Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/China- and Chinese-related articles/Archive 4

Archive 1

Archive 2

Archive 3

Archive 4

Archive 5

Archive 6

→

Archive 8

Use of Hanyu Pinyin in romanising Chinese names outside mainland China

I wish to discuss the use of Hanyu Pinyin in romanising Chinese names outside mainland China.

First, I wish to state the obvious:

• Many Chinese names have traditional spellings of their names, which may be based on standard Mandarin, one of the dialects or another language.
• When the names were written in Roman letters, they could be written in a variety of romanisation methods.
• There is a general consensus to write the majority of Chinese names in mainland China in Hanyu Pinyin, even if there are older names. The exceptions are some words, for which a common English name existed.
• Singaporean names can be written in a variety of romanisations. The Hanyu Pinyin is used more often if the pronunication of the name is based on Standard Mandarin but many names preserve their names based on their Cantonese or Hakka pronunciation. Although, the Mandarin spelling also exists.
• Names in Hong Kong and Macao (Oumun) are based on Cantonese pronunciation, so their Mandarin names Xianggang and Aomen are normally not used.
• The majority of names Taiwan are based on standard Mandarin pronunciation (sometimes on Minnanhua, e.g. Keelung 基隆, Kinmen 金門) but uses a variety of romanisations.

I suggest to add alternative (not changing the entry) English names to the geographical names in Taiwan, thus simplifying the search, supplying a consistent pronunciation, which is better known to Chinese learners, travellers, etc.

Flaws with the current system:

• Many names use a "bastardized" version of Wade-Giles, ignoring the difference in ch'-ch, p'-p (Wade-Giles), etc (ch-zh, p-b - Hanyu Pinyin), thus creating inconsistency and confusion. In the spelling Taichung (台中) it is not clear if the 2nd syllable starts with a ch' or ch (ch or zh). The spelling Taizhong makes it clear.
• Wade-Giles is not a current standard in Taiwan, with overseas Chinese and is not well-known or used by Mandarin teachers in Taiwan - reason: Zhuyin Fuhao is used for learning, current standard romanisations are Tongyong Pinyin (created in Taiwan) or Hanyu Pinyin (borrowed from mainland China).
• Names are used in consistently and is not always clear, which name uses, which system. With the number of homophones, it is a real issue with foreign people trying to correctly identify a name based on their Roman spelling alone.

Benefits:

• Knowing the Hanyu Pinyin spelling will allow to get the exact toneless pronunciation (initials and finals) of the Chinese names outside China.
• It will allow to use the most common input method - MS Chinese IME based on pinyin to enter the names phonetically on a computer.
• Will help bring Chinese language standards to a more consistent and most known romanisation.
• The alternative names ARE ALREADY in use and many web-sites either use them as the main entry or use the traditional and the Hanyu Pinyin in brackets. Providing the additional spelling will help to link the names of the same city /town/county spelled differently.

Hurdles and suggestions:

• Hanyu Pinyin is politically not favoured and not used a lot by Taiwanese people. I am suggesting not to rename but to provide the additional spelling in brackets. For example, Taichung (or Taizhong), Hsinchu (or Xinzhu).

Please address the request seriously and if you have an objection, please specify something more descriptive than "I don't see the need". Don't consider this as something political. --Atitarev (talk) 01:51, 5 May 2008 (UTC)

I added some additional lines in the article - to add Hanyu Pinyin based names to Chinese names (where standard Mandarin is spoken and written) traditionally based on other types of romanisation. It mainly affects Taiwanese and Singaporean geographical and personal (Chinese) names. --Atitarev (talk) 01:27, 8 May 2008 (UTC)

Since a template containing the Chinese characters and the pinyin should follow the title, why add the additional burden and redundancy of throwing in the pinyin version of the place name in additional parenthetical comment? If redundancy was not your intention, I think we should clarify the comment in the manual of style. Do you mean that every wikilink in any other article needs to have the pinyin version parenthetically? WilliamDParker (talk) 13:59, 8 May 2008 (UTC)

For whatever reason, the standard is to use the common English name. While I think the local romanization method of the current local pronunciation by the local people would be an equally good alternative, that's not the standard. However, nothing prevents a forward. For example, if you type "taibei" into the search screen, the page that pops up is "Taipei". And as WilliamParker points out, once you get to the page, the "correct" pronunciations are provided. I see no reason to change the standard. Readin (talk) 13:38, 15 May 2008 (UTC)

For those who still dont know about it The legal standard in the ROC (Taiwan) since january 01, 2009 is Hanyu Pinyin... read the article about it, or the tongyong instead... Gumuhua (talk) 19:21, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

Nevertheless, Taipei, however unfortunate from a sinocentric point of view, remains standard English usage; we are intended for an English-speaking audience. This may change in time. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 04:22, 4 January 2009 (UTC)

How is it sinocentric to simply use the romanization methodology which is standard in both the PRC and Taiwan (ROC) as well as in Singapore? Just as we no longer use antiquated, archaic forms of English derived from Norman French or old English (Anglo-Saxon), from a neutral point of view, I would suggest that it is prudent to use the internationally recognized standard (pinyin) anywhere there is ambiguity regarding spelling and/or pronunciation of Mandarin words. Since one of the goals and purposes of wikipedia is the aggregation of knowledge, sometimes in order to clarify misconceptions, I would argue that reinforcing inaccurate "standard English usage" (which itself is a misnomer) is in clear contradiction to that principle. In my opinion, the continued usage of postal-map and wade-giles romanizations, especially since most of the audience isn't familiar with the terminology anyway, is an anachronism that hinders cross-cultural dialogue. Although we cannot rectify errors in everyday English on our own, we surely shouldn't misinform people due to cultural biases. If we followed your line of logic, the article on the Turkish city of "Istanbul" should instead be called "Constantinople" since westerners know more about the latter. Jeois (talk) 18:37, 30 January 2011 (UTC)

"Istanbul" is the WP:ENGLISH WP:COMMONNAME for the modern Turkish city that used to be called Constantinople. "Taipei" remains both the common name and the official romanization (Taipei City Government's English website: http://english.taipei.gov.tw), so it's not only sinocentric but wrong to emend it or Hong Kong for the English wiki.

