![]() | 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. |
Where are the hiragana (ひらがな) characters? These are used more than katakana (カタカナ), which are the only demonstrated set. Katakana is used to write foreign words, onomatopoeic words, or biological names, but for most else it's supposed to be hiragana. I have a chart of kana that I've placed somewhere. When I can dig it up, I'll put up a link to it, for anyone interested. - coldacid 20:00 -0500 2004-03-24
I have a problem with point 3 in the Romanization section:
"Syllabic n ン followed by b, m; or p is written m."
This is not only not standard practice, it's also confusing and misleading. The syllable "n" exists in Japanese; there's no reason to transcribe it as "m". Exploding Boy 01:59, Apr 1, 2004 (UTC)
Hello, I have an opinion about "n" versus "m". I favor "m" because that is the Japanese pronunciation.
Somebody cited statistics for "Monbusho" versus "Mombusho", but I think they are not the right numbers to give in a debate about Hepburn romanization, since the "n" is Kunreishiki and Mombusho was the Education Ministry, the only major proponent of Kunreishiki.
Adopting the "n" invites readers to pronounce words incorrectly. If we want people to pronounce incorrectly, we might as well adopt Kunreishiki (heaven forfend!). Hepburn, including the "m", at least gets some people to pronounce some words correctly. Given that we have adopted Hepburn, we should use the "m", which continues to be correct pronunciation. The pronunciation Ra-n-po is incorrect; Ra-m-po is correct. Shi-n-bashi is incorrect; Shi-m-bashi is correct. Ji-n-bocho is incorrect; Ji-m-bocho is correct (at least in the consonants). Mo-n-busho is incorrect; Mo-m-busho is correct (again, in the consonants).
The "m" of Hepburn is not "generally deprecated." It is not deprecated in any way within the Hepburn system. It correctly conveys pronunciation. That's why I advocate using it.
Fg2 02:09, 9 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Revth, you edited Japanese grammar changing e to he and o to wo. But Wikipedia:Manual of Style for Japan-related articles says to use e and o. Can we come to an agreement? Gdr 15:50, 2004 Apr 2 (UTC)
Although rule 4 indirectly addresses this, what's the standard for a doubled n? Should "emperor" be tennō or ten'nō? We seem to be using the former, and I prefer that because there's not really an ambiguity that would require an apostrophe, but computer dictionaries seem to only like the apostrophe version and I do see it in stuff by Viz, so it should probably be mentioned. DopefishJustin 15:46, May 10, 2004 (UTC)
It doesn't seem to be possible to use Unicode characters in captions for images, so should long vowels just be unmarked? DopefishJustin 15:46, May 10, 2004 (UTC)
I notice in the style manual in the romanization section an example of long vowels is given using the name Tokyo, written as Tōkyō. While this is a correct romanization of the long o, Tokyo is almost exclusively written without macrons in an English context. The same applies to other words like sumo (sumō), Kyoto (Kyōto) and Hokkaido (Hokkaidō) which have established English spellings. This should be noted. Exploding Boy 00:55, Jun 26, 2004 (UTC)
Apart from the fact that it's a PITA to use numeric entities at all, Google seems not to be returning them, as suggested on this page. this page will do it, though you need to view source, perversely, to see the entities, and I suspect it only handles the Japanese range. (unsigned comment by User:Adamrice)
I agree that it is a pain. Maybe one day the English Wikipedia will transmit in UTF-8 (see Wikipedia:Unicode). In the mean time the CGI script below may be useful. Gdr 09:40, 2004 Jul 9 (UTC)
htmlify.cgi
#!/usr/local/bin/python import cgi import sys sys.stderr = sys.stdout print 'Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8' print print '<html>' print '<head><title>Convert text to HTML</title></head>' print '<body><h1>Convert text to HTML</h1>' def conv(char): o = ord(char) if 32 < o and o < 127: return cgi.escape(char) else: return '&#%d;' % o form = cgi.FieldStorage() if form.has_key('text') and form['text']: t = unicode(form['text'].value, 'utf8') u = ''.join(map(conv, t)) print '<table>' print '<tr><td>To get this:</td><td>' + u + '</td></tr>' print '<tr><td>Write this:</td><td>' + cgi.escape(u) + '</td></tr>' print '</table>' print '<form action="htmlify.cgi" method="POST">' print '<input type="text" id="text" name="text">' print '</form>' print '</body>' print '</html>'
I don't know if this is right place to post this question because it involves the right name for an article, but the decision for the right name is made more complicated by Japanese localization problems.
