- Joined
- Aug 8, 2021
Another one tweeted about whatever the hell this jumble of words is supposed to mean. [A]
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It seems to me this man is working on some kind of romanization program for foreign languages, which is actually somewhat more worthwhile than what the tranch is doing. Sadly it's also far more boring, so there's not much to say other than that's what he's doing currently.
It's definitely a romanization/transliteration program -- specifically, for Taiwainese dialects of Chinese (Mandarin dialect and Hokkien dialect). Bopomofo is a Chinese romanization system that was developed in pre-Communist China by the Republican government (around 1910), and was a common alternative to the much more widely-used Wade-Giles system.
After the Communist Revolution, Beijing replaced it with the Bei-Da (Beijing DaXia, or Beijing University) Pinyin system of romanization. Taiwan wasn't about to use the Commie romanization, but didn't want to use the Western-developed Wade-Giles (which does admittedly suck absolute ass), so they kept alive the old Bopomofo system, primarily for the 2 main Taiwainese dialects, but it can still be used with any form of Chinese. (per the Tweet, Putonghua == literally Mandarin for "Chinese Words")
Why the fuck they're talking about using it in conjunction with Western languages like Greek or Serbian beats the hell out of me, unless they're trying to hack together something vaguely like how Japanese has katakana/romaji which can be used for transliterating foreign languages into something phonetically pronounceable by Japanese speakers.