On the other hand, no one calls Fuzhou "Foochow" any more and just try to find "Amoy" on a map. Those spellings should be mentioned as former uses, but not in the lede. — LlywelynII 23:34, 9 September 2011 (UTC)

As for the original poster, I'm not sure what his proposal was. Did he just mean to suggest that the pinyin translit. should be included as a parenthetical? Of course it should (unless the inclusion of Hakka, Cantonese, &c. means that an infobox is better). Even if pinyin weren't the standard for Taiwan (and it now is), mainland usage and Mandarin pronunciation is so important we should include it for completeness in the same way that Sakhalin gets its Japanese name mentioned. — LlywelynII 23:34, 9 September 2011 (UTC)

Linguistics box and related boxes...

The linguistics box should include the romanizations appliable to the correspondent chinese characters... For instance, in the ROC, we can see IN THE LINGUISTICS BOX both the simplified and the traditional: In the country profile we only see the traditional variant, CAUSE THATS THE OFFICIAL ONE THERE... DPP has its own linguistics box and its own political box, the same applies to some newspapers, TV channels... and so on... Is this a policy or an established guideline? If not, Id like to propose it...Gumuhua (talk) 19:20, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

We should include all useful Romanizations, whether they are official or not. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 04:23, 4 January 2009 (UTC)

I'm with Sept. — LlywelynII 23:34, 9 September 2011 (UTC)

Traditional and simplified characters

I have a question. At an article I have written, Harvard Girl, I have been using simplified characters the whole time since it's a topic mostly relevant to mainland China, and most of my Chinese sources were Xinhua and Sina. I recently added a source from Epoch Times, which of course is traditional characters. Now I'm torn about what to do—should I change the characters in the title and quotation of the ET source for the sake of consistency within the article, or should I leave them traditional for the sake of faithfulness to the source? Any input would be appreciated. rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 01:00, 15 April 2009 (UTC)

You could make a compromise by having back-to-back Simplified versus Traditional in this one case. For the Epoch Times, you should preferably present the simplified characters first to be consistent with the rest of the article, but next to it supply (perhaps in parentheses?) the traditional characters. Any other suggestions or thoughts from other editors?--Pericles of Athens^Talk 16:49, 15 April 2009 (UTC)

That's a good idea. The only thing holding me back right now is that I already also have English translations of the titles, author names, and quotes, and adding trad. characters as well would make for awfully long footnotes. Not sure if that is a major problem, though. rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 17:24, 15 April 2009 (UTC)

It's not a major problem, but pace Pericles you should lead with the form used by the source and only then offer transcription if you'd like.

Of course, you should also use English sources whenever available. — LlywelynII 23:34, 9 September 2011 (UTC)

Naming convention for Chinese foods and usages of Wikitionary

I raise the issue to WT:WikiProject China#Naming convention for Chinese foods and usages of Wikitionary. Would you spare a moment to give your thought there? Thanks.--Caspian blue 18:28, 11 May 2009 (UTC)

References in Chinese typeface

An editor has been adding Chinese references to the List of vegetarians article. There are many foreign language references on there such as Portuguese, Dutch, German etc and since they share the English typeface they can still be verified and translated. The Chinese language doesn't use the same typeface and just comes out as gibberish i.e. little numbers and it is not readable. I removed them because I think that on the English language Wikipedia the references should at least be readable which is the case even if they are in German but this is not the case with Chinese. This is the English Wikipedia after all, so I think references should at least use the English typeface so that someone who is versed in German or whatever will at least be able to translate them without having to install other typefaces on their computer. Foreign languages are verifiable through translation, other typefaces makes them non-verifiable IMO. I would welcome some input on this - do Chinese typefaces (with no Englush translation provided) make references non-verifiable? Am I correct to remove the references along with the text they support? Betty Logan (talk) 00:59, 18 June 2009 (UTC)

You are forum shopping. The answer here will be the same as in the other two places where you have asked: Chinese sources are perfectly OK, although certainly not ideal. People who can read Chinese will normally have Chinese fonts installed. So your technical argument makes no sense at all. The verifiability problems of List of vegetarians are caused by the list's absurdly wide scope (how about List of car registration numbers?), not by evil foreigners trying to subvert it. Hans Adler 00:47, 19 June 2009 (UTC)

You should get your facts straight before spouting your mouth off. If you compare the times you will see that I asked the question in the TWO most relevant places - in "Reliable sources" and in the section about Chinese language at the same time before I got an answer on either board. Since the people who frequent those boards might have something relevant to say from different perspectives I thought it would be reasonable to ask. I have in the past asked something on one board only for i) no-one to be bothered answering my question or ii) be redirected to another board. Instead of criticising people trying to ascertain the correct course of action maybe you should try being constructive. I obviously made a mistake, and gave my reasons, but at least I tried to check my facts to get it sorted out. If you check the page in question you will indeed see that it has been sorted out, and that the editor and I came up with an acceptable solution between us. Chinese typefaces may be all the fashion in the "Motherland" Hans, but there are many computers that don't have them and whether you like it or not it's something that has to be catered for. We opted to add the reference and also provide a link to the google translation for people who don't have a Chinese typeface. Betty Logan (talk) 01:28, 19 June 2009 (UTC)

Well, it's not as bad as I thought it was (very narrow timing, so easy to get wrong), but it's still forum shopping:

• 18 June 2009, 00:42: Kayau gets an answer that you don't like at WP:New contributors' help page and you respond in the hope that the answer will change. [1]
• 18 June 2009, 00:57: You forum shop at WP:Reliable sources/Noticeboard. [2]
• 18 June 2009, 00:59: You forum shop here.
• 18 June 2009, 01:13 and 01:17: You get two independent answers that you don't like at WP:Reliable sources/Noticeboard. [3]