The article in question is Muten-Rôshi (one of the ones renamed by WTM) and a bit more information on this question can be found in that talk page, but it's worth asking here. I'm hoping that knowing the "correct" answer from this example will nail down the rules for me so I can make sure that I use them correctly in the future. (Though, I suspect there is more art here than science.)
The first step would be the Google check, and here's the beginning of that results. (The full table is in the Talk page for the article.)
Alternate Name | Google Pages |
---|---|
Roshi | 34400 |
Kamesennin | 9800 |
Master Roshi | 8190 |
Muten Roshi | 2900 |
Kame-Sennin | 2250 |
So, given this choice, what's the best pick? The generic name? The bad romaji name? A corrected romaji name that no one uses? The english dub name, even though it's #3 in popularity? Or should I just take the short road and correct the Shonen Jump ô and replace it with ō? JRP 22:23, 29 Jul 2004 (UTC)
I am wondering does anyone know about any convention regarding suffixes of an article title like prefecture, province and so on. It seems sometimes a suffix is capitalized; e.g. Ise Province, Foo District, Tokushima and some while a suffix is not capitalized like Tokushima prefecture, Tokugawa shogunate. I don't have a preference but I just need to know which one is correct and why. -- Taku 06:37, Aug 1, 2004 (UTC)
American English always capitalizes place names in full (e.g. Yamaguchi Prefecture, Chiba City, Senri New Town). British English occasionally leaves the "common" part of the place name in lower case, but I've also seen British English capitalize the full name, too... so it seems safe to me to capitalize every word in a proper place name. - Sekicho 15:59, Aug 1, 2004 (UTC)
Here's another issue that needs to be resolved: how should articles for places of interest like 法隆寺 be named? Here are some options:
Personally, I don't like any of these, but I think number 2 is the least of four evils, although number 3 comes close behind since it makes it clearer that "-ji" means temple. Number 1 is basically not English, while the fourth without -ji just sounds strange and isn't popular on Google either; I would say "Horyuji" or "Horyuji Temple" in English, but I'd never say "Horyu Temple". Opinions? Jpatokal 13:10, 4 Aug 2004 (UTC)
And now I'm leaning towards option 1 also. Poking around, non-Japanese temples with well-known foreign names (eg. Angkor Wat, Wat Phra Kaew) are also listed without the redundant "Temple" tacked on the end, so there's precedent for this too.
It's tough to make a universal rule though, since as Sekicho says eg. Ise Shrine and Osaka Castle are the usual names, not "Ise Jingu" or "Osakajo". But eg. Meiji Jingu and Izumo Taisha are usually known by their Japanese names. What to do? Jpatokal 09:54, 5 Aug 2004 (UTC)
My vote on this would be 1-2/3-4 (I think the difference between 2 and 3 must be considered on a case-by-case basis, which isn't very helpful). Generally speaking, when English speakers who are knowledgeable about Japan talk about temples and shrines, we say "Ise Jingu" or "Kiyomizu-dera" (and yes, we do say it with exactly that punctuation and capitalization!). "Heian Temple" sounds very odd to my ear: I don't think I've ever heard anyone say that.
