Protestors decry discrimination against Taiwanese language (fwd link)

[Nahed Johnspoon]

There's also a kind of irony in the complaint being made about the  
name of the Minnan language, because the term is the exact Mandarin  
cognate of Bân-lâm-gú, the indigenous name: "Southern Fujian  
Language". Bân-lâm is Minnanese for "Southern Fujian Province", not  
"snake". The alternative name is Tâi-oân-oē, which has the Mandarin  
equivalent "Taiwanhua", or "the Taiwanese language". It's also  
distinct from Hokkien and Amoy, although still close, so neither of  
those names are appropriate either.

In short, it's a strange complaint, kind of like saying, "The word  
Zhongwen is racist because it contains the word 'middle', and we are  
not average!" when actually the name is from "The Middle Kingdom" and  
not some other meaning of "zhong".

There are very strong reasons for supporting Bân-lâm-gú speakers in  
Taiwan - but that the name contains a word with the radical for  
"snake" in it doesn't appear to be a good one.

On 2009 33 - 11 Aug, at 21:55 EDT, William J Poser wrote: "Just as a  
clarification, the "Taiwanese" in question here is not one of the  
aboriginal languages of Taiwan. The true aboriginal languages are the  
various Austronesian languages. Then there is a layer of varieties of  
Chinese spoken by the earlier Chinese colonists. The majority of the  
early layer of Chinese colonists spoke a Southern Min variety of  
Chinese (Min Nan in Mandarin Chinese). That is what is here referred  
to as "Taiwanese". The most recent layer in the Taiwanese cake is  
Mandarin Chinese, imposed as the official language by the losers of  
the Chinese Civil War who took control of Taiwan at the end of WWII.  
Without implying any value judgment, this is a conflict between  
earlier and later colonial languages, in some ways comparable to  
conflicts between Spanish and English in the Southwestern US."