Category Archives: Languages in Taiwan

Tiger Couplets: New Year New Door Decor

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Out and about in Taipei over the new year, I spotted quite a lot of Year of the Tiger couplets, some printed, some more original. Some of them even gave an insight into the political persuasion of the inhabitants.

This couplet was distributed by Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲), chair of the Taiwan People’s Party, and it was one of the main rivals to the one issued by President Tsai Ing-wen and Vice President Lai Ching-te. If you’re a Ko-fen (柯粉/a fan of Ko Wen-je) or just fancy a few political discussions in your lobby with neighbours of different political stripes, you can print it yourself at the Taipei City gateway here. The Chinese word for “tiger” (虎 hu3) is a near-homonym for 「褔」 (good fortune/fu2), especially in Taiwanese-accented Mandarin (台灣國語) in which the “h” sound is often pronounced as “f”. So this couplet is a play on this, with the first two characters having the dual meaning of “tiger pouncing” and “a jump in wealth.”

President Tsai volleyed with this snazzy design 「福運旺來」 (again, good fortune also hints at its near homonym in tiger):

The couplet on the right of the doorway below reads: 「事業興旺」 (asking for success in career), while on the right panel there is another tiger couplet.

On the left panel of the door there are some quite cool examples of compound characters (合體字):

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Taiwanese besties: 「換帖的」and 「麻吉」

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The use of Taiwanese in this Ministry of Foreign Affairs post struck me as interesting. As the term 「換帖」 exists in Mandarin too, they used romanized script to ensure that it is read in Taiwanese. I guess this makes it harder for people in a certain country to work out what it’s supposed to mean, but I also wonder how many Taiwanese people would catch on:

https://www.facebook.com/mofa.gov.tw/posts/1189156254942348

「可以說是台灣的uānn-thiap–ê 的柯寧參議員」

You could say Senator Cornyn is bosom buddies with Taiwan.

“uānn-thiap–ê” describes a close friendship formed by a blood-brothers style pact, wherein two friends exchange cards with information on each other (name, age, place of origin, family history), to forge a kinship. Now it’s used to describe good friends.

Another, more common term to describe a close friend is 「麻吉」. The term is pretty common and was even used for the title of the film Ted in Taiwan 《熊麻吉》:


There are several folk morphologies for this term, from the stickiness of mochi cakes (pronounced similarly in Taiwanese/ muâ-tsî) to a corruption of the word 「默契」 (though no clear reason for the corruption is given). The most convincing theory is that it’s a corruption of the English word “match” in Taiwanese. Whatever its origin, it’s a pretty handy word to use and will let everyone know that you’re in touch with the popular culture references of 10 years ago.

The Green Crown Prince Cheng Wen-tsan of Taoyuan

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The fun thing about Taipei is that political opinions are often very in your face, whether it is a taxi driver going on about how the ruling party is driving the economy into the ground or a random bit of graffiti scrawled on a traffic box about the Taoyuan Mayor that piques your curiosity as to the context:

太子鄭文燦
Crown prince Cheng Wen-tsan

The frame of reference for this fantastic piece of “artwork” dates back to the words of Taipei City Councilor Lo Chih-chiang (羅智強) back in May. He suggested that there were double standards going on, in that the 1st Mayor of Taoyuan Cheng Wen-tsan (鄭文燦) had received special treatment when it came to the Novotel outbreak of coronavirus because of his favorable position in the ruling Democratic Progressive Party, as Lo put it he is a 「綠朝太子」 “the crown prince of the Green dynasty” – here green is a reference to the colors of the DPP vs the blue of the opposition KMT (Lo’s party). The accusation is that Cheng was able to push all of the responsibility on to the central government because of this special treatment, while other mayors got lambasted for doing the same. Lo then went on to taunt Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲), asking him if he was jealous of this special treatment (an attack based on Ko’s tumultuous past relationship with the DPP).

Ko–who always seems to have a quip at the ready–.replied that if he’d pushed all the the responsibility to the central government, the situation would have been f*cked long ago and he doesn’t have it as easy as some (pointing no elbows at Cheng I’m sure).

Posing as the Enemy: Wang Ting-yu and the 反串ing DPP Hubby

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The internet has brought us all sorts of newly coined terms, like 「五毛」 (Wumao/Five centers/internet users paid to promote PRC talking points), 「小粉紅」 (young jingoistic Chinese netizens) and others. But one that keeps coming up recently is 「反串」fǎnchuàn which is actually a repurposed opera term, originally meaning to play a character deviating from your normal repertoire.