The Japan Stylesheet, which was put out by SWET about 15 years ago, recommends that you do use Japanese suffixes and never use redundant English and Japanese (so don't say "Shirakawa River")
The exceptionn is cases where there's already a momentum of English usage in the other direction. For example--Mt Fuji, not Fuji-san (and definitely not Mt. Fuji-san). adamrice
I see one potential problem with a hyphen. There are some place and personal names containing ji like Kisshoji (place) or Tendouji (person name). One reason to add a suffix temple is disambiguation. But other than this, I am fine with horyuji or horyu-ji -- Taku 15:29, Aug 13, 2004 (UTC)
I like the disambiguation factor too ... also, using the hyphen might make the place names a little easier on the eye for longer temple names. CES 18:34, 26 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Since Wikipedians who mess with Korean and Chinese related articles made naming tables, I decided to lump in Chinese and Korean together to create an "Asian languages" table. In several articles, the "Japanese" got lumped in as well. See: Chopsticks, Go (board game), Liancourt Rocks, Manchukuo, and Sea of Japan as examples. (The Liancourt Rocks table was started by another person who had the same idea.)
NOTE: The "Hepburn" added to the "Romaji" indicates only that the standard way of writing it conforms only to Hepburn - It does not imply that more romanization systems should be added to the table. WhisperToMe 21:26, 28 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Actually, the naming dispute has its own article ( Dispute over the name of the Sea of Japan), and the names and stuff came from that article. WhisperToMe 00:15, 1 Sep 2004 (UTC)
Whisper has pointed out that some of the Sailor Moon characters have strikingly common nonstandard romanizations.
Of course the situation is even worse for 天王はるか Ten'ō Haruka. I converted these to "Meioh Setsuna" (etc.) in the article text, but I'm wondering if this was really the right thing to do here. I could make a strong case that Meioh should be treated as no more worthy of use than Meiô, but I don't know what the "average reader" would be least surprised by in this circumstance (especially given that any group of five readers will likely be split as to their preferred spelling). So, generally speaking -- do people agree with my first impulse ("Meioh": vox populi, vox Wikipedias) or my second ("Meiō": damn the otaku, full speed ahead)? -- Aponar Kestrel (talk) 23:17, 2004 Aug 31 (UTC)
Someone found another way to write a macron. He or she used a code {{o}} to get o. The macron is "higher" than the one in the standard character (ō). I did not know about that code until seeing it in the Lupin article. WhisperToMe 06:27, 5 Sep 2004 (UTC)
<font style="text-decoration: overline">
" either, so that's no argument at all, I'm afraid. --
Aponar Kestrel
(talk) 17:58, 2004 Sep 5 (UTC)
Never mind that {{o}} isn't actually the correct character... Exploding Boy 15:08, Sep 7, 2004 (UTC)
I doubt that, but it's not any more. Exploding Boy 21:00, Sep 8, 2004 (UTC)
These templates have all been deleted now - the Insert: box on edit page now provides a way to insert most special characters. Noel (talk) 15:39, 17 Mar 2005 (UTC)
This was moved from Tokugawa Ieyasu.
I changed "Tokugawa" to "Ieyasu" in many places because that distinguishes Ieyasu from his descendants. Likewise, "Toyotomi" --> "Hideyoshi" and "Oda" --> "Nobunaga".
