Is it Macau or is it Macao?

People get confused sometimes about the name of this place, but whether you call it:

• Haojing'ao (壕鏡澳 "Trench Inlet")
• Liandao (蓮島 "Lotus Island")
• Xiangshan'ao (香山澳 "Fragrant mountain Island")

According to some sites (like the U.S. Library of Congress), its official name used to be Macao when it was a Portuguese territory but after the reversion to China the official name became Macau (China : Special Administrative Region) and in conversations about it in its former territorial status the name Macau is now prefered in most contexts.

But other sources (such as the Macao SAR Government Portal) seem to prefer Macao and Macao Special Administrative Region.

At the risk of disrespecting Congress I am going to side with the actual Macao government site, and not just because they have updated more recently. :-)

Last year, while looking into what we had for East Asian collation support in Windows, I noticed a curious fact. The default system code page is 950, which is the Traditional Chinese code page, yet the collation choices were:

• 0x00001404 uses the PRC Pinyin-based pronunciation sorting tables
  As if it were using MAKELCID(MAKELANGID(LANG_CHINESE, SUBLANG_CHINESE_MACAU), SORT_CHINESE_PRCP)
• 0x00021404 uses the PRC-based stroke order
  As if it were using MAKELCID(MAKELANGID(LANG_CHINESE, SUBLANG_CHINESE_MACAU), SORT_CHINESE_PRC)

I figured this was a bug but it seemed odd that no one ever reported it, if it were. Hmmm, strange....

So, although I was confused I decided to see if I could find out what was going on. I talked to several native speakers and people now living in the US who were either from Macao or who had vistied there for an extended period, and learned that even though the Traditional forms are still used more often than the Simplified ones, in recent years the Simplified forms have seen more usage.

More importantly, however, people in Macao often do use a pronunication sort and it is Pinyin-esque (English is a productive language, so I can make that word up!). Many people in Macao learn the Bopomofo pronunciations but they do not use them in their daily lives. Thus the PRC Simplified Pinyin may not be perfect but they will be closer to the order that a native speaker would expect than the Bopomfo order, even if not all of the ideographs are on the list.

I was unable to find any data on a Macao-specific Pinyin ordering, but I do know that the PRC government has expressed interest in getting Pinyin pronunciations for many more ideographs, including Traditional forms. Perhaps one of the motivations behind such a move is indeed to help support people in Hong Kong and Macao! Certainly it is the case that a Pinyin-based IME is more useful to most native speakers in Macao than a Bopomofo one would be.

Maybe something Cantonese would be most useful, but that is a story for another day....

This post brought to you by "序" (U+5e8f, a.k.a. as an ideograph meaning sequence or series)