And I don't understand why you keep repeating your nonsense argument about people not seeing the Chinese characters because their computers can't handle them. Every modern computer can handle them, and virtually all Chinese speakers living outside China know how to install the necessary fonts. If you had a computer that could only handle Chinese characters but no Latin letters, then of course you would bother to find out how to fix this. Same thing holds for Chinese speakers, only the other way round and it's not hypothetical. Repeating your silly argument only makes you sound silly. You have no right to insist on a Google translation link, byt the way. It's likely to be removed by some Wikignome sooner or later, as it is non-standard and unnecessary. --Hans Adler 01:49, 19 June 2009 (UTC)

Questions should be posted on the boards best placed to respond to them. Since this was about the Chinese language and about Reliable Sources I decided to seek out an informed opinion from both areas. Wikipedia is built from consensus so I am entitled to canvass different viewpoints, and I am entitled to offer my opinion and I am entitled to disagree with the outcome. There are thousands - even millions - of people who aren't good with computers. My mother wouldn't have the foggiest of how to install fonts on her computer, so you will have to explain why it's silly for me to wonder about making information accessible because you're coming across as slightly arrogant with that argument. See you around Fritz! Betty Logan (talk) 02:55, 19 June 2009 (UTC)

At the risk of also being rudely accused of "spouting my mouth off", I agree with Hans. I hope that helps evidence the sought-after consensus here.--Ethelh (talk) 01:22, 20 June 2009 (UTC)

It is sorted out now. I didn't know what the rules were for Chinese typefaces, so I asked on a couple of boards - this one and Reliable sources - for some clarification. Fritz is a bit upset because I asked on more than one board (although I am perfectly entitled to do that), which is what the grief is about. We added a translation to the source in the end so both parties happy. I don't know why Hans is so upset, because the other editor in the dispute seems happy enough and we still work on some articles together. Thankyou for replying to my RFC. Betty Logan (talk) 02:07, 20 June 2009 (UTC)

Could you please explain who the editor is to whom you are referring as "Fritz"? Hans Adler 02:40, 20 June 2009 (UTC)

Don't Bite Newbies

Hi, Miss Logan and Mr. Adler. I see that you have been quite upset with one another. I would like to bring this heated argument to a conclusion. On Mr. Adler's side, it is true that we can use Chinese text as reference, as long as we put the Chinese tag on it. On Miss Logan's side, she came here last November, so it is not right to bite the newbies. I therefore wish that the conflict will end here. Kayau (talk) 06:43, 21 June 2009 (UTC)

While I see the points made by Betty Logan, I agree with Adler. First, there are many features on Wikipedia that might not initially work with a user's computer (.ogg files, for example). Second, don't Chinese-English translators exist? — DroEsperanto (talk) 03:47, 6 August 2009 (UTC)

Template

Just as a reminder, the entire original conflict could've been avoided by someone pointing out that Chinese pages should include {{Contains Chinese text}} (aka {{Chinese text}} & ideally in future aka {{hanzi}}) which links through to Help:Multilingual_support_(East_Asian). — LlywelynII 23:34, 9 September 2011 (UTC)

Italicization of pinyin

I noticed that in the guideline, it says pinyin should be italicized to differentiate it from the English text. Does this include when a translation is being provided (for example,: "U.S.–China Strategic and Economic Dialogue (S&ED) (simplified Chinese: 中美战略与经济对话; traditional Chinese: 中美戰略與經濟對話; pinyin: Zhōng Měi zhànluè yǔ jīngjì duìhuà)")? If so, I think we should go ahead and modify that in the templates and clarify that in the guideline. – DroEsperanto^{(t / c)} 18:04, 29 July 2009 (UTC)

I am planning on trying to do that in the templates soon. The problem is right now since it's not in the template, some people (such as myself) have it hard-coded in articles, as {{zh|s=拼音|t=''pīnyīn''}} for example... when pinyin is added into the template and then transcluded with this in it, it yields ugly bold+apostrophe 'pinyin' . So before italics can be added to the templates, I'll have to go through and remove the hard-coded italics from articles. I'm currently in the process of replacing all zh-xx templates with {{zh}}, and while doing that I'm also keeping an eye out for hard-coded pinyin italics. rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 15:05, 18 September 2009 (UTC)

It's been fixed, but yeah, good suggestion. — LlywelynII 23:34, 9 September 2011 (UTC)

Merge discussion?

A pair of {{Mergefrom}} and {{Mergeto}} were there since September 2007. However I can't see any discussion about the proposed merge and the merge templates are just stnding here for two years. How long will this situation continue? --Quest for Truth (talk) 05:12, 24 September 2009 (UTC)

The romanization italitization sensation that's sweeping the nation

Should all romanizations be italicized in the {{zh}} templates that come at the beginning of articles? Currently I only have it italicizing Hanyu Pinyin, but it seems reasonable to italicize all of them...I'm not just sure about the italicization standards for particular ones like WG, POJ, etc. If anyone knows, please weigh in at Template talk:zh#Pinyin italicization. Thank you, rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 12:12, 28 September 2009 (UTC)

Segmentation and the use of the Ruby template

Is there any guideline written down about segmenting words when putting text in {{ruby-zh-p}} templates? I recently made this edit to keep words together (i.e., doing 漂亮(piàoliang) instead of 漂(piào) 亮(liang)), which is the standard for writing in pinyin [4] and for transcriptions in academic writing. If there's not already a guideline written down, I would suggest adding one, but wanted to run that by people here first. rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 16:24, 13 December 2009 (UTC)

See discussion below at #use dictionary spacing. Also, using template:linktext seems preferable to what you're doing. — LlywelynII 23:34, 9 September 2011 (UTC)

transliteration boxes

pronunciations of the native Chinese varieties ought to be in the 'lead' of city articles. However, if the transliteration box only includes the native romanisations, then it is entirely, or almost so, redundant. MOS states that Cantonese regions MUST have the Cantonese romanisation schemes, but it does NOT state that other regions canNOT have them. 华钢琴49 (TALK) 20:00, 27 March 2010 (UTC)

MoS naming style

There is currently an ongoing discussion about the future of this and others MoS naming style. Please consider the issues raised in the discussion and vote if you wish GnevinAWB (talk) 20:58, 25 April 2010 (UTC)

RFC which could affect this MOS

It has been proposed this MOS be moved to Wikipedia:Subject style guide . Please comment at the RFC GnevinAWB (talk) 20:54, 24 May 2010 (UTC)

Unofficial proposal for widespread utilization of mouseover template

I have created Template:Mousetext, which produces text distinguished easily with a dotted underline, that displays alternate text when the mouse cursor hovers above it. Although there are many potential uses, my original intention and purpose for the template is to include original texts for translations, to minimise cluttering that we currently have with many China-related articles, where the names of Chinese-related concepts have additional data given in parentheses.

