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This chapter discusses how, in articles about Chinese terms and names, variants spellings and writings of the title should be listed.
OK, this seems to have become a fairly broad discussion. Here are the main points/suggestions raised so far and some comments. Perhaps we could continue dialogue in this hierarchical listing of issues so that it maintains readability and clarity? -- Pratyeka 01:03, 24 Nov 2003 (UTC)
Good idea to structure this! I combined your chapter (was “Heirarchy of Issues”) with the existing talk because I couldn’t understand it otherwise. Sebastian 22:00, 2005 Mar 19 (UTC)
Note that a few people are known in the West by spellings that are not regular Wade-Giles. Confucius (kong fu zi) and Mencius (meng zi) would be one kind of example, Latinized forms of Mandarin pronunciations, and they have become so well known that they amount to the "English word" for these people. But Chiang Kai-shek (Jiang Jie-shi) and Sun Yat-sen (Sun Yi-xian) are spellings for non-Mandarin pronunciations by which these two 20th Century figures became generally known. To make things clear for everyone concerned, their other names (names by which they are more commonly known in Chinese texts, Jiang Zhong-zheng and Sun Zhong-shan) should be provided. Similarly, it would be appropriate to clue people in to the fact that Su Dong-po is also known (and more properly known) by the name Su Shi. Fortunately there are only a few cases where people who only knew one form would be thrown off the track.
Patrick0Moran 03:08, 20 Nov 2003 (UTC)
I had a look at that text. Thanks. As long as people looking at the "Manual of Style for China-related articles" can find that information easily enough then there would be no reason to repeat it I guess. However, it may be unclear to people whether one is only to mention Chiang Kai-shek (which would be fine for most English speakers) or to also give hanzi and/or romanization for that name and other names by which native speakers are likely to identify him. I can't think of a good Chinese example of where English speakers know somebody by a name that Chinese speakers would likely not recognize, but U.S. students of Japanese frequently call the Daikanwajiten the "Morohashi," which leaves even well-educated Japanese speakers clueless sometimes. That is to say, I favor giving information to help non-English speakers locate and understand the stuff they want to read in English. Characters are probably more important for them. I also favor giving information that would help U.S. students bridge between what they will find in older history books, current mass media publications, and the words of Chinese speakers. (For instance, the preferred romanization for the last Chinese emperor's name in Manchurian form, the romanization in Mandarin form, the Chinese characters, the usual terms of reference in English, etc., etc. It would be easy for us to do it, but difficult for someone who was just starting out.)
Patrick0Moran 18:21, 20 Nov 2003 (UTC)
Patrick brought up a good point: this Manual of Style intends to bridge different lingual representations of a piece of information. The most recognized English nomenclature is used but any known variants should be included. IMO listing of representations should be exhaustive, which is exactly what a reader intends to look for in an encyclopedic article. All, for instance simplified and traditional Chinese charaters, different romanization and transliteration of Chinese charaters, should be included. Just as Pratyeka has stated, reference in other articles can be kept in accordance primarily with readable clarity, then with grammatical customs.
To achieve exhaustion, we may actually need a table to list all representations and it will be extremely tedious and redundant in some readers' view. For instance, Sun Yat-Sen had 6 names: 孫文, 孫逸仙, 孫德明, 孫日新, 中山樵 and 孫中山. An exhaustion of representation would be providing simplified and tradtional Chinese charaters, pinyin, zhuyin, wade-giles and other known romanizations for each name, i.e. at least 6*5=30 representations. Some readers would then argue that quite a few of them are not even used. A reconcilation would be a balance between exhaustion and usage; this has to be done from article-by-article consensus.
My edition to the above Beijing example would be the following:
Guangzhou ( trad ch 廣州, sim ch 广州, py guang3 zhou1, wg kuang chou, Tongyong pinyin guang jhou, zhuyin ㄍㄨㄤˇ ㄓㄡ, also Canton) is the capital of the Guangdong Province in southern China.
kt² 00:09, 23 Nov 2003 (UTC)
Why not write "Wade Giles", "Traditional Chinese" etc. out in their complete forms in the first instance and abbreviate thereafter. Alternately, we could use Menchi's proposal (esp for second, third... instances) to save room: Wikipedia_talk:Naming_conventions_(Chinese)/archive2#Native_terms_and_Romanizations.
In the above sample for Guangzhou, trad ch should at least be [[Traditional Chinese|trad ch]], but I prefer [[Traditional Chinese]]. People will have no idea what "trad ch" stands for if theyre not familiar with Chinese. The PY and WG forms need to be appropriately toned and capitalized: Gŭangzhōu, Kuangchou.
Why do we put the alternate forms in italics? It makes it hard to read. -- Jiang 00:33, 23 Nov 2003 (UTC)
Menchi's version saves more space and allows people to learn why there are multiple versions just by putting their cursor over that link. If our aim is to save space, Menchi's version does a better job. I prefer writing it out on the first instance and abbreviating thereafter. -- Jiang 01:01, 23 Nov 2003 (UTC)
I don't think zhuyin should be included. It's used as an educational tool, not for communication. -- Jiang 02:11, 23 Nov 2003 (UTC)
If Zhuyin was all ROC needed, it wouldn't have created its evil/wondrous twin Tongyong Pinyin. There's no need present both twins. Very redundant. Most of all, nobody, not even Taiwanese would search/google using Zhuyin. -- Menchi 07:05, 23 Nov 2003 (UTC)
Unsure if there is any consensus here so thought I'd add a section for it.
The 4 volume Guo2 Yu3 Ci3 Dian3, which was produced by the Department of Education, is arranged horizontally, and the zhuyin fuhao are written horizontally. In the font they use, the "yi" symbol is a vertical bar rather than a horizontal bar, which improves readability (or maybe I've just gotten used to it).
I think a separate page comparing romanization systems and instructing people how to pronounce ji, qi, xi, zhi, chi, shi, ri, etc. would be more useful than piling romanization system on top of romanization system and capping it off with zhuyin fuhao.
Patrick0Moran 07:07, 25 Nov 2003 (UTC)
Unfortunately some people have employed the Microsoftian embrance and extend (or in this case embrace and introduce subtle incompatibilities without expanding functionality) on Hanyu Pinyin. The result is that saying "pinyin" now is no longer enough to accurately convey what romanization scheme you are using. I suggest that "pinyin" be converted to "Hanyu Pinyin" to be more precise. Once Tongyong Pinyin dies and ceases to be in use, we can easily convert "Hanyu Pinyin" back to the more concise "pinyin". -- BenjaminTsai Talk 08:11, 28 December 2005 (UTC)
I've created and listed here Template:zh-tcy. It displays (Traditional Chinese;Cantonese Yale) for those topics about Hong Kong where Cantonese romanisation might be useful. Usage: {{zh-tcy |t=中國 |cy=Jùng gwok}}. If you don't think it belongs here, feel free to remove the listing - but please do not delete the template itself. Hong Qi Gong 04:33, 28 February 2006 (UTC)
Abbreviation of romanization names. There is no consensus on this yet, with seemingly a few in the 'dont abbreviate' camp, and a few opting in but differing on precise abbreviation.
Unfortunately I haven't a single English dictionary at the moment, but it's my view (supported by a quick glance at an English/Japanese dictionary) that all dictionaries and encylopedias I've ever seen have used lower case forms for classifying words or articles. For example, lower case pinyin, lower case IPA, lower case 'n' 'v' 'adj', etc. It's my opinion that upper case labels detract from the readability of the article and are not particularly justified in most cases (I say most, because 'Wade-Giles' has capitals - at least when used in its expanded form). Thus I would propose a lowercase 'trad' 'simpl' 'pinyin' 'wg' etc... maybe we can add a vote here seeing as its a subjective matter.
-- Pratyeka 10:45, 19 Nov 2003 (UTC)
Lowercase all:
Uppercase proper nouns:
I guess since we use terms like "watts" and "henries" we could use "wade-giles", but it seems a bit awkward to me to decapitalize family names. -- Patrick0Moran 03:08, 20 Nov 2003 (UTC)
To clarify, I was suggesting an abbreviated form, such as 'wg'. Sorry Menchi, but I must disagree on your "linguistic rules" statement. Patrick0Moran's 'watts' example is a good one. Where commonly used classifications (or measures) have derived from proper names, readability seems to over-rule 'always use capitals for proper names'. A second point - with an abbreviation such as 'wg', if the user doesn't know what it means, they can click the link and find out - that's the joy of wikipedia. I don't see this as imposing a readability problem at all - quite the opposite, allowing people to find the information that they want more quickly (though this is my personal opinion (subjective) hence the suggestion of a poll!) Furthermore, in my opinion anyone that's the slightest bit interested in alternate romanizations of Chinese place names probably already knows what Wade-Giles is, or will be happy to click a 'wg' link and find out. Making them laboriously skip over it with their eyes on every second article they read just strikes me as sadism! -- Pratyeka 06:37, 20 Nov 2003 (UTC)
I think 'WG' is passable but I feel 'wg' looks a lot cleaner.
Another good example of lowercase abbreviations of proper nouns which I just thought of is languages. The most widespread abbreviation system for languages is an ISO standard, and all abbreviations are lowercase. en, zh, etc.
Modified forms of this system in use on internet (for national extentions, eg: en-us, zh-cn, zh-tw, etc.) are also all lowercase. -- Pratyeka 07:28, 20 Nov 2003 (UTC)
Kt2, re: "wg": Pratyeka doesn't want WG to be capitalized because he thinks those are "classifying words" (How about "French:" in Quebec), "unreadable" (probably POV), and he quotes -- to be blunt, unparalleled -- examples of "watts", IPA, and other uncommon nouns. What's your justification? -- Menchi 01:03, 23 Nov 2003 (UTC)
It used to bother me that Watt changed to watt, and Kelvin changed to kelvin, but those changes reflected the fact that when stating the number of watts of electricity an appliance uses one is talking about, essentially, the velocity and number of electrons in motion past some point in an electrical cord at a certain time, and not the man named Watt. Similarly, in talking about "1 degree kelvin" one is talking about a temperature that is very near to being as cold as anything can be, and not about Lord Kelvin. With "Wade-Giles" we are talking about a system of romanization and naming it by its creators, Mssrs. Wade and Giles. So I think WG would be more appropriate in view of what the words being abbreviated actually mean.
The other things that strikes me is that if I saw "wg" in the midst of a line of text my first impulse would be to wonder whether it was a typo for "wag," "wig," or what. If one doesn't want to mention "bo, po, mo, fo" one can just use "NPA" (for National Phonetic Alphabet), and that could just as easily be written "npa", but there does not seem to be an alternative name for the Wade-Giles system.
Doesn't IPA always stay capitalized? And isn't that because "International Phonetic Alphabet" is a proper noun relating to a definite body of text, essentially a short publication? That would argue for both NPA and W-G being capitalized.
Patrick0Moran 01:43, 23 Nov 2003 (UTC)
This section discusses proposals and format considerations for the list of name variants which is included in brackets in the introduction.
