From Takow to Kaohsiung

Tingzhou Road (汀州路), or is it Dingzhou Road, Taipei City.

Tingzhou Road (汀州路) runs from Wanhua District (萬華區) at its northwestern end, through Zhongzheng District (中正區), to Wenshan District (文山區) at its southern point.

According to Wikipedia, it was constructed on the open corridor left following demolition of the old Taipei-Xindian railway line in 1965 but, since the same claim is made on another Wikipedia page for the nearby, largely parallel, and much straighter Roosevelt Road (羅斯福路; named after 32nd US President Franklin D. Roosevelt, in office 1933-1945), it is tempting to trust the latter.

Most local people used to call this "Dingzhou Rd.", however; in fact, many still do. It's most unlikey that they pay much heed to the romanized spellings of their street names, but this wouldn't have helped anyway, since under the old spelling system "ㄉㄧㄥ" and "ㄊㄧㄥ" were romanized as "ting" and "t'ing", but since the apostrophe was routinely dropped (otherwise, for example, there would be T'aiwan and T'aipei), both would become "Tingchou Rd." Moreover, even after the Taipei City Government started using Hanyu Pinyin, it mistakenly used "Dingzhou Rd." for several years, before correcting signs to the current "Tingzhou".

More likely they were simply not familiar with the River Ting (汀江) or the ancient Tang-dynasty state and modern city of Tingzhou (汀州) in China's Fujian Province, and were simply practicing the technique when encountering a character one doesn't know the pronunciation for of 有邊讀邊 無邊讀中間 ([when] there is a side [element], read the side; [if] there's no side [element], read the middle [element]). This is frequently successful since most Chinese characters are composed of two parts, one semantic and the other phonetic. Indeed, while 汀 is just such a character, with the three dots on the left indicating water, that is, a river, and the 丁 on the right functioning as a phonetic indicator, unfortunately there has evidently been some phonetic shifting over the last 2,000-plus years since 丁 and 汀 must have been pronounced the same, as the former is now pronounced "ding" and the latter "ting". Oh dear.

Given the Taipei City Government's historical prediliction for naming its streets after places in China [MC: perhaps to honor civilian officials in the KMT postwar administration or military figures who faught and/or died in the anti-Japanese / anti-CCP wars], it is not surprising, especially if these are obscure and thousdands of kilometers from Taiwan, that local people sometimes mispronounce the characters. Tingzhou is just across the Taiwan Strait in Fujian Province, much harder say, 臨沂街 (Linyi Street) named for Linyi (臨沂; lit. "Close to River Yi"; [MC: perhaps selected because it was the hometown of 3rd-century CE military Strategist Zhuge Liang {諸葛亮}) City further to the north in Shandong Province, especially as 沂 seems to be composed of "water" (i.e. river) semantic element on the left, and 斤 (Mdn. jin) on the right, suggesting a pronunciation of Linjin St., or perhaps Linzhe St. (after 折 (Mdn. zhe; "to break off / bend").

[MC; Completely irrelevant to this blog but perhaps of interest to some anyway: 丁字路口 (Mdn. ding-zi-lu-kou) is not the 口 ("mouth", i.e. "entrance") to 丁字路 (Dingzi Road) but is the Chinese word (yes, Chinese words can have 4 characters, it is not a monosyllabic language as is often claimed) for "T-junction", since it literally means "丁-character-road-entrance". Similarly, 十字路口 (Mdn. shi-zi-lu-kou; lit. "十-character-road-entrance") is the Chinese word for "crossroads".]



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