For example, instead of:

Zhang Qiangguo (Chinese: 张强国; Pinyin: zhāng qiángguó), also known by his nickname of Old Zhang (Chinese: 老张; Pinyin: lǎo zhāng), was a senior Party Commissariat of the Yunnan People's Party for Democracy and Love (Chinese: 云南人民民主爱情党; Pinyin: yúnnán rénmín mínzhǔ àiqíng dǎng), and a graduate of Beijing University

which is very cluttered and difficult to read and navigate, the same text can be rendered as:

Zhang Qiangguo, also known by his nickname of Old Zhang, was a senior Party Commissariat of the Yunnan People's Party for Democracy and Love, and a graduate of Beijing University

without omitting any detail. Note: The individual and political party described is entirely fictional, for the sole purpose of demonstrating the template. The given name chosen is a common generic personal name, similar to that of "John Johnson". The template does not have to specifically apply to leading paragraphs. It can be used to disambiguate any Chinese name that appears in an article body that does not have an article of its own, and thus cannot be linked to:

On 17 April 1941, Chiang Kai-shek ordered Zhang Zhengming to push forward towards Futian, so that his men could meet up with and assist the army led by Chen Zhiyuan to the south, which was engaging against the Chinese Communist general Hu Yongjie and about 500 communist troops. By the end of May, Kuomintang troops controlled all of the Xiyuan region, and Zhang Zhengming was awarded the Order of the White Sun for his actions.

Additionally, since in the future text cluttering would no longer be an issue, we could also solve the issue of distinguishing between Chinese names. For example, Zhang Hen'e (张很饿) and Zhang Hen'e (张恨恶) can be rendered as Zhang Hen'e and Zhang Hen'e within the main article body (i.e. paragraphs), distinguishing/disambiguating the original name without cluttering up the text body. An alternative use would be the other way round: "In 1432, 张明 became the governor of 小村, however was murdered by 李阴 not so long afterwards. His successor, 陈文, wrote 小村之邪恶, a novel based on the incident, which became a bestseller during the Ming Dynasty" - however this method might not be so friendly to non-Chinese speakers.

Any suggestions, corrections, criticisms, comments or feedback? -- 李博杰  | —Talk contribs email 08:08, 29 July 2010 (UTC)

I like the idea a lot, but I think there might be a problem with Accessibility. I completely agree that a lot of lead sections are unnecessarily cluttered, but I also think (this is a somewhat technical point) that displaying Chinese names in Chinese enhances Wikipedia's usefulness a lot. It is also a standard practice in China-related academic works. It is only when people feel the need that accented Pinyin, Wade-Giles, traditional and short characters all need to be shown that problems arise. So my idea would be more along the lines of

In 17 April 1941, Chiang Kai-shek ordered Zhang Zhengming (张正名) to push forward ...

Of course this still creates an accessibility problem, but IMHO a relatively small one, as any info that a JavaScipt CSS non-user would miss could be easily searched for elsewhere. Another option would of course be to use some template to direct the reader to the source text, i.e. to hit the 'edit'-button. Yaan (talk) 09:15, 29 July 2010 (UTC)

P.S. I think the issues re. accessibility are of a somewhat fundamental nature and you might want to put a link to this discussion at a place like the village pump. Yaan (talk) 09:24, 29 July 2010 (UTC)

I see what you mean. If Javascript non-users is a problem, then we could always make a mid-text variant of {{hidden begin}}{{hidden end}} - this template hides bodies of text (whole paragraphs), which are collapsed by clicking a "show" link, however for browsers that do not support JS, all text is immediately shown anyway, and nothing is hidden. If it were possible to create something similar that only hides a few words along a line within a paragraph (i.e. "On 17 April 1941, Chiang Kai-shek ordered Zhang Zhengming_[show] to push forward" becomes "On 17 April 1941, Chiang Kai-shek ordered Zhang Zhengming (Simplified Chinese: 张正名; Traditional Chinese: 張正名; Pinyin: example)_[hide] to push forward"), we might be able to circumvent the JS issue. -- 李博杰  | —Talk contribs email 09:33, 29 July 2010 (UTC)

Actually, I now think the issue is not JavaScript, but CSS (my mistake). I personally think most of that accented pinyin, Wade-Giles, trad./short etc stuff is of rather little value for anyone (except for searching maybe), and there is no big problem in making it inaccessible to people who do not use CSS. At the same time, I think Chinese characters are of rather great value for some readers, and there is no big problem associated with displaying them for everyone. So if it was for me to decide, I'd say definitely use the template, but keep on displaying names both in Chinese and Latin characters (but only one variant per script) for everyone.

I don't think your last idea is easier to implement and/or more accessible than your first one. It looks like a typical JavaScript task to me. But then, I am not fully aware of what HTML and CSS can do. Yaan (talk) 10:06, 29 July 2010 (UTC)

I've already used the former template on Resident Identity Card to describe PRC laws that do not have their own Wikisource page. ("On April 6, 1984, the State Council of the People's Republic of China passed the Identity Card Provisional Bill, commencing the process of gradual introduction of personal identification...") To me it appears fine, and does its intended job, that is, to not omit the Chinese name nor clutter the paragraph. I'll see what consensus is established by the bulk of Wikipedia editors in a few days time, and see what the wider community has to say. -- 李博杰  | —Talk contribs email 10:46, 29 July 2010 (UTC)