Here is an idea for a new formatting style for the introduction of China-related articles. It looks like this:
Mao Zedong ( 毛澤東/ 毛泽东/ Máo Zédōng/ Mao Tse-tung)
Michael Chang ( 張德培/ 张德培/ Zhāng Dépéi/ Chang Te-p'ei)
If the Simplified and Traditional versions were the same, you could do something like this:
Qin Shi Huangdi ( 秦始皇帝/ Qín Shĭ Húangdì/ Ch'in Shih Huang-ti)
or
Qin Shi Huangdi ( 秦始皇帝/ Qín Shĭ Húangdì/ Ch'in Shih Huang-ti)
I think this method of formatting might help clean up the appearance of some pages, such as the
Michael Chang page.
It would also be easier to use this format for names in the middle of a page, like in the Chiang Ching-kuo article, when the names of his children are listed. Let me know what you think. -- Spencer195 05:51, 18 Mar 2004 (UTC)
This discussion went far beyond the original proposal. I took out the part about boxes, because I like it. Please feel free to sort the rest of this discussion if you feel it is important. Sebastian 22:00, 2005 Mar 19 (UTC)
Articles on Chinese subjects are always going to have to make room for the Chinese and romanized versions of their names, and the basic question is how to include this info while keeping the intro easily readable. Currently, including the various different versions in parentheses in the first line of the intro can make the reader's job difficult, especially when there are many alternatives listed. There is, however, a straightforward way to separate these out for the sake of clarity which I don't think has yet been raised: put the Chinese/romanizations on the first line so that they will come directly under the article title, and then after leaving a space begin the intro to the article. For an example of how this would look, see the Qing Dynasty or Sun Yat-sen pages. This style provides all the necessary info in a highly logical and readable format.
A second issue concerns alternative names for people. Often these too clog up the intro making it difficult to follow, but they need to be included as they may be the names that the reader is searching for (maybe they came to the article via a redirect). Where there are more than two commonly-used names for people, then I would suggest that they are listed in an easy to read format following the introductory paragraph, with suitable explanations as necessary. Again, see the Sun Yat-sen article for an example. I will leave aside for now the issue of rulers' names.
A separate discussion is whether or not to abbreviate Chinese, pinyin, etc, and I would suggest keeping it a separate discussion for now. Which names should or should not be included for an article could be discussed on the relevant page for the article concerned. For now let me suggest that any responses to this idea address the general concepts described. I believe these two suggestions will significantly improve the reader experience, removing the often hard to follow and annoying interpolations currently found in the introductions of China-related articles. - Madw 01:46, Jun 28, 2004 (UTC)
So we get rid of the abbreviations (which I've just done). Is that better? I don't think there is any difficulty in understanding that what is written is the article title in different forms - what else would it be? Nevertheless, if additional clarification is needed then a word or phrase can be added, or if needed only for particular pages, such as Sun Yat-sen, then could be added there. But I'd also like to highlight the big picture, as I said before. Let's not get bogged down in the details, which can be tweaked later as necessary... - Madw 04:28, Jun 28, 2004 (UTC)
Let me also just say that the question should not be, is this way perfect (is there even such a thing?), but is this style (however it ends up being tweaked) better than the existing standard? For me, there is no doubt that the answer to this question is yes. - Madw 04:57, Jun 28, 2004 (UTC)
I don't have an opinion necessarily on appearance of listing translations above the text, other than noting that doing so will require a whole lot of articles be changed. This may be more trouble than it's worth. In most cases, everything fits on one line. There are many other articles on many other countries and perhaps we should bring this to the attention to more people. (There was some trouble a few months ago fitting all the Russian into Soviet Union.)
I disagree strongly with the format used at Sun Yat-sen. As stated at Talk:Sun Yat-sen, obscure names are not relevant in the intro and should not be listed there. Since we are an encyclopedia and not an almanac, listing text in bullet point format when sentence fmt could be used is discouraged. Prose better elucidates how all these names came about and who uses them. It's just not clear that Chinese people call him Sun Zhongshan all the time, not the translation for Sun Yat-sen, Sun Yixian. The proposed format gives the Sun Yat-sen name too much emphasis over the other names.
We also have situations where two different names are both commonly used (Li Bo vs. Li Taibo and Jiang Jieshi vs Jiang Zhongzheng). I don't see how listing everything on top would work in those cases without favoring one version over another.-- Jia ng 20:13, 30 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Having parenthesis open and close right next to each other doesn't look so good. I prefer
Jiāng Zémín ( Traditional Chinese: 江澤民, Simplified Chinese: 江泽民; born August 17, 1926)
or
Jiāng Zémín, 江澤民; 江泽民, (born August 17, 1926)
instead of the current:
Jiāng Zémín ( Traditional Chinese: 江澤民, Simplified Chinese: 江泽民) (born August 17, 1926)
-- Jiang 05:13, 23 Nov 2003 (UTC)
They are certainly not necessary, as the characters are easily distinugishable from the English. -- Jiang
Some people have been using ':' after romanization or character inidicators (eg: Pinyin: Guǎngzhōu). This is definitely a stylistic issue.
The use of semicolons and commas to distinguish various elements within the after-title bracket is not currently standardised. A wide variety of systems (or simply 'what people felt like at the time') is the current norm.
I agree there is a problem with those intros and that the list of names should be separated, but I think other ideas should be pondered.
What do you think about this ? Should I try to do this on one or two articles as a sample ? gbog 06:54, 2004 Jun 28 (UTC)
I've tweaked and updated Tao Qian, Li Po, and Sun Yat-sen (it can't possibly get more complicated than him!) all in the same style, taking into account what has been mentioned above. I think it works - what do you think? - Madw 15:44, Jul 1, 2004 (UTC)
I tried a slightly modified version of these boxes at Mao Zedong. Take a look and tell me what you think. ☞spencer195 22:56, 1 Jul 2004 (UTC)
For you first point, commonly known names must and should be included in the text, like how Sun Yat-sen and Sun Zhongshan are both listed in the intro there. Most readers headed there will have come from a common name link. Anything uncommon is really less introductory and less relevant than a photograph of the invdividual. If names are so important, then I don't see what's wrong with putting them back in the intro then. Putting the photo on top also ties in with the general themes of taxoboxes used on wikipedia.
For you second point, I think each situation is unique. We're not going to insert empty sections into Mao's table just because Sun had more names. That's just a waste of space. The table design looks close enough, though I'd reconmmend a vertical divider to separate the two. Most modern Chinese don't have more than one name, so we need a standard for those people too. -- Jia ng 01:12, 2 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Well, with no contributions for a while, I'm going to summarize the consensus of opinion as given in this discussion.
Given the above, I am going to update the MoS to indicate that putting a box in the intro to display such info may be used, although at this point I will simply suggest it as an alternative to the current standard rather than a replacement for it, as I'm not sure whether or not there is a consensus to remove the original option altogether. I will also suggest that the contributors to each individual article are in the best position to determine whether the info should be displayed as per the original standard or in box format, and if a box is used, then what info it should contain. Perhaps over time, as we all experiment with this form, a consensus will be reached later on exactly how such a box should appear, but in the meantime it seems sensible to leave it up to the contributors to the individual articles.
Whichever way we try to insert variants in parentheses, they always disrupt the text – and most often the most important sentence of the whole article! A box elegantly solves this and most other issues discussed here. I therefore think we gradually should change the inline lists into boxes.
Possible disadvantages:
What do others think? — Sebastian 04:04, 2005 Mar 20 (UTC)
I would love a bot to translate ugly numbered pinyin in nice little tones! gbog 18:15, 17 Dec 2003 (UTC)
Issue resolved
Some questions:
When creating new articles, please try to use the second method. If you use the first method, whether or not you include the numbers for tone, please italicise the pinyin to differentiate it from the English text.
does that mean we shoule creat articles using names like Zh?ng-guó rather than just plain name Zhong-guo? Or Zhong1-guo2 is adviced? And about the italicize, should be italicize all the Chinese pinyin as that of foreign languages? or just in the definition line? -- FallingInLoveWithPitoc 09:07, 19 Nov 2003 (UTC)
Shouldn't the first letter of people's name be capitalized? I am so upset to see the name written like 'zu3 chong1 zhi1'. In pinyin, people's name should be separated between surname and given name, and the first letter of each part of the name should be capitalized. therefore, 'zu3 chong1 zhi1' should be written as 'Zu3 Chong1zhi1'. -- Yacht 05:31, Nov 25, 2003 (UTC)
[2]?
This sounds resonable: " Pinyin titles are not capitalized, except for the first letter of the first word and proper names. English translations of Chinese titles are also not capitalized, except for the first letter of the first word and proper names, when they are first given next to Pinyin titles." [3] -- Jiang 08:05, 25 Nov 2003 (UTC)
i strongly think no capitalization should be done for hanyu pinyin. Pinyin is NOT supposed to be an "Anglicized Chinese" but merely a pronunciation guide to help both Chinese natives and foreigners. Furthermore, the pinyin for each singular Chinese character should be separated. Thus, Mao Zedong's name in pinyin should go "máo zé dōng" and NOT "Máo Zédōng". i'm "SO upset" to see this confusion. Appropriate changes should be made in the guidelines as well. -- Plastictv 02:21, 3 Apr 2005 (UTC)
The manual currently says:
However, most pinyin on Wikipedia is not italicised, and the new templates ({{Zh-cp}} etc.) don't italicise the pinyin that they display. Shall we make the templates do so? Chamaeleon 00:11, 19 Feb 2005 (UTC)
Ruby annotation is a way of putting pinyin in small letters over the top of a Han character. It cannot be used for normal inline text on Wikipedia because the small size at which characters are displayed means that the even smaller text on top is illegible. However, it is appropriate for Han characters that have a line or paragraph to themselves. It has the advantage of keeping the transcription very close to the character, and is thus didactically helpful. In browsers that do not support it, it degrades gracefully into a transcription in parentheses after the character.
So, instead of or in addition to representing a text like this:
We can represent it like this if we choose:
The markup to display text like this is as follows:
" {{Ruby-zh-p|梦|mèng}} " displays " 梦 ".
Browser support under Windows:
I'd like to add the above draft to the project page. Feel free to edit it. 大卫
Ruby looks like a nice feature, and is great for language learning websites. But how often would it actually be used in Wikipedia? There aren't many articles that have long passages of Chinese text within them. -- Curps 06:23, 19 Feb 2005 (UTC)
rt, rp {color: gray;}
in your style sheet, it looks more separate from the character.
Chamaeleon 07:14, 19 Feb 2005 (UTC)You mean the zhuyin should display vertically along the right-hand side of the character? I don't think it's possible. You can look up the technical spec at http://www.w3.org/TR/ruby/ -- Curps 04:27, 6 Mar 2005 (UTC)
When I try to use vertical writing mode, I get this:
The zhuyin is rotated sideways, and it's still on top! (I'm using IE browser, your mileage may vary).
