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Taoism article. This is not a forum for general discussion of the article's subject. |
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Frequently asked questions To view the response to a question, click the [show] link to the right of the question. Romanization of Chinese word "Tao/Dao" Q: Why is this word romanized as "Tao" in this article when Wikipedia and the scholarly community both normally prefer the use of
pinyin for Chinese loanwords, and "Dao" is a better phonetic transcription of the Chinese concept?
A: Because there is a very long tradition in English of writing the word as "Tao" (while still pronouncing it "dow"), and because the English Wikipedia prefers the longstanding historical form of this English word more than it prefers the use of pinyin Chinese for the Chinese word. Please visit the talk page archives for lengthy discussions of this issue. |
Taoism was one of the Philosophy and religion good articles, but it has been removed from the list. There are suggestions below for improving the article to meet the good article criteria. Once these issues have been addressed, the article can be renominated. Editors may also seek a reassessment of the decision if they believe there was a mistake. | ||||||||||||||||||||||
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This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 7 September 2023 and 14 December 2023. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): KawhiKawayi ( article contribs).
— Assignment last updated by KawhiKawayi ( talk) 16:11, 26 November 2023 (UTC)
This article currently has 546 occurrences of words beginning 'Tao' and 362 beginning 'Dao', which is inconsistent to put it mildly. Having read the discussion above re pronunciation, shouldn't they all be Dao, apart from a few specific cases? Masato.harada ( talk) 12:27, 19 December 2023 (UTC)
The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
This article has been expanded a lot in the past year with a lot of useful information, but also a lot of fancruft, a lot of messy inconsistent style usage, and ultimately all this information in presented in subpar prose that does very little to actually inform the average reader. tens of hours would likely be required to get this back to a GA status. I might even start with a revert to a previous version of the article and readd information as justified, but I don't have the time for that right now. Remsense 留 15:18, 30 December 2023 (UTC)
Taoism draws on numerous Chinese classics that are not themselves "Taoist" texts but that remain important sources for Taoists." and ends with an embedded list of seemingly non-Taoist writing.
The character Tao 道 (or Dao, depending on the romanisation scheme)) has been expanded into an entire section that is not clear and seems to indicate the pronunciation provided on the first line of the article is incorrect.
The same quandary surrounds the related issue of daojia versus daojiao, the two terms to which the first entries in this book are devoted. Even though the origins of these terms may lie in mere bibliographic categories, Taoists have sometimes used them interchangeably to denote what we call “Taoism,” and sometimes separately to distinguish the teachings of the Daode jing (and a few other works including the Zhuangzi) from “all the rest.” While these terms do not seem to have raised major issues at any time in the history of Taoism, the questions that they have generated in the scholarly realm are largely products of their early flawed translation, or rather interpretation, as “philosophical Taoism” and “religious Taoism,” respectively. Based on the way of seeing outlined above, Taoism is not exactly either a philosophy or a religion, but rather a set of consistent doctrinal notions that have taken many forms and given rise to a large variety of individual and collective practices throughout the history of the tradition.) That division is highlighted again in the next prose section, "
The distinction between Taoist philosophy and Taoist religion is an ancient, deeply-rooted one." and again cited to a source that does not seem to put weight on it (
‘Taoism’ encompasses thought and practice as a ‘philosophy’, ‘religion’, or a combination of both.[2]). Rjjiii ( talk) 13:23, 6 January 2024 (UTC)
As I've just said in the GAR, tens of hours of work would be required to get this article back to what I would see as GA status. However, I think it may be far easier to start with a mass revert to the state of the article a year ago. Unfortunately, this would undo a lot of the worthwhile work by Javierfv1212 in particular, which would need to be reintegrated as appropriate. If this is agreed, I would be happy to do this work myself. I don't like suggesting this, but I wouldn't if I didn't think it wasn't the easiest and fastest way to save this article. Remsense 留 15:32, 30 December 2023 (UTC)
Michael Carr’s article, "Whence the Pronunciation of 'Taoism,'" in the note refers to the “mispronunciation with [t]” which it blames on “the Wade-Giles <t> romanization of the unvoiced unaspirated Chinese <t> in dào [tau].” (p. 58) Wade-Giles uses apostrophes to indicate aspiration, which “no uninitiated English-speaking person could guess how to pronounce.” He gives a precise explanation of differences but says the Chinese is nearer to “Dow.” (60)
He concludes: ”Because the clumsy Wade-Giles system became the standard Chinese romanization, “Tao” was misread as [tau], and this mistake spread into English borrowings from Chinese.” (p. 62) The note refers to Table 3, "Pronunciations of Taoism in British Dictionaries,” and Table 4 for American ones, but not as authority for correct pronunciation but as evidence of how widely this mistake has spread. Carr is writing in Dictionaries, a journal for specialists, and among his conclusions is that “a thorough purging of Wades-Gilesian misreadings is overdue.” (p. 68)
BTW, Carr's article is industrial strength, as Table I shows 17 historical dialectical pronunciations in 7 Chinese dialects.
Sometime when I have a decade to spare I will propose correcting Wikipedia usage. ch ( talk) 22:05, 3 January 2024 (UTC)
Compare these Ngrams:
Why does English (2019) differ from the American and British component corpora? Other regional accents of English? ~~~~ Keahapana ( talk) 00:42, 4 February 2024 (UTC)
This is the
talk page for discussing improvements to the
Taoism article. This is not a forum for general discussion of the article's subject. |
Article policies
|
Find sources: Google ( books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL |
Archives: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8Auto-archiving period: 365 days |
Frequently asked questions To view the response to a question, click the [show] link to the right of the question. Romanization of Chinese word "Tao/Dao" Q: Why is this word romanized as "Tao" in this article when Wikipedia and the scholarly community both normally prefer the use of
pinyin for Chinese loanwords, and "Dao" is a better phonetic transcription of the Chinese concept?