Nice template. I occasionally edit esoteric articles and I always like to take full advantage of unicode. I find the {zh} template is much too lengthy to introduce terms throughout an article. I was surprised when I first read the MOS recommendation that English words are always preferable, and even to limit non–English details except for the article's subject. I guess it depends on the material, but there are concepts that turn up across many esoteric subjects, like wu xing, (wǔ xíng; 五行), "five elements", "five phases", [...] that are usually better left untranslated (except when first introduced in each article). I think the conventions, even without using {zh}, are still longer and more cluttered than necessary. Parentheticals don't inform the reader "that its contents aren't required to understand the sentence". (It's self–evident; that could only be true of non–English words written in the Latin alphabet). On the other hand, diacritics don't reduce readability, (and sometime they are needed to disambiguate), so I agree, the conventional repetitiveness is very unfortunate: Shao Yong (邵雍; Shào Yōng). I know it's too much to hope for, but it could be easier on the eye: 邵雍 Shào Yōng. And I have to laugh at myself because, at best, I can barely recognize a dozen words in Chinese. Anyway, all of that's just to say I wouldn't be able to copy/paste my favorite parts as easily if they became {mousetext}. But it's still a great template.—Machine Elf 1735 (talk) 11:05, 29 July 2010 (UTC)

"but there are concepts... that are usually better left untranslated" - I wholeheartedly agree. Tianxia, Wu Hu, Chunyun, and Zhonghua minzu to name a few. When the names of concepts turn up mid-sentence, it's kind of strange to use a literal English translation such as "all under heaven", "five barbarians" or "the Chinese race". Then there's the proper nouns: Zhonghua Zihai, Tian yuan shu, Hanyu Da Zidian, Kunyu Wanguo Quantu... how would you translate these every time, mid-sentence? It's strange to avoid using Chinese for certain Chinese concepts. Although I must say, this template is generally for the concepts and names that do not have their own articles - one can click a wikilink to find out how Mao Zedong or Jiandao is written in Chinese and Pinyin, however when an article is not present, we do not have the same situation. That's what I'm hoping to achieve with this template - inclusion of Chinese and the messy bits that come with it, only in a form that is less messy. -- 李博杰  | —Talk contribs email 11:23, 29 July 2010 (UTC)

I don't see the problem. Anything noteworthy deserves its own article (even if merely a stub as a placeholder for the Chinese text) and anything failing to meet that standard probably fails any need to include its foreign names within other articles as well. — LlywelynII 23:34, 9 September 2011 (UTC)

Since first seeing this posted yesterday I've thought of a couple of concerns which, although not major, make the benefits not as clear as I first thought. The first is as already noted accessibility. The existing way of displaying Chinese, as shown in the first paragraph, is easier and quicker to read and helps those readers with poor or no experience of Chinese with the Chinese and Pinyin links. Using the template it takes more time to read because of the delay before each tooltip appears and the links are missing, a potential problem, especially for users with e.g. no Chinese support on their system.

The second concern though is that there is really no problem to solve: the benefit of this being an online encyclopaedia is there's no limit to page size, or other constraint such as cost of printing unusual fonts, and this manual of style is also very clear that Chinese text should be provided where needed. If there is "too much" Chinese, because for example there's a long list of Chinese names with characters and pinyin for each, that is something best solved in the context of improving the style of the article by e.g. converting the paragraph to a list or table, or simply removing overlong unencyclopaedic text.

Another thought is there's already a template for displaying Chinese, {{zh}}. This may be something that could be handled by that template, as e.g. an optional parameter, even in such a way that it's under user control, much as there are user settings that control how math formulae display. I for example would rather see the Chinese and pinyin when reading, while other readers might not.--JohnBlackburne^words_deeds 14:10, 29 July 2010 (UTC)

Text included in the mouseover portion of the template doesn't appear to be searchable, which is not necessarily a problem but is something worth at least thinking about. (Think of a situation where, for example, a reader knows the Chinese name of someone but doesn't know how it might be transliterated, and wants to search another article to see if that person is discussed; searching for the name in Chinese might find him faster than searching for different romanizations.) rʨanaɢ (talk) 02:41, 19 August 2010 (UTC)

Some people don't use mice. Tabbing though misses the mouseoverable text. Also, I find what something is called in Chinese as essential information. I suggest only using it to hide information that could be obtained without too much brainpower, e.g. display Chinese, and in the popup display unofficial translations and Pinyin. Asoer (talk) 22:49, 22 August 2010 (UTC)

So we should show English WP:COMMONNAMEs and Chinese, and hide the numerous different romanizations? -- 李博杰  | —Talk contribs email 05:29, 23 August 2010 (UTC)

Yes. In any case, I recommend using the template to hide information that can easily be obtained, instead of hiding information that one uses to deduct the shown information. Asoer (talk) 04:11, 24 August 2010 (UTC)

Another potential issue is copy-and-pasting. I often copy-and-paste Chinese or some romanization directly from the lede, but if it's in a tooltip that wouldn't be possible. (Granted, someone could still go to the edit window to cut and paste, but ideally a reader should never have to go to the edit window to do reader things.) rʨanaɢ (talk) 22:09, 29 August 2010 (UTC)

Regarding not being able to copy and paste Chinese text, I understand that the only way to be able to do so would involve going to the article source, since tooltips can't be selected... would the issue be solved by using a horizontal { {hidden begin}} kind of thing? (kind of similar to how some internet forums have a "spoiler" feature that hides text that can be expanded upon a click) Then, the text to be hidden/expanded still remains part of the main text body, and thus, can be copy/pasted. I however have no idea how to code this into a template, though. -- 李博杰  | —Talk contribs email 03:47, 18 September 2010 (UTC)

Footnotes. — LlywelynII 23:34, 9 September 2011 (UTC)

Chinese names in ledes and infoboxes

See Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (lead section)#Guideline on native names. rʨanaɢ (talk) 02:51, 19 August 2010 (UTC)

Traditional/simplified character order in Template:Zh: a new proposal

As you probably know, currently if you want traditional characters to display before simplified characters when using this template, you have to write |first=t every time you use the template, which can be a pain in long articles, and which raises complaints about political and practical problems with making simplified characters the "default".