You can have vertical text if you want... here's some simplified text written vertically, second paragraph cut and pasted from zh Wikipedia "science fiction" article:
你看。 我不看。 没有办法。
虽然角度不同,但科幻小说的定义中总是反复出现一些词语,例如:想象、科技、人类、变化、未来等。从这些关键词中可以看到科幻小说所涉及的范畴。
在科幻爱好者中盛传的一则“世界上最短的科幻小说”是这样的:“地球上最后一个人坐在房间里。这时响起了敲门声。”可以说,这比一个精确的定义更能概括科幻小说的特质。
美国著名文学评论家伊哈布•哈桑曾说:“科幻小说可能在哲学上是天真的,在道德上是简单的,在美学上是有些主观的,或粗糙的,但是就它最好的方面而言,它似乎触及了人类集体梦想的神经中枢,解放出我们人类这具机器中深藏的某些幻想。”
在哲学主题上,科幻小说和人类上古的神话传说有着相似的精神基础,即对人类与宇宙关系的解释、人类社会未来命运的关注与猜测。
在文学谱系上,浪漫主义的文学传统应该是科幻小说最早的文学母体。早期的科幻小说往往带有恐怖小说、冒险小说或奇幻小说的痕迹。又以推理小说和哥特小说与科幻的关系最为密切,许多作品兼有以上要素,难以严格区别。
科幻小说诞生于19世纪,是欧洲工业文明崛起后特殊的文化现象之一。人类在19世纪,全面进入以科学发明和技术革命为主导的时代后,一切关注人类未来命运的文艺题材,都不可避免地要表现未来的科学技术。而这种表现,在工业革命之前是不可能的。
而科幻小说最大的特征就在于,它赋予了“幻想”依靠科技在未来得以实现的极大可能,甚至有些“科学幻想”在多年以后,的确在科学上成为了现实。因此,科幻小说就具有了某种前所未有的“预言性”。法文中,儒勒•凡尔纳的科幻小说最早就被称为“anticipation”,即“预测”。这样的文学作品基于科学的可信性是必要条件,应当说这种“科学至上”的精神是科幻小说有别于其它幻想类型作品的根本所在。
-- Curps 04:47, 6 Mar 2005 (UTC)
OK, this proposal has been here for four months without objection. I'm going to add it to the manual of style. — Chameleon 22:58, 7 Jun 2005 (UTC)
content moved to Wikipedia talk:History standards for China-related articles#Emperor naming conventions
I would like to propose that Roman-letter transcriptions for non-English writing systems should be rendered in a different colour from the rest of the text.
For instance, where pinyin or Wade Giles is given for Chinese characters, or Hepburn is given for Japanese, or romanization is given for Korean, Mongolian, Russian, Arabic, etc., then the romanisation should be given in a different colour to the main text.
The understanding should be that these romanisations are not used in the main text of the article, only in parenthetical notes as a way of indicating the correct pronunciation of unfamiliar scripts.
I realise that this proposal may sound distracting and unnecessary, but I have used it successfully for a long time on my site
[5] (e.g., see
[6], although I use graphics rather than Unicode for Chinese characters). The colour scheme helps draw a clear distinction between words that are suitable to appear in normal English texts and those that should only occur as "footnotes" etc. I normally use a light brown colour (#666600) for transcriptions which is different enough from black to be noticeable but not harsh or garish in a way that distracts the reader from reading the article.
Chameleon's suggestion of rt, rp {color: gray;}
(see above) is another alternative.
I can see that this proposal will not necessarily meet with universal approval. However, while it may sound distracting to use different colours on a page, in my experience it is even more distracting to have non-English scripts and their transcriptions indiscriminately cluttering up the page. I feel that the use of a non-distracting brown actually helps readers navigate the material better.
At any rate, I offer this suggestion for the consideration and comment of users.
(Looking again, this might be regarded as an argument for using the Ruby template for all transcriptions...)
Bathrobe 04:40, 10 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Can I please ask, what application there is for two different templates {{ zh-st}} and {{ zh-ts}} (and other pairs)? Wouldn't it be easier to stick with one or the other?
Also, is it necessary to write Simplified Chinese, as opposed to just "Simplified: characters"? I could understand if it is necessary but it looks as if it takes up space. Neonumbers 11:07, 10 July 2005 (UTC)
All characters with inverted circumflex are showing up on my computer as an empty box. Does anyone know how I can fix this? Is this problem addressed somewhere on this page? Many thanks, Badagnani 23:01, 31 August 2005 (UTC)
Based on what occured at Char siu and Char siew rice, I wonder if it may be good to standardise the order in which we list the romanisation of Chinese terms in the various Chinese dialects when multiple dialects are used. Two potential options exist:
1. List according to the "most relevant" dialect first, followed by the rest. Pros:
Cons:
2. List with a standard arrangement of dialects. Pros:
Cons:
Other options may be proposed. What do the rest of you think? A third option...a standard infobox, may be used as well.-- Huaiwei 09:43, 18 September 2005 (UTC)
In each case, giving pinyin the most prominence may confuse a reader unfamiliar with Chinese and mislead on etymology and pronunciation. Listing the pinyinized romanization first for all non-Mandarin words is like listing the Latin spelling first for any and all French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese words. -- Yuje 12:44, 22 September 2005 (UTC)
There is currently a small dispute in East Asian Tigers over which Chinese script to list first: simplified or traditional. Do members here feel we ought to also standardise this as part of the naming conventions?-- Huaiwei 10:17, 20 September 2005 (UTC)
I removed the Chinese names from Steven Chu and two other articles for the following reasons,
Whether the subject is bilingual is relevant because if they are, then this non-English name is most likely used and not simply transliterated. The question we should ask in determining whether the Chinese name should be "Does the subject use this name himself?" This would imply that a.) the subject is fluent in the languauge if he is to use his non-English name and b.) the name was not transliterated by the media. If we ask this question, then we exclude African Americans and most of the other groups you have brought up. If such a name is being used by both the subject and his community, and not given in wikipedia in whatever languauge it should be given, then it should be added. If there are persons Russian, Arab or Greek descent who interact with Russian, Arab or Greek communities using their non-English names, then the non-English name should be given.
If these second generation British Asians don't have Hindi or Urdu names, then we simply dont list them. They don't identyfy with their ethnic background in that manner. The United States has no official language and I don't see why we should eliminate all references to a subject's non-Anglo background simply because he is American. Yes, the inclusion of the non-Chinese name is based on "ethnic background", but what is wrong with that? If the name is used, then it is relevant information to be included in an encyclopedia.-- Ji ang 12:20, 6 October 2005 (UTC)
The detail of which extremely uninteresting and quite frankly unencyclopedic trivia in the form of a wide variety of transcriptions is starting to get out of hand. Not only are leads getting cluttered with the simplified/traditional Chinese-Pinyin-Wade Giles-templates, but now people are including special tables just to cover facts that seem to be there purely to satisfy a very small minority POV (which don't even concern the articles topics for the most part).
Please note that variying transcriptions and romanizations are barely interesting only to the people who already know them, and most of these already know there are more than one standard. To anyone who isn't down with Chinese langauge politics or the differences between pinyin and Wade-Giles most of this is incomprehensible clutter, a lot of which can't even be shown properly in a lot of browsers and operatins systems.
Peter Isotalo 13:48, 11 October 2005 (UTC)
Does anyone think it's a good idea to use Wade-Giles for articles about the history of Republican China, such as history of the ROC and the second sino-japanese war? It is rare to find any books about these subjects that are in pinyin. I mean, it would be weird to pick up a book and see Song Ziwen rather than T.V. Soong. I think it would be conducive to anyone who wants to go to a library and pick up books about these subjects to know the wade-giles romanization of these figures. BlueShirts 20:21, 12 December 2005 (UTC)
There is a general need to tie Chinese terms to the Chinese characters and to the pinyin romanization. There are some articles, e.g., on some martial arts topics, where competing systems of romanization are used in the same article. The same technique can be called by two different-sounding names that are really the same Chinese terms. P0M 16:45, 13 December 2005 (UTC)
Template:Zh-c has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at Wikipedia:Templates for deletion#Template:Zh-c. Thank you.
Can a native Chinese speaker please check the etymology listed at Moo shu pork? I'm not sure "wood shavings meat" is an accurate translation. Thanks! Not sure where to post this request but I know this is where the experts are. Badagnani 07:20, 3 January 2006 (UTC)
I don't understand the pinyin or abbreviation in your subject, but anyway thanks for this expert assistance! I've made the changes to Moo shu pork; have a look and see if it looks right. Badagnani 09:23, 3 January 2006 (UTC)
Oh, I see, NANS = "not a native speaker." Badagnani 09:24, 3 January 2006 (UTC)
Hello, I've just added the Chinese characters and pinyin for Paeonia lactiflora (Chinese peony) which wasn't there before, but I'm not sure I have everything right. Could someone with expertise in this flower/herb go check it out for me? Thanks! Badagnani 04:35, 12 January 2006 (UTC)
This one, too: Rock's Peony. Badagnani 04:50, 12 January 2006 (UTC)
Rock's Peony, an important symbol of China, could also use some more information about this aspect, which is only dealt with there in a cursory way. Badagnani 23:58, 13 January 2006 (UTC)
The instruction how to use a template is too difficult. I think many Wikipedians, who are not too familiar with all the wiki-html, are scared to use these templates. So in the end, we must edit their articles again to apply this system for such complex issue (which needed A LOT of discussion it seems to me when I read this discussion page). Even I dont understand the example table in the end. So I'd suggest to make it look like this, i hope someone helps: - Template Name - Looks like - Code
Template | zh-stp (Simplified, Traditional, Hanyu Pinyin) |
Looks like | simplified Chinese: 中国; traditional Chinese: 中國; pinyin: zhōng guó |
Code | {{zh|s=中国 |t=中國 |p=zhōng guó}} |
LiangHH 08:52, 18 January 2006 (UTC)
Should alternate spellings be noted in an article at the end?
A guy who edits Wang Chang Yuan thinks so. See how all of these alternate names are at the end of the article. WhisperToMe 00:42, 29 January 2006 (UTC)
He posted this on my talk page:
This is not a contest to see who can be more precise in their Chinese romanization. We've got the pinyin there, and the alternate spellings are there to assist Wikipedia users in pursuing more information about this individual. When it comes to Chinese names, or any other names commonly spelled in other alphabets, there are many romanizations, some of them "wrong" ones, often the preferred romanizations of the individuals themselves. Wikipedia is a starting point for people finding more information about subjects. All the romanizations I listed are ones for which there are Google hits (websites). Removing them means that those doing research will not have access to those websites unless they're very clever and try many permutations of spelling, which most people will not do. Badagnani 17:10, 29 January 2006 (UTC) "
WhisperToMe 17:16, 29 January 2006 (UTC)
wikipedia seems to be shifting towards using direct entry of unicode characters for foreign text in wikipedia rather than entities making the articles much easier to edit (long strings of mostly meaningless numbers are very hard to edit).
also the comments about big5 and gb make no sense to me, html entities have been unicode for as long as wikipedia has been arround afaict and the raw text of wikipedia went straight from windows-1252 to UTF-8. Plugwash 14:48, 8 February 2006 (UTC)
Wade-Giles is a useless thing. Nobody uses it. To improve the quality of Wikipedia, Wade-Giles should be removed from China related articles. Edipedia 20:54, 2 August 2006 (UTC)
Tone marks in names necessary? (copied over by Dragonbones from Chinese language talk page) I noticed that tone marks were added to names of cities, provinces, dynasties, etc. in the History section, and was wondering if they are necessary, given that many of them have essentially entered the English vocabulary? I thought that one of the style manuals might have mentioned something about this, but I can't seem to find it in Wikipedia:Naming conventions (Chinese) or Wikipedia:Manual of Style (China-related articles). --ian (talk) 16:33, 21 March 2006 (UTC)
I agree with Ian on the history articles. The usage of non-tonemarked name for historical dynasties is pretty much standard in English writing on Chinese history, which is why the current rush to tonemark them seems pretty peculiar to me. I can see specific historical characters like Zhu- Yuánzha-ng getting tonified, but Hàn or Sòng dynasty seems a bit too much.