A: Because there is a very long tradition in English of writing the word as "Tao" (while still pronouncing it "dow"), and because the English Wikipedia prefers the longstanding historical form of this English word more than it prefers the use of pinyin Chinese for the Chinese word. Please visit the talk page archives for lengthy discussions of this issue. |
Taoism was one of the Philosophy and religion good articles, but it has been removed from the list. There are suggestions below for improving the article to meet the good article criteria. Once these issues have been addressed, the article can be renominated. Editors may also seek a reassessment of the decision if they believe there was a mistake. | ||||||||||||||||||||||
|
This
level-3 vital article is rated C-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to multiple WikiProjects. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
This article has previously been nominated to be moved.
Discussions:
|
This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 7 September 2023 and 14 December 2023. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): KawhiKawayi ( article contribs).
— Assignment last updated by KawhiKawayi ( talk) 16:11, 26 November 2023 (UTC)
This article currently has 546 occurrences of words beginning 'Tao' and 362 beginning 'Dao', which is inconsistent to put it mildly. Having read the discussion above re pronunciation, shouldn't they all be Dao, apart from a few specific cases? Masato.harada ( talk) 12:27, 19 December 2023 (UTC)
The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
This article has been expanded a lot in the past year with a lot of useful information, but also a lot of fancruft, a lot of messy inconsistent style usage, and ultimately all this information in presented in subpar prose that does very little to actually inform the average reader. tens of hours would likely be required to get this back to a GA status. I might even start with a revert to a previous version of the article and readd information as justified, but I don't have the time for that right now. Remsense 留 15:18, 30 December 2023 (UTC)
Taoism draws on numerous Chinese classics that are not themselves "Taoist" texts but that remain important sources for Taoists." and ends with an embedded list of seemingly non-Taoist writing.
The character Tao 道 (or Dao, depending on the romanisation scheme)) has been expanded into an entire section that is not clear and seems to indicate the pronunciation provided on the first line of the article is incorrect.
The same quandary surrounds the related issue of daojia versus daojiao, the two terms to which the first entries in this book are devoted. Even though the origins of these terms may lie in mere bibliographic categories, Taoists have sometimes used them interchangeably to denote what we call “Taoism,” and sometimes separately to distinguish the teachings of the Daode jing (and a few other works including the Zhuangzi) from “all the rest.” While these terms do not seem to have raised major issues at any time in the history of Taoism, the questions that they have generated in the scholarly realm are largely products of their early flawed translation, or rather interpretation, as “philosophical Taoism” and “religious Taoism,” respectively. Based on the way of seeing outlined above, Taoism is not exactly either a philosophy or a religion, but rather a set of consistent doctrinal notions that have taken many forms and given rise to a large variety of individual and collective practices throughout the history of the tradition.) That division is highlighted again in the next prose section, "
The distinction between Taoist philosophy and Taoist religion is an ancient, deeply-rooted one." and again cited to a source that does not seem to put weight on it (
‘Taoism’ encompasses thought and practice as a ‘philosophy’, ‘religion’, or a combination of both.[2]). Rjjiii ( talk) 13:23, 6 January 2024 (UTC)
As I've just said in the GAR, tens of hours of work would be required to get this article back to what I would see as GA status. However, I think it may be far easier to start with a mass revert to the state of the article a year ago. Unfortunately, this would undo a lot of the worthwhile work by Javierfv1212 in particular, which would need to be reintegrated as appropriate. If this is agreed, I would be happy to do this work myself. I don't like suggesting this, but I wouldn't if I didn't think it wasn't the easiest and fastest way to save this article. Remsense 留 15:32, 30 December 2023 (UTC)
Michael Carr’s article, "Whence the Pronunciation of 'Taoism,'" in the note refers to the “mispronunciation with [t]” which it blames on “the Wade-Giles <t> romanization of the unvoiced unaspirated Chinese <t> in dào [tau].” (p. 58) Wade-Giles uses apostrophes to indicate aspiration, which “no uninitiated English-speaking person could guess how to pronounce.” He gives a precise explanation of differences but says the Chinese is nearer to “Dow.” (60)
He concludes: ”Because the clumsy Wade-Giles system became the standard Chinese romanization, “Tao” was misread as [tau], and this mistake spread into English borrowings from Chinese.” (p. 62) The note refers to Table 3, "Pronunciations of Taoism in British Dictionaries,” and Table 4 for American ones, but not as authority for correct pronunciation but as evidence of how widely this mistake has spread. Carr is writing in Dictionaries, a journal for specialists, and among his conclusions is that “a thorough purging of Wades-Gilesian misreadings is overdue.” (p. 68)
BTW, Carr's article is industrial strength, as Table I shows 17 historical dialectical pronunciations in 7 Chinese dialects.
Sometime when I have a decade to spare I will propose correcting Wikipedia usage. ch ( talk) 22:05, 3 January 2024 (UTC)
Compare these Ngrams:
Why does English (2019) differ from the American and British component corpora? Other regional accents of English? ~~~~ Keahapana ( talk) 00:42, 4 February 2024 (UTC)