So I am trying to write up a version of the template in which you set a traditional/simplified choice setting just once (specifically, on a subpage of the article where you're using the template), and then every instance of the template on that article uses the ordering you set. Further details about the new setup are here; if you have a moment I would very much appreciate your input, specifically about any potential problems you can imagine or any ways this can be made better.

Thank you, rʨanaɢ (talk) 01:29, 26 September 2010 (UTC)

Details on the new setup are where? Thanks Philg88 (talk) 00:02, 30 September 2010 (UTC)

You can find it via the talk page of the above template, but the main discussion's here.--JohnBlackburne^words_deeds 00:30, 30 September 2010 (UTC)

Inclusion of Mandarin in HK, Macau, and overseas Chinese-related articles

Please see Talk:Chinatown,_Houston#Chinatown_street_names - The discussion originated from a discussion about Chinatown, Houston

I had the impression that the Mandarin transcriptions were always included in Hong Kong and Macau-related articles and on certain articles related to overseas Chinese communities, while User:184.144.170.217 said that Mandarin should be excluded from those articles.

Also how should we judge which forms of Chinese should be used in overseas Chinese communities, like Chinatowns? WhisperToMe (talk) 00:34, 31 December 2010 (UTC)

I don't see why Mandarin shouldn't be included. It is, in my opinion, perfectly fine to include Mandarin names. Additionally, the assumption that all or most Overseas Chinese speak Cantonese is WP:OR in itself. -- 李博杰  | —Talk contribs email 01:02, 31 December 2010 (UTC)

Hi, saw this discussion and wanted to add my two cents. Adding putonghua transcriptions is probably something that should always be done, but in cases such as Talk:Chinatown,_Houston#Chinatown_street_names they are most likely not the "original" transcriptions (i.e. Cantonese first). Isn't there a simple option in the ZH-template to make pinyin not be the first transliteration? Perhaps just switching MAND <--> CANT would do the trick.  White Whirlwind  咨  03:59, 31 December 2010 (UTC)

Overseas I don't know, but methinks all HK and Macau articles should have pinyin cos the SARs are part of the PRC. Kayau Voting IS evil 05:30, 9 January 2011 (UTC)

ê

I think ê should be included in this guideline just for 'officialness', even though it is only used in one Chinese character (the rest all remove the circumflex, as in yēzĭ), and that one character is an interjection. Kayau Voting IS evil 05:34, 9 January 2011 (UTC)

No diacritics for names?

Remember, tone diacritics are not used to transcribe names or terms that appear in the normal flow of an article (e.g. "...early MingDynasty scholar Gù Yánwǔ..." or "...a bronze dǐng excavated from a Zhou Dynasty tomb..."). They should only be used in templates (e.g. traditional Chinese: 顧炎武; pinyin: Gù Yánwǔ) or infoboxes.

[ N ] Why is this? Doesn't Pinyin rely on tone diacritics, and aren't they part of the basic system of transliteration? Tengu800 (talk) 21:21, 2 April 2011 (UTC)

[ Y ]I think it's as it's the normal usage in English. If you read e.g. a newspaper article then Chinese names are in Pinyin but without accents. E.g. I read this earlier today: Unilever bows to Beijing pressure ft.com

Not only are names readers would recognise (Beijing, Guangzhou) written without accents but unfamiliar names (Tingyi, Luo Zhiping) are. While English readers will usually recognise French and German accents Chinese ones are completely unfamiliar to most English speakers. Here is another style guide on it: Accents Economist.com Style Guide. --JohnBlackburne^words_deeds 21:41, 2 April 2011 (UTC)

This seems to be the case that it is simply the common way in English books. However, when I lived in China for some time, I often found that without knowing the tone for a particular word, it was often impossible for others to understand me if I just "faked" the tone. Wade-Giles has apostrophes and various rules which indicate tone, but Pinyin without tone diacritics seems like it is even less accurate than the 19th century Wade-Giles system. I've been trying to find information on this convention and if there are any formal rules about using Pinyin for names or along with western text. I found an interesting note in this book (http://books.google.com/books?id=DaDWBRZJEzAC&lpg=PR14&dq=pinyin%20names%20diacritics&pg=PR14#v=onepage&q&f=false). The author is discussing the various conventions and how they lead to confusion and variance within scholarship. Then he states that he will use Pinyin for Chinese terms, without diacritics, essentially because the diacritics are difficult to input with his computer. I wonder if this is just the norm, that often people omit the diacritics just because there is no simple input method for them with ordinary software programs? Personally as a reader, I would like to see all Chinese names and words that are in Pinyin also having proper diacritics. Otherwise it's often difficult or impossible to know their exact pronunciation. Tengu800 (talk) 22:11, 2 April 2011 (UTC)

That book was published in 1995 and a lot has changed since then. In particular the OSes people use now have no problems displaying and reading non-ASCII text. Even Windows XP will happily display and input Chinese if you install the optional language extensions, and that's about the oldest OS in widespread use. The input difficulties are the same as for European accents, but they are used but Pinyin and other non-European aren't. Again I think it's just familiarity. French and German accents will be readily understood, given how many English speakers learn European languages in school and how many French and German words make their way into English. But the same is not true for Pinyin, which could easily be confused for e.g French.

A last reason is practicality. If I were to use an article like the FT one as a source how would I supply the accents for Chinese words? I simply could not, and the same is true for most Chinese words used in English articles. If the name is also the topic it's different: it would be normal to research the pronunciation and supply the accents. But not more generally – unless the Chinese text links to an article, in which case it would make sense to provide the full Pinyin pronunciation there.--JohnBlackburne^words_deeds 23:06, 2 April 2011 (UTC)

[ N ] It seems to me that the use or non-use of diacritics indicating tone is stylistic. Most newspapers and scholarly articles may not use them, but most sources (outside of linguistics anyway) don't use IPA to indicate pronunciation, either. Rather than appeal to common English usage, we should instead consider the merits of using or not using diacritics in our own style, or if we even want to proscribe either format.