I think Fg2 is correct. It it just a convention to use given names instead of family names in articles like this. I looked at an article in Britannica and it uses Nobunaga:
Coincidentally, they got really lengthy and balanced articles of Japanese historical figures. We are still far behind. -- Taku 17:47, Aug 27, 2004 (UTC)
I don't think we should develop a convention, which is not seen anywhere but here. As I said, my point is we should follow what almost all history books do. Sometimes the names Oda and Toyotomi are unambigous, but it is just too normal and accepted practice to use given names refer to historical figures. -- Taku 16:00, Sep 20, 2004 (UTC)
I don't think we should develop any convention either. In the English version of the manga Naruto, the character's names are in Japanese order, and they always refer to each other in short hand by their given name, perhaps as a way of reflecting what was done in historical periods of Japan. WhisperToMe 22:54, 20 Sep 2004 (UTC)
... I'm sorry, I don't know where better to ask this. Is there a name for abbreviations like wāpuro or Kimutaku? We could really use an article on it, but I don't know what to name it other than 'Japanese abbreviations'. -- Aponar Kestrel (talk) 02:27, 2004 Sep 30 (UTC)
I have created a separate article about naming order issue: Wikipedia:Manual of Style for Japan-related articles/Naming order. Personally, I hate to have a separate page about the same topic and I wish I didn't interrupt any discussion we have been having so far. But it should be helpful for us to summarize discussion and really go to come up with a solution in the near future. -- Taku 04:57, Oct 1, 2004 (UTC)
After looking through some articles on Japan, I got the feeling that we should try to simplify the way Japanese names are given within articles. A lot of articles give names the following way: <name including macrons, first name-last name order> (<kanji>, <name including macrons, last name-first name order>) -- e.g. "Kazuhiko Katō (加藤一彦 Katō Kazuhiko)" -- see the article on Monkey Punch. It seems a bit silly and redundant to me to have the rōmaji repetition of the name (only in reversed order). I am aware of course that the part following the kanji is supposed to be the transliteration, while the part before the bracket is supposed to be the form of the name commonly used in English, so there is a conceptual difference. But practically, this only means repeating the name and creating unnecessary work. There seem to be the following ways to go about it:
No. 1 would seem to include all the information pertinent to a name, but seems to me too much work, unless the English name is very common. No.4 saves a lot of work, but I for one would prefer to see kanji next to names newly introduced in an article, without having to go to a second page. No. 3 would display the name in a format familiar to Western readers -- but is this necessary? If people are unsure about whether something is the first or the last name, they can also look it up on the manual of style. Also, the word order wouldn't match the kanji. My personal favorite would be option No. 2. Obviously, this would be a bit awkward for names that are frequently mentioned in the Japanese media, but if the person is really a celeb, the name would have a link to a page that would also provide the name commonly used in English. Any thoughts? Perseus 05:37, 1 Oct 2004 (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. |
Where are the hiragana (ひらがな) characters? These are used more than katakana (カタカナ), which are the only demonstrated set. Katakana is used to write foreign words, onomatopoeic words, or biological names, but for most else it's supposed to be hiragana. I have a chart of kana that I've placed somewhere. When I can dig it up, I'll put up a link to it, for anyone interested. - coldacid 20:00 -0500 2004-03-24
I have a problem with point 3 in the Romanization section:
"Syllabic n ン followed by b, m; or p is written m."
This is not only not standard practice, it's also confusing and misleading. The syllable "n" exists in Japanese; there's no reason to transcribe it as "m". Exploding Boy 01:59, Apr 1, 2004 (UTC)
Hello, I have an opinion about "n" versus "m". I favor "m" because that is the Japanese pronunciation.
Somebody cited statistics for "Monbusho" versus "Mombusho", but I think they are not the right numbers to give in a debate about Hepburn romanization, since the "n" is Kunreishiki and Mombusho was the Education Ministry, the only major proponent of Kunreishiki.
Adopting the "n" invites readers to pronounce words incorrectly. If we want people to pronounce incorrectly, we might as well adopt Kunreishiki (heaven forfend!). Hepburn, including the "m", at least gets some people to pronounce some words correctly. Given that we have adopted Hepburn, we should use the "m", which continues to be correct pronunciation. The pronunciation Ra-n-po is incorrect; Ra-m-po is correct. Shi-n-bashi is incorrect; Shi-m-bashi is correct. Ji-n-bocho is incorrect; Ji-m-bocho is correct (at least in the consonants). Mo-n-busho is incorrect; Mo-m-busho is correct (again, in the consonants).
The "m" of Hepburn is not "generally deprecated." It is not deprecated in any way within the Hepburn system. It correctly conveys pronunciation. That's why I advocate using it.
