David on Formosa

Tay Tzyy Greening Area

When I first saw this sign I thought it was yet another example of extremely bad romanisation that is often seen in Taiwan. Not only are there several different systems of romanisation in common use, but often the signs are just plain wrong. Tay Tzyy would be written as tàizĭ in Hanyu Pinyin.

The pinyin on the sign is actually written in Gwoyeu Romatzyh (國語羅馬字). This system is designed to avoid the need for tone marks, by adding letters to the end of the word to indicate the tone. It seems like a good idea in theory, but it is overly complicated and not particularly intuitive.

To find out more about Gwoyeu Romatzyh have a look at this information from Pinyin.info and Wikipedia.

I don’t know why they chose to use Gwoyeu Romatzyh on this sign. Perhaps the company that did the stone carving had a dictionary that used the system. The English translation on this sign is actually an even bigger disaster. The latter two characters are 綠地 (lǜdì). The first character 綠 (lǜ) means green, and the second character 地 (dì) means ground. How they came up with “greening area” as a translation I don’t know. The use of area is fine, but greening is obviously wrong. “Green space” or “green area” would be a better translation.

The very small green space

This above photo gives the sign some more context. The “greening area” is disappointingly small. Why they went to so much trouble carving a sign into such a big stone for such a small space I don’t know.