Kelvinc 19:55, 31 March 2006 (UTC)
I'm not convinced by the argument that pinyin with tone marks doesn't harm readability. I don't know the technical details, but there are certainly computers and/or encodings and/or fonts around which translate tone-marked text into garbage. Tone marks for the first mention as reference are fine, but we shouldn't be adding them to every occurrence of pinyin throughout the text. Henry Flower 09:40, 3 April 2006 (UTC)
I don't have very strong feelings about using tone marks in article text, but I've started this discussion at Naming Conventions about whether or not we should have pinyin-with-tone-marks in the actual titles of articles. - Nat Krause( Talk!) 01:29, 3 April 2006 (UTC)
IMHO, adding Chinese characters more often would be a benefit. This is particularly helpful for web cut & paste searches, and it helps English/Chinese readers. For example: Shu Jing (??), is to me, is much better than Shu Jing. Personnally, especially due to the difficulty of the language and the many ranges of experience for those reading it, I feel it is extremely helpful. I agree this is an English wiki, but for Chinese articles, assuming or insisting English/Chinese readers should only see English is an unnecessary demand. The addition does not harm English only readers.
Insisting on a consistant pattern of English first, characters in parenthesis next, seems fair.
See Talk:Municipality of China. - Nat Krause( Talk!) 20:31, 11 April 2006 (UTC)
See Template_talk:CEG for discussions on how to list the names of the 56 ethnic groups that officially live in China. See Wikipedia:Naming conventions (Tibetan) and Wikipedia_talk:Naming conventions (Tibetan) for newly proposed Tibetan naming conventions, mostly related to romanisation. - Nat Krause( Talk!) 22:18, 16 April 2006 (UTC)
Hi, we need Chinese language help at Chinese wine. There's a wine which isn't yet discussed that is sold as "hung-lu" wine. It is reddish in color, with a sharp smell and is sold by the Oriental Mascot brand (which also makes mijiu and formerly also made Shaoxing jiu). The largest photo of this wine is here, but the characters aren't easily readable. I think "hung-lu" isn't Hanyu pinyin. Can someone provide information about this wine, the characters, etc.? Thank you! http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/images/B0000DJZ0F/ref=dp_primary-product-display_0/102-4042702-9901704?%5Fencoding=UTF8&n=3370831&s=gourmet-food Badagnani 22:31, 24 April 2006 (UTC)
Could anyone please tell me what is the best way to go about adding pinyin to english articles on chinese subjects? For right now, i can just copy and paste the unicode characters where needed, but that takes alot of time. Keith
OK, I know this is not the current pattern, but using numeric tone indicators is, I propose, a better way to handle pinyin (i.e., Shan1hai3 Jing4). Because:
It occurs to me that the array of different {{zh-etc., etc.}} templates can now be combined into one master template using the #if functionality. This is what has been done on Template:Cite book, where there are many, many possible values but only "title" is mandatory. For a much simpler example, I have implemented this already for the "t" and "o" values on Template:bo-ctw. As far as I know, the only factor which prevents us from merging all of the zh- templates into one would be controlling whether traditional or simplified characters appear first; there probably is a way to do this, but I don't know what it is. - Nat Krause( Talk!) 05:14, 24 May 2006 (UTC)
I just went about removing a bunch of notices inserted by User:Ling.Nut. There is no consensus to use the template. The template is ugly, redundant, and unnecessary. Please do not insult the intellegence of the reader.-- Jiang 19:40, 28 August 2006 (UTC)
It is a question on where we want to draw the line on what is common knowledge and what is not, and how prominent to make a notice, if any, for these articles. There are many things assumed in articles that are not explicitly expressed. Articles written in American English do not make it explicit that the spelling is American. People have and do try to change the spellings in articles, but that doesn't mean we should make a prominent notice declaring "This article is in American English."
No other encyclopedia or media source makes on explicit note on Chinese surnames. Some enycopedias have capitalized the surnames. News articles don't usually make a note: though notes on people with no surname (e.g. Abdullah, Megawati Sukarnoputri) are made.
Examples of less prominent renderings of notes on names are at Junichiro Koizumi and Vincente Fox. -- Jiang 02:31, 30 August 2006 (UTC)
Shouldn't all these template examples with zho-ng guó be Zho-ngguó? Keahapana 19:58, 3 June 2006 (UTC)
Very well, let's discuss, there are two China's or countries currently in existence due to the division of China by the Chinese Civil War. There is no justification to use Hanyu Pinyin on ALL Chinese related articles. Hanyu Pinyin should only be used as it pertains to any People's Republic of China (PRC) related article and Tongyong Pinyin]] should be used as it pertains to any Republic of China (Taiwan) article. If both China's are involved in a particular article, then both Hanyu Pinyin and Tongyong Pinyin should be used in parenthesis side by side for equality and neutrality in accordance with Wikipedia policy. To establish the pro-PRC Hanyu Pinyin as the so-called "standard" policy of all Chinese articles is to push to the general audience a pro-PRC point of view that is absolutely unacceptable and appalling given the criminal acts of murder committed by the PRC government on innocent students at Tiannemen Square. Sincerely, Minister of Foreign Affairs, Republic of China (Taiwan) —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 129.252.106.44 ( talk • contribs) 22:53, 10 September 2006.
Hanyu Pinyin is only the so-called "standard" because the majority of all countries and businesses have been either enticed or pressured into using their system. But from a point of neutrality, Tongyong Pinyin as used on the Republic of China (Taiwan) should have equal footing with Hanyu Pinyin as used on the People's Republic of China. And if we agree not to delete Hanyu Pinyin from articles, then we must agree to add Tongyong Pinyin to the article alongside Hanyu Pinyin.
Sincerely, Minister of Foreign Affairs, Republic of China (Taiwan) —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 129.252.106.44 ( talk • contribs) .
Is it encouraged to link to the characters' entries in Wiktionary (as in the lead here), optional, or frowned upon? To my eyes the blue Wikilinks are slightly less legible on a white background, and very few articles seem to do it. elvenscout742 18:36, 23 September 2006 (UTC)
Can someone make a new template "needhanzi," for articles about Chinese people or things that have no Chinese characters, such as Cheng Yu? Badagnani 09:42, 17 October 2006 (UTC)
Done. See Template:Needhanzi. Just use {{needhanzi}} if you find an article on a Chinese subject that needs Chinese characters. Badagnani 09:48, 17 October 2006 (UTC)
In articles, the name "Chinese Taipei" should only be used when the organisation itself refers to Taiwan as such. Depending on the context, it may be preferrable to add a footnote explaining that Chinese Taipei is more commonly known as Taiwan but not add (Taiwan) as parenthentical.
I want to add this to the manual of style, it has been discussed in Wikipedia:Village pump (policy) #Chinese Taipei and Taiwan. Can it be? -- Aleen f1 05:26, 20 November 2006 (UTC)
If is not in common usage, you still need the disambiguation. The name was a compromise and does not represent an actual place. So add the footnote at least. Wenzi 09:20, 21 November 2006 (UTC)
A new editor has just added a number of categories for Chinese surnames, which I believe to be very useful. As is usually the case at the Categories for Deletion area, the people who frequent that place generally try to delete every new category, regardless of whether they understand its use. In this case, they seem not to understand the utility of being able to have a category for everyone with the name "Liu," for example. Please voice your opinion here. Badagnani 03:40, 23 November 2006 (UTC)
In the Jay Chou article, User:125.142.209.67 added the Hokkien version of Jay Chou's name to the list at the beginning of the article. There is no template that includes a Min Nan parameter though, so it's currently just stuffed inside the zh-tsp template's pinyin parameter. Should versions of the zh-* templates with a Min Nan parameter be created? — heycam 22:08, 3 December 2006 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Manual of Style (China-related articles) only mentions the use of box-style format for prominent biographies. It would be better if there was more clarity as to when the box-style format can be used. For example, Hong Kong-style milk tea has two different names ???? and ????? each with Mandarin and Cantonese romanization. Should inline text format prevail? Or would this situation allow box-style format? Furthermore, for consistency throughout the Chinese articles, there should be a guideline for box-format usage. For example: Biographies, Geography, Organizations, etc.
The Hong Kong article has the strangest solution, instead of listing the pronunciation of ?? and ??????????????, it has a page of it's own at Pronunciation of Hong Kong. I don't think it's appropriate to have an article just for the pronunciation of Hong Kong. — Nrtm81 06:53, 4 December 2006 (UTC)
I've noticed since creating the Min Nan templates and slowly applying them to Taiwan-related articles that there is a wide range of naming conventions for Taiwan geography articles.
My opinions are:
Is the best way to obtain a consensus to edit the style manual with the above,enforce it and follow the Wikipedia:Consensus flow chart? WilliamDParker 21:49, 18 April 2007 (UTC)
I think the Min Nan and Hakka names for Taiwan place names are indispensible for many places in Taiwan. Should they both be applied across the board to Taiwan places or only to places judged relavant to the languages (e.g., Hakka only in Hsinchu, Miaoli, etc.)? WilliamDParker 21:56, 18 April 2007 (UTC)
Hello, in the Template:Chinesename we have "st" as the first parameter (lists simplified and traditional in that order), but now there's a dispute whether the simplified or traditional should appear first in the lines just below. Input would be greatly appreciated; please contribute at the discussion page of the template itself. Badagnani 21:59, 9 June 2007 (UTC)
OK, what about things like Three Gorges Dam or the Great Leap Forward, or whatever, which are PRC things? Badagnani 22:13, 9 June 2007 (UTC)
I mostly use the templates for foods and people. Badagnani 22:35, 9 June 2007 (UTC)
I would be okay with that--I like this kind of procedure, relying on the judgement of editors for particular pages, for most things on Wikipedia. But it's not clear how to modify the code to allow for this switching. At least I haven't figured it out. Regarding the depth that Template:Chinese goes into, what depth are you talking about? I think they contain the same information. Badagnani 23:40, 12 June 2007 (UTC)
I wrote an article about Super Donkey Kong - Xiang Jiao Chuan, an unlicensed video game from China. People on Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Video games questioned its notability. I am asking someone well-versed with Chinese to search Google with the game's Chinese name and see if you can find websites that discuss this game. WhisperToMe 13:44, 12 June 2007 (UTC)
I found at least three article, Wang Hao De, Sun Suzhen and Zhang Tianran that give birthdays as born on the 19th day of the 7th Lunar month in 1889. This conventions seems odd, and I saw nothing about it in the MoS. I was thinking this may be something specific to their religion, but I'm not sure. Could someone give this content a glance over, and perhaps convert it into standard months? Thanks for your consideration.- Andrew c 21:51, 30 June 2007 (UTC)
This page is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
This chapter discusses how, in articles about Chinese terms and names, variants spellings and writings of the title should be listed.