One merit that I see is the potential for disambiguation. There is an instance in Western Zhou where removing the diacritics on two different individuals would create confusion: "The reigns of the next four kings (Gōng, Yì, Xìao, and Yí) (922-878 BCE) are poorly documented." It seems like keeping the tone marks these two individuals would be much better than dancing around the use of diacritics. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 16:03, 16 April 2011 (UTC)

[ N ] I think the diacritics are important for both disambiguation and to follow Hanyu Pinyin rules. That said, an article packed with pinyin words all with diacritics looks crap. I believe it's up to individual editors to decide a good balance. As for IPA, the majority of people who use that system seem to me to be Chinese anyway which rather negates its usefulness in this context. Just my 2 RMB worth. ► Philg88 ◄ ^talk 21:49, 16 April 2011 (UTC)

I only mentioned IPA to illustrate that Wikipedia has unique stylistic guides in some things. I don't think that we should use IPA as a replacement of pinyin.

Do you think you could elaborate why an article that uses diacritics consistently throughout, (e.g. this version of Zhou Dynasty) "looks crap"? — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 22:02, 16 April 2011 (UTC)

Maybe that was a bit harsh. I don't think for one minute that the Zhou Dynasty article looks crap having been a historical contributor to it. What I mean is there are some (generally short) articles that I have seen over the years which are hard to read due to the number of diacritics, alas I cannot remember any specific examples. Then there is the issue of diacritics for links. Take a look at Yellow Emperor, it shows an eclectic style of diacritic use but since we have no firm policy I have left it alone. ► Philg88 ◄ ^talk

I was actually talking about a draft that does have lots of diacritics (I only recently took them out). It seems that the Yellow Emperor article has, in addition to constant use of diacritics, parenthetical hanzi that do more to interrupt the flow of the article than diacritics; that article doesn't seem to even use the diacritics consistently, (which the earlier draft of Zhou Dynasty does) only when terms are introduced. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 02:33, 17 April 2011 (UTC)

Well, if someone reads "Xuanyuan", they still have no idea what tones are used, and therefore could only guess at how to actually say this name. In contrast, "Xuānyuán" gives the exact pronunciation such that anyone who understands pinyin tones could say this name accurately in a way that a native speaker would be able to understand. My interest in this is in part because so many times when I was in China, I would know the pinyin for some word, but nobody would understand because I didn't know the tones. Then when they finally understood the word I was trying to say, they would then correct my tones. That is to say, tones are very significant in Chinese. Also, it looks more professional and "correct" to me, because it is the precise transliteration. I don't think the Pinyin standard allows for dropping the diacritics, and it seems like this was done more out of laziness than anything. Tengu800 (talk) 00:00, 17 April 2011 (UTC)

Nicely put Tengu800. I would like to see a guideline that says all pinyin should have diacritics with the exception of place names and generally understood words (e.g. Chairman Mao}. The problem comes with links to extant articles (which in many cases is where the pinyin is used), should they have diacritics too? ► Philg88 ◄ ^talk 00:22, 17 April 2011 (UTC)

I agree that, even if we decide that we should consistently add diacritics to any use of pinyin, that a broad exception would be with words commonly used in English. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 02:33, 17 April 2011 (UTC)

[ Y ] I'm a bit disturbed by where this discussion is going, friends.

As I told User:Aeusoes1, diacritics are not used in the normal flow of an article, a convention followed by every major scholarly organization and publication that I am aware of. As I began writing this, I started looking for specific references of journals and publications whose style guides clarify the policy we are discussing (a policy I wrote, to be clear), but I have found that they all do. Therefore, rather than me sit here and waste everyone's time by listing links to the publications of the American Oriental Society and the Oxford Press and the Journal of Chinese Linguistics (each of which are from a different continent), I think it would be more productive to ask if anyone can find a reputable, peer-reviewed publication that does use diacritics outside of the policy as I wrote it.

When discussing names, personal titles, places, lands, titles of books or poems, and most Chinese terms, the convention is thus: the name is written in roman characters without diacritics or embellishment (the exception to this is any term in Pinyin, which would be italicized), followed by the original term in Chinese characters (the use of Simplified or Full/Traditional depends on the author, topic, and/or the area of publication, but isn't otherwise crucial as long as it is consistent). Tone diacritics are, however, often used when referencing an obscure or erudite character or term that is unlikely to be known by the average educated person, and would also be followed by the original Chinese.

Let me give some examples from my own undergraduate thesis, which of course is really considered "unpublished" but was reviewed by a committee of three professors as part of its approval process and follows the widely-accepted stylistic conventions of the American Oriental Society.

Besides the bamboo strips themselves, the coffin also contained the skeleton of a man approximately forty years of age. The deceased is likely Xi 喜, a man noted in the Bian nian ji 編年記 (another text discovered in the tomb). According to that record, Xi was born in the forty-fifth year of King Zhao of Qin (262 BC). Xi held several different local administrative positions during the reign of the First Emperor, including that of Censor 御史 and Government Clerk 令史 in Anlu 安陸, and Case Official 獄吏 for Yan County 鄢縣, both of which were located in the South Commandery 南郡 (modern Hubei Province).

In this instance, an English translation is also added.

For example, might Xi need them to judge the zhongsong 冢訟 ― "sepulchral lawsuits" that were filed by the dead and brought illness to the descendants of the accused?⁸

For an example where tone diacritics would be used, see below. Note that this is from a footnote.

³¹ Bǐ 疕 refers to a head wound. See Shuowen 6.844. In the Mawangdui manuscripts it is applied to boils and sores on any part of the body.