Fg2 02:09, 9 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Revth, you edited Japanese grammar changing e to he and o to wo. But Wikipedia:Manual of Style for Japan-related articles says to use e and o. Can we come to an agreement? Gdr 15:50, 2004 Apr 2 (UTC)
Although rule 4 indirectly addresses this, what's the standard for a doubled n? Should "emperor" be tennō or ten'nō? We seem to be using the former, and I prefer that because there's not really an ambiguity that would require an apostrophe, but computer dictionaries seem to only like the apostrophe version and I do see it in stuff by Viz, so it should probably be mentioned. DopefishJustin 15:46, May 10, 2004 (UTC)
It doesn't seem to be possible to use Unicode characters in captions for images, so should long vowels just be unmarked? DopefishJustin 15:46, May 10, 2004 (UTC)
I notice in the style manual in the romanization section an example of long vowels is given using the name Tokyo, written as Tōkyō. While this is a correct romanization of the long o, Tokyo is almost exclusively written without macrons in an English context. The same applies to other words like sumo (sumō), Kyoto (Kyōto) and Hokkaido (Hokkaidō) which have established English spellings. This should be noted. Exploding Boy 00:55, Jun 26, 2004 (UTC)
Apart from the fact that it's a PITA to use numeric entities at all, Google seems not to be returning them, as suggested on this page. this page will do it, though you need to view source, perversely, to see the entities, and I suspect it only handles the Japanese range. (unsigned comment by User:Adamrice)
I agree that it is a pain. Maybe one day the English Wikipedia will transmit in UTF-8 (see Wikipedia:Unicode). In the mean time the CGI script below may be useful. Gdr 09:40, 2004 Jul 9 (UTC)
htmlify.cgi
#!/usr/local/bin/python import cgi import sys sys.stderr = sys.stdout print 'Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8' print print '<html>' print '<head><title>Convert text to HTML</title></head>' print '<body><h1>Convert text to HTML</h1>' def conv(char): o = ord(char) if 32 < o and o < 127: return cgi.escape(char) else: return '&#%d;' % o form = cgi.FieldStorage() if form.has_key('text') and form['text']: t = unicode(form['text'].value, 'utf8') u = ''.join(map(conv, t)) print '<table>' print '<tr><td>To get this:</td><td>' + u + '</td></tr>' print '<tr><td>Write this:</td><td>' + cgi.escape(u) + '</td></tr>' print '</table>' print '<form action="htmlify.cgi" method="POST">' print '<input type="text" id="text" name="text">' print '</form>' print '</body>' print '</html>'
I don't know if this is right place to post this question because it involves the right name for an article, but the decision for the right name is made more complicated by Japanese localization problems.
The article in question is Muten-Rôshi (one of the ones renamed by WTM) and a bit more information on this question can be found in that talk page, but it's worth asking here. I'm hoping that knowing the "correct" answer from this example will nail down the rules for me so I can make sure that I use them correctly in the future. (Though, I suspect there is more art here than science.)
The first step would be the Google check, and here's the beginning of that results. (The full table is in the Talk page for the article.)
Alternate Name | Google Pages |
---|---|
Roshi | 34400 |
Kamesennin | 9800 |
Master Roshi | 8190 |
Muten Roshi | 2900 |
Kame-Sennin | 2250 |
So, given this choice, what's the best pick? The generic name? The bad romaji name? A corrected romaji name that no one uses? The english dub name, even though it's #3 in popularity? Or should I just take the short road and correct the Shonen Jump ô and replace it with ō? JRP 22:23, 29 Jul 2004 (UTC)
I am wondering does anyone know about any convention regarding suffixes of an article title like prefecture, province and so on. It seems sometimes a suffix is capitalized; e.g. Ise Province, Foo District, Tokushima and some while a suffix is not capitalized like Tokushima prefecture, Tokugawa shogunate. I don't have a preference but I just need to know which one is correct and why. -- Taku 06:37, Aug 1, 2004 (UTC)
American English always capitalizes place names in full (e.g. Yamaguchi Prefecture, Chiba City, Senri New Town). British English occasionally leaves the "common" part of the place name in lower case, but I've also seen British English capitalize the full name, too... so it seems safe to me to capitalize every word in a proper place name. - Sekicho 15:59, Aug 1, 2004 (UTC)
Here's another issue that needs to be resolved: how should articles for places of interest like 法隆寺 be named? Here are some options:
Personally, I don't like any of these, but I think number 2 is the least of four evils, although number 3 comes close behind since it makes it clearer that "-ji" means temple. Number 1 is basically not English, while the fourth without -ji just sounds strange and isn't popular on Google either; I would say "Horyuji" or "Horyuji Temple" in English, but I'd never say "Horyu Temple". Opinions? Jpatokal 13:10, 4 Aug 2004 (UTC)
And now I'm leaning towards option 1 also. Poking around, non-Japanese temples with well-known foreign names (eg. Angkor Wat, Wat Phra Kaew) are also listed without the redundant "Temple" tacked on the end, so there's precedent for this too.