OK, this seems to have become a fairly broad discussion. Here are the main points/suggestions raised so far and some comments. Perhaps we could continue dialogue in this hierarchical listing of issues so that it maintains readability and clarity? -- Pratyeka 01:03, 24 Nov 2003 (UTC)
Good idea to structure this! I combined your chapter (was “Heirarchy of Issues”) with the existing talk because I couldn’t understand it otherwise. Sebastian 22:00, 2005 Mar 19 (UTC)
Note that a few people are known in the West by spellings that are not regular Wade-Giles. Confucius (kong fu zi) and Mencius (meng zi) would be one kind of example, Latinized forms of Mandarin pronunciations, and they have become so well known that they amount to the "English word" for these people. But Chiang Kai-shek (Jiang Jie-shi) and Sun Yat-sen (Sun Yi-xian) are spellings for non-Mandarin pronunciations by which these two 20th Century figures became generally known. To make things clear for everyone concerned, their other names (names by which they are more commonly known in Chinese texts, Jiang Zhong-zheng and Sun Zhong-shan) should be provided. Similarly, it would be appropriate to clue people in to the fact that Su Dong-po is also known (and more properly known) by the name Su Shi. Fortunately there are only a few cases where people who only knew one form would be thrown off the track.
Patrick0Moran 03:08, 20 Nov 2003 (UTC)
I had a look at that text. Thanks. As long as people looking at the "Manual of Style for China-related articles" can find that information easily enough then there would be no reason to repeat it I guess. However, it may be unclear to people whether one is only to mention Chiang Kai-shek (which would be fine for most English speakers) or to also give hanzi and/or romanization for that name and other names by which native speakers are likely to identify him. I can't think of a good Chinese example of where English speakers know somebody by a name that Chinese speakers would likely not recognize, but U.S. students of Japanese frequently call the Daikanwajiten the "Morohashi," which leaves even well-educated Japanese speakers clueless sometimes. That is to say, I favor giving information to help non-English speakers locate and understand the stuff they want to read in English. Characters are probably more important for them. I also favor giving information that would help U.S. students bridge between what they will find in older history books, current mass media publications, and the words of Chinese speakers. (For instance, the preferred romanization for the last Chinese emperor's name in Manchurian form, the romanization in Mandarin form, the Chinese characters, the usual terms of reference in English, etc., etc. It would be easy for us to do it, but difficult for someone who was just starting out.)
Patrick0Moran 18:21, 20 Nov 2003 (UTC)
Patrick brought up a good point: this Manual of Style intends to bridge different lingual representations of a piece of information. The most recognized English nomenclature is used but any known variants should be included. IMO listing of representations should be exhaustive, which is exactly what a reader intends to look for in an encyclopedic article. All, for instance simplified and traditional Chinese charaters, different romanization and transliteration of Chinese charaters, should be included. Just as Pratyeka has stated, reference in other articles can be kept in accordance primarily with readable clarity, then with grammatical customs.
To achieve exhaustion, we may actually need a table to list all representations and it will be extremely tedious and redundant in some readers' view. For instance, Sun Yat-Sen had 6 names: 孫文, 孫逸仙, 孫德明, 孫日新, 中山樵 and 孫中山. An exhaustion of representation would be providing simplified and tradtional Chinese charaters, pinyin, zhuyin, wade-giles and other known romanizations for each name, i.e. at least 6*5=30 representations. Some readers would then argue that quite a few of them are not even used. A reconcilation would be a balance between exhaustion and usage; this has to be done from article-by-article consensus.
My edition to the above Beijing example would be the following:
Guangzhou ( trad ch 廣州, sim ch 广州, py guang3 zhou1, wg kuang chou, Tongyong pinyin guang jhou, zhuyin ㄍㄨㄤˇ ㄓㄡ, also Canton) is the capital of the Guangdong Province in southern China.
kt² 00:09, 23 Nov 2003 (UTC)
Why not write "Wade Giles", "Traditional Chinese" etc. out in their complete forms in the first instance and abbreviate thereafter. Alternately, we could use Menchi's proposal (esp for second, third... instances) to save room: Wikipedia_talk:Naming_conventions_(Chinese)/archive2#Native_terms_and_Romanizations.
In the above sample for Guangzhou, trad ch should at least be [[Traditional Chinese|trad ch]], but I prefer [[Traditional Chinese]]. People will have no idea what "trad ch" stands for if theyre not familiar with Chinese. The PY and WG forms need to be appropriately toned and capitalized: Gŭangzhōu, Kuangchou.
Why do we put the alternate forms in italics? It makes it hard to read. -- Jiang 00:33, 23 Nov 2003 (UTC)
Menchi's version saves more space and allows people to learn why there are multiple versions just by putting their cursor over that link. If our aim is to save space, Menchi's version does a better job. I prefer writing it out on the first instance and abbreviating thereafter. -- Jiang 01:01, 23 Nov 2003 (UTC)
I don't think zhuyin should be included. It's used as an educational tool, not for communication. -- Jiang 02:11, 23 Nov 2003 (UTC)
If Zhuyin was all ROC needed, it wouldn't have created its evil/wondrous twin Tongyong Pinyin. There's no need present both twins. Very redundant. Most of all, nobody, not even Taiwanese would search/google using Zhuyin. -- Menchi 07:05, 23 Nov 2003 (UTC)
Unsure if there is any consensus here so thought I'd add a section for it.
The 4 volume Guo2 Yu3 Ci3 Dian3, which was produced by the Department of Education, is arranged horizontally, and the zhuyin fuhao are written horizontally. In the font they use, the "yi" symbol is a vertical bar rather than a horizontal bar, which improves readability (or maybe I've just gotten used to it).
I think a separate page comparing romanization systems and instructing people how to pronounce ji, qi, xi, zhi, chi, shi, ri, etc. would be more useful than piling romanization system on top of romanization system and capping it off with zhuyin fuhao.
Patrick0Moran 07:07, 25 Nov 2003 (UTC)
Unfortunately some people have employed the Microsoftian embrance and extend (or in this case embrace and introduce subtle incompatibilities without expanding functionality) on Hanyu Pinyin. The result is that saying "pinyin" now is no longer enough to accurately convey what romanization scheme you are using. I suggest that "pinyin" be converted to "Hanyu Pinyin" to be more precise. Once Tongyong Pinyin dies and ceases to be in use, we can easily convert "Hanyu Pinyin" back to the more concise "pinyin". -- BenjaminTsai Talk 08:11, 28 December 2005 (UTC)
I've created and listed here Template:zh-tcy. It displays (Traditional Chinese;Cantonese Yale) for those topics about Hong Kong where Cantonese romanisation might be useful. Usage: {{zh-tcy |t=中國 |cy=Jùng gwok}}. If you don't think it belongs here, feel free to remove the listing - but please do not delete the template itself. Hong Qi Gong 04:33, 28 February 2006 (UTC)
Abbreviation of romanization names. There is no consensus on this yet, with seemingly a few in the 'dont abbreviate' camp, and a few opting in but differing on precise abbreviation.
Unfortunately I haven't a single English dictionary at the moment, but it's my view (supported by a quick glance at an English/Japanese dictionary) that all dictionaries and encylopedias I've ever seen have used lower case forms for classifying words or articles. For example, lower case pinyin, lower case IPA, lower case 'n' 'v' 'adj', etc. It's my opinion that upper case labels detract from the readability of the article and are not particularly justified in most cases (I say most, because 'Wade-Giles' has capitals - at least when used in its expanded form). Thus I would propose a lowercase 'trad' 'simpl' 'pinyin' 'wg' etc... maybe we can add a vote here seeing as its a subjective matter.
-- Pratyeka 10:45, 19 Nov 2003 (UTC)
Lowercase all:
Uppercase proper nouns:
I guess since we use terms like "watts" and "henries" we could use "wade-giles", but it seems a bit awkward to me to decapitalize family names. -- Patrick0Moran 03:08, 20 Nov 2003 (UTC)
To clarify, I was suggesting an abbreviated form, such as 'wg'. Sorry Menchi, but I must disagree on your "linguistic rules" statement. Patrick0Moran's 'watts' example is a good one. Where commonly used classifications (or measures) have derived from proper names, readability seems to over-rule 'always use capitals for proper names'. A second point - with an abbreviation such as 'wg', if the user doesn't know what it means, they can click the link and find out - that's the joy of wikipedia. I don't see this as imposing a readability problem at all - quite the opposite, allowing people to find the information that they want more quickly (though this is my personal opinion (subjective) hence the suggestion of a poll!) Furthermore, in my opinion anyone that's the slightest bit interested in alternate romanizations of Chinese place names probably already knows what Wade-Giles is, or will be happy to click a 'wg' link and find out. Making them laboriously skip over it with their eyes on every second article they read just strikes me as sadism! -- Pratyeka 06:37, 20 Nov 2003 (UTC)
I think 'WG' is passable but I feel 'wg' looks a lot cleaner.
Another good example of lowercase abbreviations of proper nouns which I just thought of is languages. The most widespread abbreviation system for languages is an ISO standard, and all abbreviations are lowercase. en, zh, etc.
Modified forms of this system in use on internet (for national extentions, eg: en-us, zh-cn, zh-tw, etc.) are also all lowercase. -- Pratyeka 07:28, 20 Nov 2003 (UTC)
Kt2, re: "wg": Pratyeka doesn't want WG to be capitalized because he thinks those are "classifying words" (How about "French:" in Quebec), "unreadable" (probably POV), and he quotes -- to be blunt, unparalleled -- examples of "watts", IPA, and other uncommon nouns. What's your justification? -- Menchi 01:03, 23 Nov 2003 (UTC)
It used to bother me that Watt changed to watt, and Kelvin changed to kelvin, but those changes reflected the fact that when stating the number of watts of electricity an appliance uses one is talking about, essentially, the velocity and number of electrons in motion past some point in an electrical cord at a certain time, and not the man named Watt. Similarly, in talking about "1 degree kelvin" one is talking about a temperature that is very near to being as cold as anything can be, and not about Lord Kelvin. With "Wade-Giles" we are talking about a system of romanization and naming it by its creators, Mssrs. Wade and Giles. So I think WG would be more appropriate in view of what the words being abbreviated actually mean.
The other things that strikes me is that if I saw "wg" in the midst of a line of text my first impulse would be to wonder whether it was a typo for "wag," "wig," or what. If one doesn't want to mention "bo, po, mo, fo" one can just use "NPA" (for National Phonetic Alphabet), and that could just as easily be written "npa", but there does not seem to be an alternative name for the Wade-Giles system.
Doesn't IPA always stay capitalized? And isn't that because "International Phonetic Alphabet" is a proper noun relating to a definite body of text, essentially a short publication? That would argue for both NPA and W-G being capitalized.
Patrick0Moran 01:43, 23 Nov 2003 (UTC)
This section discusses proposals and format considerations for the list of name variants which is included in brackets in the introduction.
