CZ Talk:Romanization/Chinese

Tone marks

The problem with tone marks is that most people won't know what they mean, or how to interpret them. To hope that we will get correct pronunciation out of our Romanization scheme is, I think, 'a bridge too far'. There's a similar discussion over at CZ Talk:Romanization/Ancient Greek. I think the best we can hope for is 'ability to recognize this place-name/personal-name in other written works', along with 'not too horribly mangled when spoken'. J. Noel Chiappa 12:11, 13 May 2008 (CDT)

I'm suggesting that the tone be shown on the first instance of the words use. The aim is not perfect pronunciation, but rather readability. Without tone marks, the meaning of the transliterated text may be confusing and ambiguous or worse, completely meaningless. Chinese cannot be compared to Greek. Tone marks are not the same as western accents and cannot be considered in the same way. Tone marks in Chinese are not simply an aid to correct pronunciation. Rather, tone is the fundamental aspect of the language. Derek Harkness 19:53, 13 May 2008 (CDT)

I know that. (A good friend in my research group at MIT, a lady from Harbin, tried to teach me how to say her name correctly, including the tones - not sure how well she suceeded!) Can you re-read my comments above with that bit of data in hand?

For instance (getting back to the point I was trying to get across), most English-language works on Chinese topics, even specialist ones printed in China/Taiwan (I have a large library on a variety of Chinese art forms which interest me) omit tone marks on transliterated Chinese terms. Even though I know quite about about some aspects of Chinese culture and history, I can't read or use tone marks, which ought to be an indicator of how useful they will be for the vast majority of our readers.

The point of the post in the Greek talk page was that almost all readers, other than those who are actually learning the language, will find the various special symbols used in writing words in the foreign language in Roman script to be of no value, and will not be able to use them to improve their pronunciation.

Not that I object to including them in the first use (if the person writing the article knows them, or can figure out how to look them up) - just don't get your hopes up that it will produce better pronunciation in 99.8% of cases than just the straight Romanization (and that's not being sarcastic, that's a genuine attempt at a solid guess). J. Noel Chiappa 21:04, 13 May 2008 (CDT)

While to most people, the tones are meaningless, do they cause a problem? While the number of people who would find them useful is limited, to that group of people the tone marks are very useful. Why disadvantage those people without any gain to any others? Take a look at the introduction of Anshan. Are the tone mark there actually a problem?

It should not be a hindrance to authors either. This is a wiki, you put up the information you have, someone else will add more information later. If you don't know a tone for a word, put up the bit you do know. Later it can be updated. These are guidelines that the wiki works towards rather than prerequisites for writing anything. Derek Harkness 06:52, 14 May 2008 (CDT)

Well, I did say "[n]ot that I object to including them"!

As long as the document makes clear that it's perfectly fine to include the romanization without tone marks if you don't know it; and in fact that we'd rather have the romanization without tone marks, than no romanization at all, that's what's most important, I think.

Oh, one other idea - what we typically do in Japanese articles is write the term in 'plain' romanization, followed by the original characters, and then the 'fancy' romanization, e.g. "Junichiro Koizumi (小泉 純一郎, Koizumi Jun'ichirō)"; this also allows us to give the name in Asian order. You could do something similar, so in you example it could be "Anshan (鞍山, Ānshān)". Do you think that would be good? J. Noel Chiappa 11:32, 14 May 2008 (CDT)

As for the repeating, that would be required where the words have been Anglicized but not elsewhere. You can think of 'Junichiro Koizumi' as an Anglicization as the word order has been put into an English format. Thus a second rendering of the Romanized form is needed subsequently. Another example might be Macau (澳門 Aòmén). Here the name has been fully Anglicized and so the Romanization of the Chinese script needs to come after. Where the name has no Anglicization, I see no benefit of writing it twice. So just Ānshān (鞍山) is enough. Derek Harkness 06:43, 15 May 2008 (CDT)

Wade-Giles

A book I just read made me wonder if we should encourage people to give the Wade-Giles transliteration (clearly marked as a secondary, deprecated transliteration) as well as the Pinyin, in all cases where the W-G one was at one time well known/used (e.g. Chungking, etc).

There are also some that are well known, but I'm not sure if they are W-G or not - is 'Peiping' in W-G, or a different system? Ditto for 'Szechuan'. Anyway, we should probably include all 'well-known' transliterations, even if neither Pinyin or Wade-Giles. J. Noel Chiappa 08:56, 17 June 2008 (CDT)

The current draft does state that for Chinese mainland related items, Wade-Giles should be given as a secondary translation if known and appropriate. It is still used commonly outside China, especially when discussing history. Different consideration need to be placed on areas that are not mandarin speakers or areas outside of mainland China where other systems form Pinyin or Wade-Giles may be in use.

The name "Peiping" is an old name for the city. It's a different name form Beijing rather than a different transliteration. The Chinese characters are different not just the romanisation. So you have:

Běiping (Chinese: 北平; Wade-Giles: Peiping)

Běijīng (Chinese: 北京; Wade-Giles: Peiching) commonly known by its postal system name Peking.

Beijing, plus mention of Peking, should open the article were as Beiping (or Peiping) can go to their relevant positions in the History section. There have been half a dozen other names for the city over the last millennia. While on the main Beijing page you have time to go into every one during the history section, there is no need to do so when you are just mentioning the name in passing within another article.

We should try to avoid listing every possible transliteration. There would be too many. Leave that job to a dictionary. Wiktionary does it quite well. For example, this mess from off of the Beijing page on WP is a good example of what not to do:

Beijing (Chinese: 北京; pinyin: Běijīng; Wade-Giles: Peiching or Pei3-ching1; IPA: [pèitɕíŋ]; Chinese Postal Map Romanization: Peking; pronunciation (help·info)) ... It is also known in English as Peking (English pronunciation (info)).

This is made into an exceptionally redundant mess as the first heading in the article, after the lede, is titled, "Names" and goes into all the detail yet again and more. So the mess in the first sentence could be simplified greatly by shifting it into the "Names" section. ...said Derek Harkness (talk) 10:48, 19 June 2008

I'm basically in agreement with all of the above (especially the point about not cramming all the variants into the lede, which I agree is ugly - and also the point about only giving the variants in the article on the subject, not on every mention). I was suggesting only a slight change in emphasis, "in all cases where the W-G one was at one time well known/used". I'll look at the current wording and see if it captures what I was thinking.

Thanks for the Beiping/Beijing explanation. Now that you mention it, I do recall it being renamed, but I'd completely forgotten about that! J. Noel Chiappa 07:31, 25 June 2008 (CDT)

I took a look at the text, and it didn't say quite what I intended (that giving the W-G should be done where it was common, and therefore likely to be found in older books), so I added a few words to cover that (and also will add some of your other points, e.g. not on every mention, to the main Romanization page, as these apply to all languages, not just Chinese).

Also, there was a part in the Romanization not Anglicization section I thought was hard to follow; I rewrote it to say more clearly what I think you meant, but you should check it to make sure I have correctly expressed what your point was. J. Noel Chiappa 07:50, 25 June 2008 (CDT)