From Takow to Kaohsiung

On the Transliteration of aboriginal names

Given that Chinese is the main language used in Taiwan (with Mandarin pronunciation predominant politically even if not numerically), it is tempting to view place names through this lens. Thus Taipei (台北) is the main city of "northern" (北) "Tai"(台)-wan; Taoyuan (桃園) was a "garden" (園) full of "peach trees" (桃); and Xiangshan (象山) is a "hill" (山) that, from the right angle, resembles an "elephant" (象).

It should not be forgotten, however, that Chinese characters have pronunciations as well as meanings. This might seem a banal thing to point out but, since Chinese lacks an alphabet, when characters are used merely for their phonetic values, they inevitably appear to bring with them their original meanings.

This was one of the main ways that the Chinese written language developed thousands of years ago, with "loan words" (假借字; Mdn. jiajiezì) adopted when, for example, a pictograph of something concrete was borrowed to indicate something abstract with the same or similar pronunciation (with the borrowed character then often losing its original meaning or, frequently, being adapted through addition of a new semantic or phonetic element). Thus, since Chinese people tend to point at their noses to indicate themselves, the original character for a nose, 自, was borrowed to mean "oneself" and no longer means "nose".

This kind of borrowing continued into modern times, particularly when transliterating foreign words into Chinese. Thus Frederick is 弗雷德里克 (Mdn. Fu-lei-de-li-ke; lit. "Not-thunder-virtue-mile-win") and New York is 紐約 (Mdn. Niu-yue; lit. "Button Treaty").

It was also used during the early years of Han-Chinese immigration into Taiwan to transliterate aboriginal names, albeit generally using pronunciations of Chinese characters based on Zhangzhou or Quanzhou forms of Fujianese (here usually referred to by the catch-all "Hoklo Taiwanese") or one of various forms of Hakka language (most commonly in Taoyuan, Hsinchu and Miaoli). This, naturally, makes deciphering toponymic evolution rather prone to errors and misunderstandings [MC: and is certainly far beyond my linguistic abilities].

Taiwan (台灣) was, therefore, not a "terrace" overlooking a "bay", Yuanli (苑裡) in Miaoli County was not something "inside" (裡) a "garden" (苑), and Luermen (鹿耳門) in historical Tainan was not a "gate / port" (門) through which "deer" (鹿) "ears" (耳) were exported. On the contrary, all three are transliterations of aboriginal place names.



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