Here is an idea for a new formatting style for the introduction of China-related articles. It looks like this:
Mao Zedong ( 毛澤東/ 毛泽东/ Máo Zédōng/ Mao Tse-tung)
Michael Chang ( 張德培/ 张德培/ Zhāng Dépéi/ Chang Te-p'ei)
If the Simplified and Traditional versions were the same, you could do something like this:
Qin Shi Huangdi ( 秦始皇帝/ Qín Shĭ Húangdì/ Ch'in Shih Huang-ti)
or
Qin Shi Huangdi ( 秦始皇帝/ Qín Shĭ Húangdì/ Ch'in Shih Huang-ti)
I think this method of formatting might help clean up the appearance of some pages, such as the
Michael Chang page.
It would also be easier to use this format for names in the middle of a page, like in the Chiang Ching-kuo article, when the names of his children are listed. Let me know what you think. -- Spencer195 05:51, 18 Mar 2004 (UTC)
This discussion went far beyond the original proposal. I took out the part about boxes, because I like it. Please feel free to sort the rest of this discussion if you feel it is important. Sebastian 22:00, 2005 Mar 19 (UTC)
Articles on Chinese subjects are always going to have to make room for the Chinese and romanized versions of their names, and the basic question is how to include this info while keeping the intro easily readable. Currently, including the various different versions in parentheses in the first line of the intro can make the reader's job difficult, especially when there are many alternatives listed. There is, however, a straightforward way to separate these out for the sake of clarity which I don't think has yet been raised: put the Chinese/romanizations on the first line so that they will come directly under the article title, and then after leaving a space begin the intro to the article. For an example of how this would look, see the Qing Dynasty or Sun Yat-sen pages. This style provides all the necessary info in a highly logical and readable format.
A second issue concerns alternative names for people. Often these too clog up the intro making it difficult to follow, but they need to be included as they may be the names that the reader is searching for (maybe they came to the article via a redirect). Where there are more than two commonly-used names for people, then I would suggest that they are listed in an easy to read format following the introductory paragraph, with suitable explanations as necessary. Again, see the Sun Yat-sen article for an example. I will leave aside for now the issue of rulers' names.
A separate discussion is whether or not to abbreviate Chinese, pinyin, etc, and I would suggest keeping it a separate discussion for now. Which names should or should not be included for an article could be discussed on the relevant page for the article concerned. For now let me suggest that any responses to this idea address the general concepts described. I believe these two suggestions will significantly improve the reader experience, removing the often hard to follow and annoying interpolations currently found in the introductions of China-related articles. - Madw 01:46, Jun 28, 2004 (UTC)
So we get rid of the abbreviations (which I've just done). Is that better? I don't think there is any difficulty in understanding that what is written is the article title in different forms - what else would it be? Nevertheless, if additional clarification is needed then a word or phrase can be added, or if needed only for particular pages, such as Sun Yat-sen, then could be added there. But I'd also like to highlight the big picture, as I said before. Let's not get bogged down in the details, which can be tweaked later as necessary... - Madw 04:28, Jun 28, 2004 (UTC)
Let me also just say that the question should not be, is this way perfect (is there even such a thing?), but is this style (however it ends up being tweaked) better than the existing standard? For me, there is no doubt that the answer to this question is yes. - Madw 04:57, Jun 28, 2004 (UTC)
I don't have an opinion necessarily on appearance of listing translations above the text, other than noting that doing so will require a whole lot of articles be changed. This may be more trouble than it's worth. In most cases, everything fits on one line. There are many other articles on many other countries and perhaps we should bring this to the attention to more people. (There was some trouble a few months ago fitting all the Russian into Soviet Union.)
I disagree strongly with the format used at Sun Yat-sen. As stated at Talk:Sun Yat-sen, obscure names are not relevant in the intro and should not be listed there. Since we are an encyclopedia and not an almanac, listing text in bullet point format when sentence fmt could be used is discouraged. Prose better elucidates how all these names came about and who uses them. It's just not clear that Chinese people call him Sun Zhongshan all the time, not the translation for Sun Yat-sen, Sun Yixian. The proposed format gives the Sun Yat-sen name too much emphasis over the other names.
We also have situations where two different names are both commonly used (Li Bo vs. Li Taibo and Jiang Jieshi vs Jiang Zhongzheng). I don't see how listing everything on top would work in those cases without favoring one version over another.-- Jia ng 20:13, 30 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Having parenthesis open and close right next to each other doesn't look so good. I prefer
Jiāng Zémín ( Traditional Chinese: 江澤民, Simplified Chinese: 江泽民; born August 17, 1926)
or
Jiāng Zémín, 江澤民; 江泽民, (born August 17, 1926)
instead of the current:
Jiāng Zémín ( Traditional Chinese: 江澤民, Simplified Chinese: 江泽民) (born August 17, 1926)
-- Jiang 05:13, 23 Nov 2003 (UTC)
They are certainly not necessary, as the characters are easily distinugishable from the English. -- Jiang
Some people have been using ':' after romanization or character inidicators (eg: Pinyin: Guǎngzhōu). This is definitely a stylistic issue.
The use of semicolons and commas to distinguish various elements within the after-title bracket is not currently standardised. A wide variety of systems (or simply 'what people felt like at the time') is the current norm.
I agree there is a problem with those intros and that the list of names should be separated, but I think other ideas should be pondered.
What do you think about this ? Should I try to do this on one or two articles as a sample ? gbog 06:54, 2004 Jun 28 (UTC)
I've tweaked and updated Tao Qian, Li Po, and Sun Yat-sen (it can't possibly get more complicated than him!) all in the same style, taking into account what has been mentioned above. I think it works - what do you think? - Madw 15:44, Jul 1, 2004 (UTC)
I tried a slightly modified version of these boxes at Mao Zedong. Take a look and tell me what you think. ☞spencer195 22:56, 1 Jul 2004 (UTC)
For you first point, commonly known names must and should be included in the text, like how Sun Yat-sen and Sun Zhongshan are both listed in the intro there. Most readers headed there will have come from a common name link. Anything uncommon is really less introductory and less relevant than a photograph of the invdividual. If names are so important, then I don't see what's wrong with putting them back in the intro then. Putting the photo on top also ties in with the general themes of taxoboxes used on wikipedia.
For you second point, I think each situation is unique. We're not going to insert empty sections into Mao's table just because Sun had more names. That's just a waste of space. The table design looks close enough, though I'd reconmmend a vertical divider to separate the two. Most modern Chinese don't have more than one name, so we need a standard for those people too. -- Jia ng 01:12, 2 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Well, with no contributions for a while, I'm going to summarize the consensus of opinion as given in this discussion.
Given the above, I am going to update the MoS to indicate that putting a box in the intro to display such info may be used, although at this point I will simply suggest it as an alternative to the current standard rather than a replacement for it, as I'm not sure whether or not there is a consensus to remove the original option altogether. I will also suggest that the contributors to each individual article are in the best position to determine whether the info should be displayed as per the original standard or in box format, and if a box is used, then what info it should contain. Perhaps over time, as we all experiment with this form, a consensus will be reached later on exactly how such a box should appear, but in the meantime it seems sensible to leave it up to the contributors to the individual articles.
Whichever way we try to insert variants in parentheses, they always disrupt the text – and most often the most important sentence of the whole article! A box elegantly solves this and most other issues discussed here. I therefore think we gradually should change the inline lists into boxes.
Possible disadvantages:
What do others think? — Sebastian 04:04, 2005 Mar 20 (UTC)
I would love a bot to translate ugly numbered pinyin in nice little tones! gbog 18:15, 17 Dec 2003 (UTC)
Issue resolved
Some questions:
When creating new articles, please try to use the second method. If you use the first method, whether or not you include the numbers for tone, please italicise the pinyin to differentiate it from the English text.
does that mean we shoule creat articles using names like Zh?ng-guó rather than just plain name Zhong-guo? Or Zhong1-guo2 is adviced? And about the italicize, should be italicize all the Chinese pinyin as that of foreign languages? or just in the definition line? -- FallingInLoveWithPitoc 09:07, 19 Nov 2003 (UTC)
Shouldn't the first letter of people's name be capitalized? I am so upset to see the name written like 'zu3 chong1 zhi1'. In pinyin, people's name should be separated between surname and given name, and the first letter of each part of the name should be capitalized. therefore, 'zu3 chong1 zhi1' should be written as 'Zu3 Chong1zhi1'. -- Yacht 05:31, Nov 25, 2003 (UTC)
[2]?
This sounds resonable: " Pinyin titles are not capitalized, except for the first letter of the first word and proper names. English translations of Chinese titles are also not capitalized, except for the first letter of the first word and proper names, when they are first given next to Pinyin titles." [3] -- Jiang 08:05, 25 Nov 2003 (UTC)
i strongly think no capitalization should be done for hanyu pinyin. Pinyin is NOT supposed to be an "Anglicized Chinese" but merely a pronunciation guide to help both Chinese natives and foreigners. Furthermore, the pinyin for each singular Chinese character should be separated. Thus, Mao Zedong's name in pinyin should go "máo zé dōng" and NOT "Máo Zédōng". i'm "SO upset" to see this confusion. Appropriate changes should be made in the guidelines as well. -- Plastictv 02:21, 3 Apr 2005 (UTC)
The manual currently says:
However, most pinyin on Wikipedia is not italicised, and the new templates ({{Zh-cp}} etc.) don't italicise the pinyin that they display. Shall we make the templates do so? Chamaeleon 00:11, 19 Feb 2005 (UTC)
Ruby annotation is a way of putting pinyin in small letters over the top of a Han character. It cannot be used for normal inline text on Wikipedia because the small size at which characters are displayed means that the even smaller text on top is illegible. However, it is appropriate for Han characters that have a line or paragraph to themselves. It has the advantage of keeping the transcription very close to the character, and is thus didactically helpful. In browsers that do not support it, it degrades gracefully into a transcription in parentheses after the character.
So, instead of or in addition to representing a text like this:
We can represent it like this if we choose:
The markup to display text like this is as follows:
" {{Ruby-zh-p|梦|mèng}} " displays " 梦 ".
Browser support under Windows:
I'd like to add the above draft to the project page. Feel free to edit it. 大卫
Ruby looks like a nice feature, and is great for language learning websites. But how often would it actually be used in Wikipedia? There aren't many articles that have long passages of Chinese text within them. -- Curps 06:23, 19 Feb 2005 (UTC)
rt, rp {color: gray;}
in your style sheet, it looks more separate from the character.
Chamaeleon 07:14, 19 Feb 2005 (UTC)You mean the zhuyin should display vertically along the right-hand side of the character? I don't think it's possible. You can look up the technical spec at http://www.w3.org/TR/ruby/ -- Curps 04:27, 6 Mar 2005 (UTC)
When I try to use vertical writing mode, I get this:
The zhuyin is rotated sideways, and it's still on top! (I'm using IE browser, your mileage may vary).