It's tough to make a universal rule though, since as Sekicho says eg. Ise Shrine and Osaka Castle are the usual names, not "Ise Jingu" or "Osakajo". But eg. Meiji Jingu and Izumo Taisha are usually known by their Japanese names. What to do? Jpatokal 09:54, 5 Aug 2004 (UTC)
My vote on this would be 1-2/3-4 (I think the difference between 2 and 3 must be considered on a case-by-case basis, which isn't very helpful). Generally speaking, when English speakers who are knowledgeable about Japan talk about temples and shrines, we say "Ise Jingu" or "Kiyomizu-dera" (and yes, we do say it with exactly that punctuation and capitalization!). "Heian Temple" sounds very odd to my ear: I don't think I've ever heard anyone say that.
The Japan Stylesheet, which was put out by SWET about 15 years ago, recommends that you do use Japanese suffixes and never use redundant English and Japanese (so don't say "Shirakawa River")
The exceptionn is cases where there's already a momentum of English usage in the other direction. For example--Mt Fuji, not Fuji-san (and definitely not Mt. Fuji-san). adamrice
I see one potential problem with a hyphen. There are some place and personal names containing ji like Kisshoji (place) or Tendouji (person name). One reason to add a suffix temple is disambiguation. But other than this, I am fine with horyuji or horyu-ji -- Taku 15:29, Aug 13, 2004 (UTC)
I like the disambiguation factor too ... also, using the hyphen might make the place names a little easier on the eye for longer temple names. CES 18:34, 26 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Since Wikipedians who mess with Korean and Chinese related articles made naming tables, I decided to lump in Chinese and Korean together to create an "Asian languages" table. In several articles, the "Japanese" got lumped in as well. See: Chopsticks, Go (board game), Liancourt Rocks, Manchukuo, and Sea of Japan as examples. (The Liancourt Rocks table was started by another person who had the same idea.)
NOTE: The "Hepburn" added to the "Romaji" indicates only that the standard way of writing it conforms only to Hepburn - It does not imply that more romanization systems should be added to the table. WhisperToMe 21:26, 28 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Actually, the naming dispute has its own article ( Dispute over the name of the Sea of Japan), and the names and stuff came from that article. WhisperToMe 00:15, 1 Sep 2004 (UTC)
Whisper has pointed out that some of the Sailor Moon characters have strikingly common nonstandard romanizations.
