which is freeware. I've since upgraded to NoteTab
Pro.
EmEditor text editor
Another great text editor. Especially useful for its Unicode support.
World Wide Web Consortium
The group that issues the standards for the Web. Much of this site is written in
tech-speak, but it's still worthwhile.
Eric Meyer's Website
Lots of useful information about CSS from the author of the best books on the
subject. If you have a website but don't know what CSS is, it's time you
learned.
A List Apart
An influential on-line magazine on the care and feeding of Web sites. It's an
important voice in the fight to uphold Web standards.
Opera Web browser
A lean, fast, customizable, standards-compliant Web browser. It is an excellent
choice, whatever your operating system. Available in a
variety of languages.
Firefox Web browser
Another fast, customizable, standards-compliant Web browser. It is completely
free. And while you're at the site, download Thunderbird, too, which can
handle your e-mail more safely than Outlook Express or any other Microsoft
virus-magnet.
Unicode
Unicode is the keeper of the standards that make displaying multilingual pages
such as found on this site easier and better for everyone. Unfortunately, the site
helps spread the ideographic
myth by labeling Chinese characters "ideographs," which they most certainly
are not.
CSS Zen Garden: the beauty of CSS
design
A demonstration of what can be accomplished visually through CSS-based design.
All of the radically different looking sites here have exactly the same valid
HTML. The differences in look are achieved -- as they should be -- through
CSS.
Hivelogic Enkoder
Want to be able to put your e-mail address on a Web site without having it
harvested by "spam-bots," the programs that trawl the Internet for valid addresses
to deluge with spam from Nigerian conmen, etc.? Encode your address first using
this quick and free service.
Other
Angry Young Grad Student
Music
The Village Voice was correct to call
Thomas Anderson "clearly the
greatest unknown songwriter on the planet." Check out the site to start finding
out why that's true.
Book-related links:
Camphor Press
A Taiwan-based publisher of e-books focused on Taiwan and China.
Bookish.Asia: Reviews of books about or set in East Asia.
BookFinder
Excellent tool for searching among sites for new and used books.
AddAll
Another search-bot for books. Unlike BookFinder, its
search function for used books is separate
from the search for new books.
Academia Sinica library system catalog
Taiwan's National Central Library catalog
National Taiwan University Library catalog