You can have vertical text if you want... here's some simplified text written vertically, second paragraph cut and pasted from zh Wikipedia "science fiction" article:
你看。 我不看。 没有办法。
虽然角度不同,但科幻小说的定义中总是反复出现一些词语,例如:想象、科技、人类、变化、未来等。从这些关键词中可以看到科幻小说所涉及的范畴。
在科幻爱好者中盛传的一则“世界上最短的科幻小说”是这样的:“地球上最后一个人坐在房间里。这时响起了敲门声。”可以说,这比一个精确的定义更能概括科幻小说的特质。
美国著名文学评论家伊哈布•哈桑曾说:“科幻小说可能在哲学上是天真的,在道德上是简单的,在美学上是有些主观的,或粗糙的,但是就它最好的方面而言,它似乎触及了人类集体梦想的神经中枢,解放出我们人类这具机器中深藏的某些幻想。”
在哲学主题上,科幻小说和人类上古的神话传说有着相似的精神基础,即对人类与宇宙关系的解释、人类社会未来命运的关注与猜测。
在文学谱系上,浪漫主义的文学传统应该是科幻小说最早的文学母体。早期的科幻小说往往带有恐怖小说、冒险小说或奇幻小说的痕迹。又以推理小说和哥特小说与科幻的关系最为密切,许多作品兼有以上要素,难以严格区别。
科幻小说诞生于19世纪,是欧洲工业文明崛起后特殊的文化现象之一。人类在19世纪,全面进入以科学发明和技术革命为主导的时代后,一切关注人类未来命运的文艺题材,都不可避免地要表现未来的科学技术。而这种表现,在工业革命之前是不可能的。
而科幻小说最大的特征就在于,它赋予了“幻想”依靠科技在未来得以实现的极大可能,甚至有些“科学幻想”在多年以后,的确在科学上成为了现实。因此,科幻小说就具有了某种前所未有的“预言性”。法文中,儒勒•凡尔纳的科幻小说最早就被称为“anticipation”,即“预测”。这样的文学作品基于科学的可信性是必要条件,应当说这种“科学至上”的精神是科幻小说有别于其它幻想类型作品的根本所在。
-- Curps 04:47, 6 Mar 2005 (UTC)
OK, this proposal has been here for four months without objection. I'm going to add it to the manual of style. — Chameleon 22:58, 7 Jun 2005 (UTC)
content moved to Wikipedia talk:History standards for China-related articles#Emperor naming conventions
I would like to propose that Roman-letter transcriptions for non-English writing systems should be rendered in a different colour from the rest of the text.
For instance, where pinyin or Wade Giles is given for Chinese characters, or Hepburn is given for Japanese, or romanization is given for Korean, Mongolian, Russian, Arabic, etc., then the romanisation should be given in a different colour to the main text.
The understanding should be that these romanisations are not used in the main text of the article, only in parenthetical notes as a way of indicating the correct pronunciation of unfamiliar scripts.
I realise that this proposal may sound distracting and unnecessary, but I have used it successfully for a long time on my site
[5] (e.g., see
[6], although I use graphics rather than Unicode for Chinese characters). The colour scheme helps draw a clear distinction between words that are suitable to appear in normal English texts and those that should only occur as "footnotes" etc. I normally use a light brown colour (#666600) for transcriptions which is different enough from black to be noticeable but not harsh or garish in a way that distracts the reader from reading the article.
Chameleon's suggestion of rt, rp {color: gray;}
(see above) is another alternative.
I can see that this proposal will not necessarily meet with universal approval. However, while it may sound distracting to use different colours on a page, in my experience it is even more distracting to have non-English scripts and their transcriptions indiscriminately cluttering up the page. I feel that the use of a non-distracting brown actually helps readers navigate the material better.
At any rate, I offer this suggestion for the consideration and comment of users.
(Looking again, this might be regarded as an argument for using the Ruby template for all transcriptions...)
Bathrobe 04:40, 10 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Can I please ask, what application there is for two different templates {{ zh-st}} and {{ zh-ts}} (and other pairs)? Wouldn't it be easier to stick with one or the other?
Also, is it necessary to write Simplified Chinese, as opposed to just "Simplified: characters"? I could understand if it is necessary but it looks as if it takes up space. Neonumbers 11:07, 10 July 2005 (UTC)
All characters with inverted circumflex are showing up on my computer as an empty box. Does anyone know how I can fix this? Is this problem addressed somewhere on this page? Many thanks, Badagnani 23:01, 31 August 2005 (UTC)
Based on what occured at Char siu and Char siew rice, I wonder if it may be good to standardise the order in which we list the romanisation of Chinese terms in the various Chinese dialects when multiple dialects are used. Two potential options exist:
1. List according to the "most relevant" dialect first, followed by the rest. Pros:
Cons:
2. List with a standard arrangement of dialects. Pros:
Cons:
Other options may be proposed. What do the rest of you think? A third option...a standard infobox, may be used as well.-- Huaiwei 09:43, 18 September 2005 (UTC)
In each case, giving pinyin the most prominence may confuse a reader unfamiliar with Chinese and mislead on etymology and pronunciation. Listing the pinyinized romanization first for all non-Mandarin words is like listing the Latin spelling first for any and all French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese words. -- Yuje 12:44, 22 September 2005 (UTC)
There is currently a small dispute in East Asian Tigers over which Chinese script to list first: simplified or traditional. Do members here feel we ought to also standardise this as part of the naming conventions?-- Huaiwei 10:17, 20 September 2005 (UTC)
I removed the Chinese names from Steven Chu and two other articles for the following reasons,
Whether the subject is bilingual is relevant because if they are, then this non-English name is most likely used and not simply transliterated. The question we should ask in determining whether the Chinese name should be "Does the subject use this name himself?" This would imply that a.) the subject is fluent in the languauge if he is to use his non-English name and b.) the name was not transliterated by the media. If we ask this question, then we exclude African Americans and most of the other groups you have brought up. If such a name is being used by both the subject and his community, and not given in wikipedia in whatever languauge it should be given, then it should be added. If there are persons Russian, Arab or Greek descent who interact with Russian, Arab or Greek communities using their non-English names, then the non-English name should be given.
If these second generation British Asians don't have Hindi or Urdu names, then we simply dont list them. They don't identyfy with their ethnic background in that manner. The United States has no official language and I don't see why we should eliminate all references to a subject's non-Anglo background simply because he is American. Yes, the inclusion of the non-Chinese name is based on "ethnic background", but what is wrong with that? If the name is used, then it is relevant information to be included in an encyclopedia.-- Ji ang 12:20, 6 October 2005 (UTC)
The detail of which extremely uninteresting and quite frankly unencyclopedic trivia in the form of a wide variety of transcriptions is starting to get out of hand. Not only are leads getting cluttered with the simplified/traditional Chinese-Pinyin-Wade Giles-templates, but now people are including special tables just to cover facts that seem to be there purely to satisfy a very small minority POV (which don't even concern the articles topics for the most part).
Please note that variying transcriptions and romanizations are barely interesting only to the people who already know them, and most of these already know there are more than one standard. To anyone who isn't down with Chinese langauge politics or the differences between pinyin and Wade-Giles most of this is incomprehensible clutter, a lot of which can't even be shown properly in a lot of browsers and operatins systems.
Peter Isotalo 13:48, 11 October 2005 (UTC)
Does anyone think it's a good idea to use Wade-Giles for articles about the history of Republican China, such as history of the ROC and the second sino-japanese war? It is rare to find any books about these subjects that are in pinyin. I mean, it would be weird to pick up a book and see Song Ziwen rather than T.V. Soong. I think it would be conducive to anyone who wants to go to a library and pick up books about these subjects to know the wade-giles romanization of these figures. BlueShirts 20:21, 12 December 2005 (UTC)
There is a general need to tie Chinese terms to the Chinese characters and to the pinyin romanization. There are some articles, e.g., on some martial arts topics, where competing systems of romanization are used in the same article. The same technique can be called by two different-sounding names that are really the same Chinese terms. P0M 16:45, 13 December 2005 (UTC)
Template:Zh-c has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at Wikipedia:Templates for deletion#Template:Zh-c. Thank you.
Can a native Chinese speaker please check the etymology listed at Moo shu pork? I'm not sure "wood shavings meat" is an accurate translation. Thanks! Not sure where to post this request but I know this is where the experts are. Badagnani 07:20, 3 January 2006 (UTC)
I don't understand the pinyin or abbreviation in your subject, but anyway thanks for this expert assistance! I've made the changes to Moo shu pork; have a look and see if it looks right. Badagnani 09:23, 3 January 2006 (UTC)
Oh, I see, NANS = "not a native speaker." Badagnani 09:24, 3 January 2006 (UTC)
Hello, I've just added the Chinese characters and pinyin for Paeonia lactiflora (Chinese peony) which wasn't there before, but I'm not sure I have everything right. Could someone with expertise in this flower/herb go check it out for me? Thanks! Badagnani 04:35, 12 January 2006 (UTC)
This one, too: Rock's Peony. Badagnani 04:50, 12 January 2006 (UTC)
Rock's Peony, an important symbol of China, could also use some more information about this aspect, which is only dealt with there in a cursory way. Badagnani 23:58, 13 January 2006 (UTC)
The instruction how to use a template is too difficult. I think many Wikipedians, who are not too familiar with all the wiki-html, are scared to use these templates. So in the end, we must edit their articles again to apply this system for such complex issue (which needed A LOT of discussion it seems to me when I read this discussion page). Even I dont understand the example table in the end. So I'd suggest to make it look like this, i hope someone helps: - Template Name - Looks like - Code
Template | zh-stp (Simplified, Traditional, Hanyu Pinyin) |
Looks like | simplified Chinese: 中国; traditional Chinese: 中國; pinyin: zhōng guó |
Code | {{zh|s=中国 |t=中國 |p=zhōng guó}} |
LiangHH 08:52, 18 January 2006 (UTC)
Should alternate spellings be noted in an article at the end?
A guy who edits Wang Chang Yuan thinks so. See how all of these alternate names are at the end of the article. WhisperToMe 00:42, 29 January 2006 (UTC)
He posted this on my talk page:
This is not a contest to see who can be more precise in their Chinese romanization. We've got the pinyin there, and the alternate spellings are there to assist Wikipedia users in pursuing more information about this individual. When it comes to Chinese names, or any other names commonly spelled in other alphabets, there are many romanizations, some of them "wrong" ones, often the preferred romanizations of the individuals themselves. Wikipedia is a starting point for people finding more information about subjects. All the romanizations I listed are ones for which there are Google hits (websites). Removing them means that those doing research will not have access to those websites unless they're very clever and try many permutations of spelling, which most people will not do. Badagnani 17:10, 29 January 2006 (UTC) "
WhisperToMe 17:16, 29 January 2006 (UTC)
wikipedia seems to be shifting towards using direct entry of unicode characters for foreign text in wikipedia rather than entities making the articles much easier to edit (long strings of mostly meaningless numbers are very hard to edit).
also the comments about big5 and gb make no sense to me, html entities have been unicode for as long as wikipedia has been arround afaict and the raw text of wikipedia went straight from windows-1252 to UTF-8. Plugwash 14:48, 8 February 2006 (UTC)
Wade-Giles is a useless thing. Nobody uses it. To improve the quality of Wikipedia, Wade-Giles should be removed from China related articles. Edipedia 20:54, 2 August 2006 (UTC)
Tone marks in names necessary? (copied over by Dragonbones from Chinese language talk page) I noticed that tone marks were added to names of cities, provinces, dynasties, etc. in the History section, and was wondering if they are necessary, given that many of them have essentially entered the English vocabulary? I thought that one of the style manuals might have mentioned something about this, but I can't seem to find it in Wikipedia:Naming conventions (Chinese) or Wikipedia:Manual of Style (China-related articles). --ian (talk) 16:33, 21 March 2006 (UTC)
I agree with Ian on the history articles. The usage of non-tonemarked name for historical dynasties is pretty much standard in English writing on Chinese history, which is why the current rush to tonemark them seems pretty peculiar to me. I can see specific historical characters like Zhu- Yuánzha-ng getting tonified, but Hàn or Sòng dynasty seems a bit too much.
