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Dear Sir or Madam,
I saw in the page of Release Notes in your
site[*1] that, the names of two sets of Chinese characters appear in the
language list as Chinese(China) and Chinese(Taiwan), respectively. This is not
appropriate, if I may say so. The commonly used terms for them are
Chinese(Simplified) and Chinese(Traditional).
Simplified Chinese is used mainly in
mainland China, but it is also used in other countries such as Malaysia and
Singapore. Also, Traditional Chinese characters are not used
only in Taiwan. They are widely used in other regions such as Hongkong and Macao
as well as some oversea Chinese communities. Actually, even in
mainland China, there are still a small number of people who write only
Traditional Chinese characters[*2]. So, marking a character set as "of China" or
"of Taiwan" seems to be inappropriate.
In addition, I don't think the two terms
"China" and "Taiwan" are comparable. Despite that most, if not all people in
mainland China and a part in Taiwan consider Taiwan as a part of China, the word
China itself appears in the covers of passports issued in Taiwan[*3]. So in my
opinon, China is a vague term when used with Taiwan. If one wants to refer to
the the area currently administered by the government of the People's Republic
of China except Hongkong and Macao, the term "mainland China" would be a proper
choice, despite that this may include other islands of China, like
Hainan.
Thank you for reading this
E-mail.
Best Regards,
Jianglong Nan
[*2] A survey in December 2004 showed that this number was
0.95%, much higher than I thought.
[*3] You can see the words "Republic of China" appeared in the
covers of passports issued by the Taiwan government. The Republic of China was
founded in 1912 and its government was the sole legitimate government of the
entire China including Taiwan before 1949, when its ruling party lost the civil
war and retreated to Taiwan.
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