>From 1387-1814, a ~430 years period, that's quite a long time. About the total recountable history of Taiwan... :)
In her 400 some history Taiwan has been occupied by several foreign powers, including Dutch, Tsing Dynasty from China, Japan, and KMT party from China again. The long time fight against foreign powers were all futile, resulted in a 'macro-personality' of getting used to be slaves. The mentality of being slaves is that when you have the chance to play master yourself, you still look up to the old master to either get approval or beg for mercy. This resulted in a bizzard situation in current Taiwan that even a local-based, democratic government was elected, the old foreign power is still the underground power that truly control all aspects of Taiwan. They reject whatever policies the democratic government plan. Many nation-wide constructions that the old power planned and supported when they were in power, they turn their positions into rejecting those them. The slave mentality of the public is something that help those old power to paralize the society. With that, a language reform to reduce the cultural influence of the foreign power is therefore hopeless in Taiwan (at least currently). Maybe Norwegians have some sort of that mentality too ? Considering that they rather to elect people from the old foreign power ... On 1/29/06, Magnus Lycka <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Runsun Pan wrote: > > The simplified chinese exists due to the call for modernization of > > language decades ago. That involved the 'upside-down' of almost > > entire culture > This is in some ways quite the opposite compared to Nynorsk > in Norway, which was an attempt to revive the old and pure > Norwegian, after being dominated (in politics as well as in > grammar) by Denmark from 1387-1814. (I guess it was a > complicating factor that the end of the union with Denmark > led to a union with Sweden. The Norwegians probably had some > difficulties deciding what neighbour they disliked most. When > they broke out of the union with Sweden in 1905, they actually > elected a Danish prince to be their king.) Anyway, only a > fraction of the Norwegians use Nynorsk today, and the majority > still speak the Danish-based bokmål. On the other hand, the > spelling of bokmål has also been modernized a lot, with a > series of spelling reforms of both languages. > -- > http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list > -- ~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~ Runsun Pan, PhD [EMAIL PROTECTED] Nat'l Center for Macromolecular Imaging http://ncmi.bcm.tmc.edu/ncmi/ ~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~ -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
