| > It's also counterproductive to let humans learn a language of limited content resources and use cases. Taiwanese/Hokkien have limited content resources because of conscious decisions of previous governing bodies in China, Singapore, Taiwan (not sure about Malaysia). If they had been allowed to flourish, actively promoted and native speakers were taught how to write, it would be a lot different today. The premise of the article is false. Taiwanes/Hokkien has had a standardized written form since the 19th century. The problem is most native speakers do not know it, so really what it suffers from are low literacy rate. I communicate in written Taiwanese via text quite often. Over the past ten years or so, the government in Taiwan has been trying to promote native language literacy, but with so-so results due to what I see as poor pedagogy. > I don't know how to express clearly in Taiwanese Many heritage or home speakers probably feel the same way. There are strong social stigmas against using Taiwanese in academia or people seeing it as a crude language. But if you are a native speaker of both Mandarin and Taiwanese, it isn't too hard to learn the written form if you want to. I'm not a native speaker of Taiwanese, but I can make somewhat intelligible translations of them. A native speaker who has learned to write Taiwanese and knows English could do a better job. > GPS in my neighborhood has a 100x lower accuracy because of radio interference Tī goán chhù-piⁿ in-ūi tiān-chû kau-jiáu só͘-í GPS ê cheng-chún-tō͘ khah pháiⁿ chi̍t-pah pē. > move this MOSFET up by 15mm to balance the PCB thermal stress Chit MOSFET ūi-tio̍h chè-ap PCB ê on-tō͘ ài khǹg kòe-khì siōng-chē 15mm. > Even Japanese, a language used by 125 million, has similar issues, my Japanese coworkers frequently switch to English during technical discussions. That's interesting. I have only experienced preference for English technical vocabulary, but never switching of languages. Even for native English speakers they need to have familiarity with the subject or those technical words are unintelligible to them. |