But in the hostility-laden world of cross-strait social media interactions, it’s used to indicate deliberately posing as the enemy or opponent online, either to discredit their arguments, destroy their image or go so extreme that even the people on their side get put off. This is the social media equivalent of a bad guy impersonating Superman and kicking a little boy in the shin on camera. An alternative use is satire, mocking of the way the other side argues their case.

The latter seems to be what Lin Wei-feng, the husband of the deputy director of the DPP’s social media operations center, is claiming he was doing when he took to Taiwan’s popular bulletin board system PTT (which has been closed to new registrations for a while now due to suspected infiltration by Chinese trolls) to tell people to block or delete the Centers of Disease Control’s Line account on their phones and spreading a range of other disinformation. In what some (the KMT mostly) presume was a stage-managed gesture, DPP Legislator drew attention to the posts stating that PRC collaborators had infiltrated the platform and added that fake versions of the CDC Line app were being used to spread disinformation online. Lin’s apology refutes the idea that this was a DPP plot in a “so cringy it has the ring of truth” apology he posted to Facebook, which includes lines like “In fact, my partner has often expressed annoyance at my use of social media, and has advised me not to get caught up in wars of words on the internet.”:

This whole story was summarized recently by one of my favorite Taiwanese internet celebrities Potter King, in which he rightly states, that just because in this case it was a Taiwanese person behind the “disinformation,” doesn’t mean that China isn’t engaged in disinformation campaigns against Taiwan. Lin’s actions have made it all the more difficult for the DPP to make this case without the political baggage that he’s added to it being brought up over and over again.

The moral of the story is, even if you think you’re being extremely witty on the internet, don’t spread anything that could be interpreted as disinformation (especially when your wife works for the party currently in power).

DIY Variants: Excellent!

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I spotted this intriguing-looking character on a signboard on a road I have walked down a million times before. It looks like a cross between 「優」(yōu/excellent) and 「收」(shōu/to receive):

Google tells me the name of the company–which sells office supplies and prints name cards–is 「猷美」(yóuměi), so the other two characters on the sign seem decorative. If anyone has solved this mystery before or has any suggestions, let me know.

I tried the variant dictionary already and there does seem to be a wide variety of different forms of 「優」, none I saw though replaced the 「心」and 「夂」 with a 「收」though:

Update: Thanks to jdmartinsen for resolving the mystery, stating that the 「丩」 is likely a stylized 「忄」:

劉炳森寫的優

The 「優」 in the sign seems to resemble the style of calligrapher Liu Bingsen, as shown in this calligraphic database.

You can see that the 「有」 also employs a variant form, with 「𠂇」 written 「㐅」, similar but not identical to one of the variants listed below:

Another sign in a shop two streets away had this (rather more common) variant of 「價」(jià/price):

This simplified version of 「價」 is also the Japanese kanji version of the character, 「価」(か/ka). Cool to see the use of variants in action and perhaps Japanese usage influencing choice of shorthand in Chinese.

‘What the f*ck?’ in Taiwanese from 是在哈囉 to 洗嘞哈囉

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I’ve been hearing the phrase 「是在哈囉」 for a while now. The most recent case of which was a while back when a Taiwanese friend responded to a former member of the diplomatic service who wrote tell-all posts on his Facebook lodging his complaints about his former colleagues.

https://www.facebook.com/freeTAIPEI/posts/381023249137797

According to this handy slang guide from Business Next, the phrase takes its origin from when Americans say “Hello~~~?” (wavy intonation) to mean “What the f*ck is going on with you?”. Originally I’d thought the phrase meant attracting attention just for the sake of courting controversy, but according to the Business Next interpretation, it’s basically “up to f*ckery” or “behaving or acting bizarrely”.

中天 (whoops) posted this video suggesting that lots of people don’t really know what it means but get the general gist:

As with much slang, different people use it in different ways and it evolves over time (see the varying interpretations of 「三八」 to start your journey down the rabbit hole), so I thought I’d pick a few random examples of its use from across the internet so that you can troll strangers without nagging doubts about the appropriateness of your cutting remark on their new Instagram pics.

This example is an ad trying to encourage people to return to their hometowns to vote:

Even Minister of Foreign Affairs Joseph Wu has apparently employed the phrase when questioning the actions of the WHO:

Do these people live in a parallel universe? What the hell is going on?

