News from CND:Taiwan Adopts Mainland's Romanized Phonetic System

["Nam c. Low" <nclow@home.com>]

I found following news from CND-Global

	http://www.cnd.org/CND-Global/CND-Global.new.html

worth noting. Maybe we shall adopt the same
Hanyu Pingyin as a norm in HGN.

Rgds,
Nam Low


> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 2. Taiwan Adopts Mainland's Romanized Phonetic System ................... 24
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> [CND, 08/01/99] Taiwan is to adopt the mainland's system of romanizing the
> phonetic transcription of Chinese characters, Taiwan's Vice Premier LIU
> Chao-shiuan announced on Tuesday, AFP reported. 
> 
> Hanyu Pinyin, a phonetic system using Roman alphabets to represent Chinese
> characters as pronounced in Mandarin, was introduced in the mainland in
> 1958, after the Nationalists flet the mainland upon losing the civil war. 
> 
> The political and military rivalry with the mainland led Taiwan to reject
> Pinyin. However, Taiwan has been using a few systems without a single
> standard, resulting in different versions of romanized spellings for the
> same Chinese character. 
> 
> Mr. Liu said that Taiwan's adoption of Hanyu Pinyin was due to the
> system's widespread international recognition. Therefore a pragmatic
> approach is necessary for linguistic matters. 
> 
> There will be exceptions to the newly-adopted system, such as long
> established city names like Taipei and Kaosiung for their easy
> international recognition. People are also free to choose their own
> romanized names. (XU Mingyang, YIN De An) 
>