Kelvinc 19:55, 31 March 2006 (UTC)
I'm not convinced by the argument that pinyin with tone marks doesn't harm readability. I don't know the technical details, but there are certainly computers and/or encodings and/or fonts around which translate tone-marked text into garbage. Tone marks for the first mention as reference are fine, but we shouldn't be adding them to every occurrence of pinyin throughout the text. Henry Flower 09:40, 3 April 2006 (UTC)
I don't have very strong feelings about using tone marks in article text, but I've started this discussion at Naming Conventions about whether or not we should have pinyin-with-tone-marks in the actual titles of articles. - Nat Krause( Talk!) 01:29, 3 April 2006 (UTC)
IMHO, adding Chinese characters more often would be a benefit. This is particularly helpful for web cut & paste searches, and it helps English/Chinese readers. For example: Shu Jing (??), is to me, is much better than Shu Jing. Personnally, especially due to the difficulty of the language and the many ranges of experience for those reading it, I feel it is extremely helpful. I agree this is an English wiki, but for Chinese articles, assuming or insisting English/Chinese readers should only see English is an unnecessary demand. The addition does not harm English only readers.
Insisting on a consistant pattern of English first, characters in parenthesis next, seems fair.
See Talk:Municipality of China. - Nat Krause( Talk!) 20:31, 11 April 2006 (UTC)
See Template_talk:CEG for discussions on how to list the names of the 56 ethnic groups that officially live in China. See Wikipedia:Naming conventions (Tibetan) and Wikipedia_talk:Naming conventions (Tibetan) for newly proposed Tibetan naming conventions, mostly related to romanisation. - Nat Krause( Talk!) 22:18, 16 April 2006 (UTC)
Hi, we need Chinese language help at Chinese wine. There's a wine which isn't yet discussed that is sold as "hung-lu" wine. It is reddish in color, with a sharp smell and is sold by the Oriental Mascot brand (which also makes mijiu and formerly also made Shaoxing jiu). The largest photo of this wine is here, but the characters aren't easily readable. I think "hung-lu" isn't Hanyu pinyin. Can someone provide information about this wine, the characters, etc.? Thank you! http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/images/B0000DJZ0F/ref=dp_primary-product-display_0/102-4042702-9901704?%5Fencoding=UTF8&n=3370831&s=gourmet-food Badagnani 22:31, 24 April 2006 (UTC)
Could anyone please tell me what is the best way to go about adding pinyin to english articles on chinese subjects? For right now, i can just copy and paste the unicode characters where needed, but that takes alot of time. Keith
OK, I know this is not the current pattern, but using numeric tone indicators is, I propose, a better way to handle pinyin (i.e., Shan1hai3 Jing4). Because:
It occurs to me that the array of different {{zh-etc., etc.}} templates can now be combined into one master template using the #if functionality. This is what has been done on Template:Cite book, where there are many, many possible values but only "title" is mandatory. For a much simpler example, I have implemented this already for the "t" and "o" values on Template:bo-ctw. As far as I know, the only factor which prevents us from merging all of the zh- templates into one would be controlling whether traditional or simplified characters appear first; there probably is a way to do this, but I don't know what it is. - Nat Krause( Talk!) 05:14, 24 May 2006 (UTC)
I just went about removing a bunch of notices inserted by User:Ling.Nut. There is no consensus to use the template. The template is ugly, redundant, and unnecessary. Please do not insult the intellegence of the reader.-- Jiang 19:40, 28 August 2006 (UTC)
It is a question on where we want to draw the line on what is common knowledge and what is not, and how prominent to make a notice, if any, for these articles. There are many things assumed in articles that are not explicitly expressed. Articles written in American English do not make it explicit that the spelling is American. People have and do try to change the spellings in articles, but that doesn't mean we should make a prominent notice declaring "This article is in American English."
No other encyclopedia or media source makes on explicit note on Chinese surnames. Some enycopedias have capitalized the surnames. News articles don't usually make a note: though notes on people with no surname (e.g. Abdullah, Megawati Sukarnoputri) are made.
Examples of less prominent renderings of notes on names are at Junichiro Koizumi and Vincente Fox. -- Jiang 02:31, 30 August 2006 (UTC)
Shouldn't all these template examples with zho-ng guó be Zho-ngguó? Keahapana 19:58, 3 June 2006 (UTC)
Very well, let's discuss, there are two China's or countries currently in existence due to the division of China by the Chinese Civil War. There is no justification to use Hanyu Pinyin on ALL Chinese related articles. Hanyu Pinyin should only be used as it pertains to any People's Republic of China (PRC) related article and Tongyong Pinyin]] should be used as it pertains to any Republic of China (Taiwan) article. If both China's are involved in a particular article, then both Hanyu Pinyin and Tongyong Pinyin should be used in parenthesis side by side for equality and neutrality in accordance with Wikipedia policy. To establish the pro-PRC Hanyu Pinyin as the so-called "standard" policy of all Chinese articles is to push to the general audience a pro-PRC point of view that is absolutely unacceptable and appalling given the criminal acts of murder committed by the PRC government on innocent students at Tiannemen Square. Sincerely, Minister of Foreign Affairs, Republic of China (Taiwan) —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 129.252.106.44 ( talk • contribs) 22:53, 10 September 2006.
Hanyu Pinyin is only the so-called "standard" because the majority of all countries and businesses have been either enticed or pressured into using their system. But from a point of neutrality, Tongyong Pinyin as used on the Republic of China (Taiwan) should have equal footing with Hanyu Pinyin as used on the People's Republic of China. And if we agree not to delete Hanyu Pinyin from articles, then we must agree to add Tongyong Pinyin to the article alongside Hanyu Pinyin.
Sincerely, Minister of Foreign Affairs, Republic of China (Taiwan) —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 129.252.106.44 ( talk • contribs) .
Is it encouraged to link to the characters' entries in Wiktionary (as in the lead here), optional, or frowned upon? To my eyes the blue Wikilinks are slightly less legible on a white background, and very few articles seem to do it. elvenscout742 18:36, 23 September 2006 (UTC)
Can someone make a new template "needhanzi," for articles about Chinese people or things that have no Chinese characters, such as Cheng Yu? Badagnani 09:42, 17 October 2006 (UTC)
Done. See Template:Needhanzi. Just use {{needhanzi}} if you find an article on a Chinese subject that needs Chinese characters. Badagnani 09:48, 17 October 2006 (UTC)
In articles, the name "Chinese Taipei" should only be used when the organisation itself refers to Taiwan as such. Depending on the context, it may be preferrable to add a footnote explaining that Chinese Taipei is more commonly known as Taiwan but not add (Taiwan) as parenthentical.
I want to add this to the manual of style, it has been discussed in Wikipedia:Village pump (policy) #Chinese Taipei and Taiwan. Can it be? -- Aleen f1 05:26, 20 November 2006 (UTC)
If is not in common usage, you still need the disambiguation. The name was a compromise and does not represent an actual place. So add the footnote at least. Wenzi 09:20, 21 November 2006 (UTC)
A new editor has just added a number of categories for Chinese surnames, which I believe to be very useful. As is usually the case at the Categories for Deletion area, the people who frequent that place generally try to delete every new category, regardless of whether they understand its use. In this case, they seem not to understand the utility of being able to have a category for everyone with the name "Liu," for example. Please voice your opinion here. Badagnani 03:40, 23 November 2006 (UTC)
In the Jay Chou article, User:125.142.209.67 added the Hokkien version of Jay Chou's name to the list at the beginning of the article. There is no template that includes a Min Nan parameter though, so it's currently just stuffed inside the zh-tsp template's pinyin parameter. Should versions of the zh-* templates with a Min Nan parameter be created? — heycam 22:08, 3 December 2006 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Manual of Style (China-related articles) only mentions the use of box-style format for prominent biographies. It would be better if there was more clarity as to when the box-style format can be used. For example, Hong Kong-style milk tea has two different names ???? and ????? each with Mandarin and Cantonese romanization. Should inline text format prevail? Or would this situation allow box-style format? Furthermore, for consistency throughout the Chinese articles, there should be a guideline for box-format usage. For example: Biographies, Geography, Organizations, etc.
The Hong Kong article has the strangest solution, instead of listing the pronunciation of ?? and ??????????????, it has a page of it's own at Pronunciation of Hong Kong. I don't think it's appropriate to have an article just for the pronunciation of Hong Kong. — Nrtm81 06:53, 4 December 2006 (UTC)
I've noticed since creating the Min Nan templates and slowly applying them to Taiwan-related articles that there is a wide range of naming conventions for Taiwan geography articles.
My opinions are:
Is the best way to obtain a consensus to edit the style manual with the above,enforce it and follow the Wikipedia:Consensus flow chart? WilliamDParker 21:49, 18 April 2007 (UTC)
I think the Min Nan and Hakka names for Taiwan place names are indispensible for many places in Taiwan. Should they both be applied across the board to Taiwan places or only to places judged relavant to the languages (e.g., Hakka only in Hsinchu, Miaoli, etc.)? WilliamDParker 21:56, 18 April 2007 (UTC)
Hello, in the Template:Chinesename we have "st" as the first parameter (lists simplified and traditional in that order), but now there's a dispute whether the simplified or traditional should appear first in the lines just below. Input would be greatly appreciated; please contribute at the discussion page of the template itself. Badagnani 21:59, 9 June 2007 (UTC)
OK, what about things like Three Gorges Dam or the Great Leap Forward, or whatever, which are PRC things? Badagnani 22:13, 9 June 2007 (UTC)
I mostly use the templates for foods and people. Badagnani 22:35, 9 June 2007 (UTC)
I would be okay with that--I like this kind of procedure, relying on the judgement of editors for particular pages, for most things on Wikipedia. But it's not clear how to modify the code to allow for this switching. At least I haven't figured it out. Regarding the depth that Template:Chinese goes into, what depth are you talking about? I think they contain the same information. Badagnani 23:40, 12 June 2007 (UTC)
I wrote an article about Super Donkey Kong - Xiang Jiao Chuan, an unlicensed video game from China. People on Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Video games questioned its notability. I am asking someone well-versed with Chinese to search Google with the game's Chinese name and see if you can find websites that discuss this game. WhisperToMe 13:44, 12 June 2007 (UTC)
I found at least three article, Wang Hao De, Sun Suzhen and Zhang Tianran that give birthdays as born on the 19th day of the 7th Lunar month in 1889. This conventions seems odd, and I saw nothing about it in the MoS. I was thinking this may be something specific to their religion, but I'm not sure. Could someone give this content a glance over, and perhaps convert it into standard months? Thanks for your consideration.- Andrew c 21:51, 30 June 2007 (UTC)