A Taiwanese soap star Brent Hsu also made the Taiwanese version of the phrase popular in the Taiwanese drama Proud of You (《天之驕女》):

In the phrase 「洗嘞哈囉」, the character 「洗」 is used to represent the pronounciation of the character 「是」 sī in Taiwanese, and the character 「嘞」”lei” in Mandarin and “leh” in Taiwanese represents the Taiwanese character for 「在」 (to be doing s.t.). Then the 「哈囉」 is just a representation of the borrowing of the word Hello from English.

As you can see many of these posts are from last year or the year before, so expect saturation with this phrase at some point and a few rolled eyes if you use it at this point.

Another way to say “What the f*ck!?” in Taiwan is to use the phrase 「花若發」 (huā ruò fā) which is an approximation of the sound of the English phrase (What the f*ck) using Chinese characters (and Mandarin pronounciation).

Anti-Taiwanese vandalism on International Mother Language Day

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I’m not sure quite what was going on with this angry red spoldge of red spray paint on the 「拍謝」 on the construction site sign below:

construction site sign Taiwanese language with characters scored out

「拍謝」 is the informal way to write the Taiwanese term 「歹勢」 or “phái-sè”, which is the Taiwanese equivalent of the Mandarin term 「不好意思」 (sorry).

I’m curious about the motivations of the vandalizer. Are they against the use of Taiwanese on a formal sign? Are they against the borrowing of Mandarin sounds to represent Taiwanese, rather than the 「歹勢」 that is used more commonly? Or are they against the use of Chinese characters to represent Taiwanese at all? Or was it just a random stain that got on the sign somehow?

Given the history of its suppression, language tends to be a sensitive issue in Taiwan. Writer Huang Chun-ming (黃春明) even took off his shirt during a lecture back in 2011 due to a disagreement with Associate Professor Wi-vun Chiung (蔣為文) in the audience over the necessity for Taiwanese-language instruction for primary schools and Huang’s unwillingness to adopt Latin script to represent the Taiwanese language (as implied by the sign below).

Huang Chun-ming with his shirt off
professor holding up a protest sign in Taiwanese
Taiwanese writers don’t use Taiwanese language, but use Chinese language to create, oh the shame!

Ironically you’ll see Professor Chiung uses the Simplified version of the character 「國」 in his sign. Linguistic hardliners are not really my cup of tea, and I much prefer the hodge-podge of English, Mandarin and Taiwanese that the construction site sign portrays.

Passive Aggressive Food Fights in the Workplace: Don’t f*ck with my biandang! + heart emoji

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note in Chinese requesting that people do not turn off the machine

If you work in an Asian office, a biandang/lunchbox/bento warmer is a standard bit of kit. Lots of people have metallic lunchboxes which you can put inside to keep them warm until lunchtime.

There has been an escalating passive-aggressive argument lately in my office, as someone has been turning off the warmer as soon as they take their own lunch, leaving the remaining coworkers with lukewarm lunches, which is the eighth of the seven deadly sins (James 2:15-17).

I’m a microwave kind of guy, so haven’t been involved in the tussle, but the note was posted back in January without the highlighted text or scrawl down the side:

敬請最後一位使用者關掉即可，感謝！（想吃熱便當 heart emoji)
以上 2021.01.21
Please only turn off the machine if you are the final person to use it! (I want a hot lunch)
Yours Jan 21, 2021

Since then, while innocently waiting for the microwave to finish, I’ve noticed the door ajar and the machine off a few times with quickly cooling biandangs still inside.

This led to the escalation down the side and the addition of dots and highlighted text:

*不要再關啦！2021.2.8
Stop turning it off! Feb. 8, 2021

I’m sure the culprit is someone with good intentions but over-wrought anxiety about the biandang warmer never being turned off and consuming the whole building in flames, however, it does seem like a bit of a dick move to continue to turn it off.

Out and About with Variants in Taiwan

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I’m always interested to see how variants of standard Chinese characters are still used in everyday life, whether it’s handwriting, signs or an author making a stylistic choice.

I spotted this beauty at a petrol station in Taitung. You can understand the reason for the simplification of the top of the character given the chunky font required by this kind of paint:

This character is 「嚴」(yán/strictly), but the top has been simplified along the same lines as the simplified version of the character 「严」. It retains the 「敢」 of the traditional character though:

You can look up these kinds of variants in the variant dictionary here.

Funnily enough there is a standard 「嚴」 on the sign to the left of the one circled.

Have you ever caught a p̶o̶k̶e̶m̶o̶n̶ Chinese character variant in the wild? Submissions welcome!