Of course the situation is even worse for 天王はるか Ten'ō Haruka. I converted these to "Meioh Setsuna" (etc.) in the article text, but I'm wondering if this was really the right thing to do here. I could make a strong case that Meioh should be treated as no more worthy of use than Meiô, but I don't know what the "average reader" would be least surprised by in this circumstance (especially given that any group of five readers will likely be split as to their preferred spelling). So, generally speaking -- do people agree with my first impulse ("Meioh": vox populi, vox Wikipedias) or my second ("Meiō": damn the otaku, full speed ahead)? -- Aponar Kestrel (talk) 23:17, 2004 Aug 31 (UTC)
Someone found another way to write a macron. He or she used a code {{o}} to get o. The macron is "higher" than the one in the standard character (ō). I did not know about that code until seeing it in the Lupin article. WhisperToMe 06:27, 5 Sep 2004 (UTC)
<font style="text-decoration: overline">
" either, so that's no argument at all, I'm afraid. --
Aponar Kestrel
(talk) 17:58, 2004 Sep 5 (UTC)
Never mind that {{o}} isn't actually the correct character... Exploding Boy 15:08, Sep 7, 2004 (UTC)
I doubt that, but it's not any more. Exploding Boy 21:00, Sep 8, 2004 (UTC)
These templates have all been deleted now - the Insert: box on edit page now provides a way to insert most special characters. Noel (talk) 15:39, 17 Mar 2005 (UTC)
This was moved from Tokugawa Ieyasu.
I changed "Tokugawa" to "Ieyasu" in many places because that distinguishes Ieyasu from his descendants. Likewise, "Toyotomi" --> "Hideyoshi" and "Oda" --> "Nobunaga".
I think Fg2 is correct. It it just a convention to use given names instead of family names in articles like this. I looked at an article in Britannica and it uses Nobunaga:
Coincidentally, they got really lengthy and balanced articles of Japanese historical figures. We are still far behind. -- Taku 17:47, Aug 27, 2004 (UTC)
I don't think we should develop a convention, which is not seen anywhere but here. As I said, my point is we should follow what almost all history books do. Sometimes the names Oda and Toyotomi are unambigous, but it is just too normal and accepted practice to use given names refer to historical figures. -- Taku 16:00, Sep 20, 2004 (UTC)
I don't think we should develop any convention either. In the English version of the manga Naruto, the character's names are in Japanese order, and they always refer to each other in short hand by their given name, perhaps as a way of reflecting what was done in historical periods of Japan. WhisperToMe 22:54, 20 Sep 2004 (UTC)
... I'm sorry, I don't know where better to ask this. Is there a name for abbreviations like wāpuro or Kimutaku? We could really use an article on it, but I don't know what to name it other than 'Japanese abbreviations'. -- Aponar Kestrel (talk) 02:27, 2004 Sep 30 (UTC)
I have created a separate article about naming order issue: Wikipedia:Manual of Style for Japan-related articles/Naming order. Personally, I hate to have a separate page about the same topic and I wish I didn't interrupt any discussion we have been having so far. But it should be helpful for us to summarize discussion and really go to come up with a solution in the near future. -- Taku 04:57, Oct 1, 2004 (UTC)
After looking through some articles on Japan, I got the feeling that we should try to simplify the way Japanese names are given within articles. A lot of articles give names the following way: <name including macrons, first name-last name order> (<kanji>, <name including macrons, last name-first name order>) -- e.g. "Kazuhiko Katō (加藤一彦 Katō Kazuhiko)" -- see the article on Monkey Punch. It seems a bit silly and redundant to me to have the rōmaji repetition of the name (only in reversed order). I am aware of course that the part following the kanji is supposed to be the transliteration, while the part before the bracket is supposed to be the form of the name commonly used in English, so there is a conceptual difference. But practically, this only means repeating the name and creating unnecessary work. There seem to be the following ways to go about it:
No. 1 would seem to include all the information pertinent to a name, but seems to me too much work, unless the English name is very common. No.4 saves a lot of work, but I for one would prefer to see kanji next to names newly introduced in an article, without having to go to a second page. No. 3 would display the name in a format familiar to Western readers -- but is this necessary? If people are unsure about whether something is the first or the last name, they can also look it up on the manual of style. Also, the word order wouldn't match the kanji. My personal favorite would be option No. 2. Obviously, this would be a bit awkward for names that are frequently mentioned in the Japanese media, but if the person is really a celeb, the name would have a link to a page that would also provide the name commonly used in English. Any thoughts? Perseus 05:37, 1 Oct 2004 (UTC)