New disinformation push on Amazon? A torrent of new low quality "books" about Taiwan has appeared; a quick Google shows at least some of the content is plagiarised, and the names of the authors appear to be fake. I count 61 of these under one search term alone. 1/4 The language inside changes from perfect English to passages riddled with grammatical errors and back again. The books I have seen all appeared in the last week or so, and many mention Nancy Pelosi in the title. The overall bias is strongly pro-PRC. 2/4

How many competing writing systems can one language have? Five? Ten? A hundred? I've been working all hours recently, so to switch modes I thought I'd do a long, very nerdy thread on Hokkien and how history has led to a proliferation of ways to write it. 🧵👇 1/34 But first, English. English spelling is famously a hot mess. In each of the words though, tough, trough, through, thought, thorough, bough, hough, hiccough, and lough the "ough" is pronounced differently (at least for me; some English dialects merge some of these). 2/34

Reading the recent articles about Lee Teng-hui a lot of the focus is understandably on 1996, Taiwan's first democratic presidential election. But to me a more significant milestone is 1992 – the first democratic election of the Legislative Yuan. 1/14 First let's step back another two years, to 1990. Back then there were two legislative bodies: the Legislative Yuan (立法院, LY) and the National Assembly (國民大會, NA). Both were highly undemocratic. 2/14