Interesting and informative post, Tony. I never knew that cross-strait relations were that varied throughout the years. The dynamic in teh 70s seems particularly interesting.
I agree.
Look, I don't even know why this is a political problem. Traditional characters, yeah, I support those, but Wide-Giles simply sucks.
The problem with Wade-Giles is not that is just simply sucks (I'm not defending it here), but because it is misused, primarily by leaving out aspiration, which W-G marks with an apostrophe <'>. It's even more so because the actual "W-G" one sees is really Postal romanization, which let's be honest is very bad very ugly (tempted not to work in the whole "very erotic very violent" meme from years ago), and another thing we can blame the Qing for. If there's one W-G modification that should have been used, it's to replace the apostrophe with an <h>, like in POJ and in the Vietnamese alphabet (though <ph> and <kh> were historical as they were originally aspirate voiceless but are now /f/ and /x/), as well as the romanization of similar consonants in Hindi, other Indo-Aryan languages, and other languages of SE Asia. So in that case:
They are the single worst thing about reading old history books. They turn "Q", "Zh" and "J" all into "Ch" which is the most stupid and confusing thing in existence.
Maintaining the apostrophe or replacing it with an <h> would solve that problem, so <ch> and <ch'/chh> would be Pinyin's <zh> and <ch>, where adding a palatalizing <i> to it - resulting in <chi> and <ch'i/chhi> being equivalent to Pinyin's <j> and <q>. (Oh, and whilst we're at it, we can regularize it so that we have <sh> as such in both systems but have <shi> replace W-G <hs> and thus be equivalent to <x> in Pinyin.)
"Z" turns into "Ts" but "C" is also "Ts".
Again, the original form of W-G separates them into <ts> and <ts'/tsh>, which before /ɨ/ is respelled to <tz> and <tz'/tzh>. Gwoyeu Romatzyh avoids this by respelling both as <tz> and <ts>, respectively, but it loses a bit of symmetry. A possible modification here would be to retain Pinyin <c> for W-G <ts'/tsh> but retain W-G <ts>. To reflect the symmetry of the original W-G system, /i/ and /ɨ/ would remain separate and not merged (unlike Pinyin), but use <i> for /i/ and <y> for /ɨ/ (like in a lot of Slavic languages with the latter phoneme), so <tzû> and <tz'û/tzhû> become <tsy> and <cy> and <tsi> and <ts'i/tshi> become <tsi> and <ci>. (This could also work with <ch, chh> where <chi, chhi> occur before /i/, /y/ (W-G <ü>) or /j/ and <ch, chh> occur before <y> and other vowels.)
"T/D", "K/G", and "P/B" are only differentiated with apostrophes that every writer who doesn't actually know Mandarin forgets to use.
True, which is why I stated that the apostrophe should be replaced with an <h>.
Oh and the Taiwanese can't even get their own system right, they are always adding in things like extra vowels (like Soong instead of Song) or whatnot for some reason.
Most of those extra Romanizations are also not W-G, but are idiosyncratic. In some cases, especially with Mainlanders, it's actually purporting to represent GR (which I am assuming is the case for James Soong, where the double <o> represents Tone 3, but is inaccurate as the surname is actually Tone 4, so should really be <Sonq>). Another possibility is that in Pe̍h-ōe-jī there are two vowels written with the <o> letter: <o> itself, which is a schwa in Southern Taiwan but a full-blown /o/ (not /ow/, as in wont in both English and Mandarin) in Northern Taiwan (including Taipei); and <o͘ >, which represents an open o sound /ɔ/ akin to English <aw> in <law>, German short <o>, or the <o> in Mandarin <wǒ>. However, as not too many computers or typewriters have the additional letter <o͘ >, sometimes it is represented as <oo> instead (indeed, this is what the ROC Ministry of Education does with its Tâi-lô system). Though in the case of the vowels, Tongyong Pinyin's use of fully writing out the syllables /ej/ and /əw/ as <ei> and <ou> in some areas unlike the Hanyu Pinyin/W-G contracted forms <u>, <ui> is something worth considering.
Finally, the Mandarin spoken on Taiwan and in the mainland are the same language. Seeing things like "Diayudao/Tiaoyutai/Senkaku" just piss me off. Should we start adding in Erhua as well to make the Northerners happy? Don't go about messing up the Mandarin language just because of political BS.
Technically, I agree with you there, even if the Guoyu in Taiwan is of a somewhat older state than the Standard Chinese on the Mainland and is also partially reflective of a Taiwanese Hokkien substratum. (However, I am curious as to how Taiwanese Mandarin would handle erhua, seeing as the retroflex approximant is absent from Taiwanese Hokkien, as are retroflex sounds in general.)