The use of tone diacritics is mostly used in language-learning materials, and articles such as those I've cited and those we edit here on Wikipedia do not fall into that category. Wikipedia articles are to be encyclopedic in quality, and are not concerned with whether or not a reader can pronounce terms properly in a specific language. Wikipedia almost always follows the conventions of reputable academic experts and publications for articles in their particular areas, and Chinese is no different.  White Whirlwind  咨  10:17, 17 April 2011 (UTC)

How are diacritics "embellishment", when they are the standard for pinyin? Is there any part of the pinyin standard that allows for simply dropping the diacritics? In all the examples you gave, the readers are presumed to already understand Chinese, and (importantly) the actual Hanzi is given. This is a major difference between these examples and the article text that often appears in Wikipedia. To me, pinyin without diacritics is inaccurate, just like IAST without diacritics. Tengu800 (talk) 13:45, 17 April 2011 (UTC)

I have no doubt, White whirlwind, that there is a universal/near-universal preference for omitting tone diacritics in relevant scholarly literature. Without looking, the only work I can think of that did use diacritics used it for the romanization of Japanese (Shinto in History: Ways of the Kami), which hardly counts. But, as a stylistic issue, we have the option of adopting our own conventions. So the question isn't whether the dominant literature does or doesn't indicate tone in the general flow of text, but why they do or don't. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 16:06, 17 April 2011 (UTC)

[ N ] It would be bizarre if Wikipedia were to stipulate the use of anything other than fully toned pinyin for the transcription of Mandarin Chinese. As all here seem aware, only by so doing is the syllable, word or phrase at issue fully and meaningfully conveyed. It seems entirely reasonable to exclude from this well-established borrowings into English. It seems less reasonable to exclude (Mandarin) Chinese names, where tone indications will be welcomed by Chinese initiates (ever growing in number) who might wish to pronounce a name with some semblance of correctness, and easily ignored by others.

Contrary to the opinion of White Whirlwind, toneless pinyin is not a "convention followed" in academic circles; its persistence is rather a function largely of conservatism among authors themselves—-this goes first to the cumbersome nature of inputting tones for many, more fundamentally to the dubious tonal competence of many a Western academic (as likely as not also to speak in untoned pinyin!) Wikipedia labors under none of these restrictions.

As for the journals themselves, again contrary to White Whirlwind’s claim, the general rule on style sheets is simple stipulation of the use of "Hanyu Pinyin" or the like, with no explicit position taken on tone marks: see the sheets for Monumenta Serica, Early China, etc. Whatever one's interpretation of these requirements, properly toned pinyin is certianly increasingly visible. Newell Ann Van Auken’s recent article in Early China, a typographically rather conservative tome, used fully toned pinyin, as can be seen from the Table of Contents. I can attest from personal experience that the Journal of the American Oriental Society happily prints toned pinyin. The Lantern certainly seems to encourage it here in writing:

"Please use Times Pinyin or, if that is not possible, Palapinyin, for inserting tones."

There are, indeed, a growing number of outlets that explicitly require tone marks, in spite of the above-noted difficulties for a certain class of submitters. These include, to give one example, the Journal of the Chinese Language Teachers Association, style sheet here, where we read:

"Romanization: Except for established proper nouns and terminology, romanization should be done in standard Hanyu Pinyin. Tonal markings should be made by using either the Unicode-compliant Times New Roman font with tone-marked vowels or tone numbers at the end of each syllable (which will be converted to tone diacritics by the Editor)."

When someone doesn’t know French, they tend not to give a whale about the accent marks. However, Wikipedia, as the work of the editors above and others makes clear, knows Chinese. We are also in a position to act like it. Shouldn’t we? Zhaonach (talk) 20:27, 27 April 2011 (UTC)

It seems that, so far, we don't have consensus on whether to put tone diacritics in the general flow of articles as JohnBlackburne and White Whirlwind are against it and Tengu800, Philg88, and Zhaonach are for it. Since Whirlwind might have IRL concerns, I hesitate to make any decisions without him, but while we're thinking about things, there are two issues that we should also consider.

1. Links in the article names. Philg88 has suggested that we consider changing article titles to have tone diacritics. There might be some issues with the use of diacritics (I'm not sure, WP:Article titles doesn't give a definitive answer) and consistency. Even if we don't, though, we might want, as a matter of course, to create redirects with tone so that we can write, e.g. [[Zhōu Dynasty]] rather than the piped [[Zhou Dynasty|Zhōu Dynasty]]. Even if we continue piping (I think robots might automatically dab it eventually anyway), the pinyin forms with diacritics are intuitive alternatives.

1. Philg88 has also brought up that the article Yellow Emperor looks poor and I think it's because of the overuse of hanzi in parenthesis, which clutters the article by interrupting the flow of each sentence. At the same time, as he said on my talk page, hanzi is useful when needing to disambiguate and to cross-reference with Chinese materials. One alternative that we could implement is to link to wiktionary. Take a look at Partition of Jin#The Six Titled Retainers and compare it to the paragraph below

The Six Titled Retainers

At the time of Duke Wén of Jìn and Duke Xiāng of Jìn (636-621 BCE), the Hú, Zhào, Xiān, Xì, and Xū clans, amongst others, were quite powerful. Later on the Hán, Luán, Fán, and Xún rose to power. After the middle of the Spring and Autumn Period, ministers and Titled Retainers from ten clans controlled Jin state politics. In the closing years of this period, the dominant clans were the Zhào, Wèi, Hán, Fán, Zhì, and Zhonghang, who were collectively called the "Six Titled Retainers" (Chinese: 六卿; pinyin: Lìu Qīng).

While there are some problems with this layout (such as giving readers the impression that these are internal wikilinks), I think it greatly removes the feel of clutter while maintaining the hanzi characters for those interested. It might not be the solution for all instances of hanzi (as I show in the last sentence) but we might as well utilize our sister project in this regard when we can. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 21:07, 1 May 2011 (UTC)

[ N ] Like most everyone, I totally support tone marks, it's the only I can look up the meaning and hear the pronunciation. FYI, apart from a few names, all words are “unlikely to be known by the average educated person” on English Wikipedia. Thank you kindly.—Machine Elf ¹⁷³⁵ 21:22, 1 May 2011 (UTC)

I like the "Six Title Retainers" example Aeusoes1, looks much better and would fix the "Yellow Emperor" problem. ► Philg88 ◄ ^talk 22:17, 1 May 2011 (UTC)

I agree that the Six Titled Retainers example is good, using correct Pinyin and without breaking the text with excessive Hanzi. The only issue I see with this is that someone doesn't know whether they will get a dictionary entry or an encyclopedia article when they click on a link. For example, "Duke Wén of Jìn" is a Wikipedia article, whereas "Duke Xiāng of Jìn" is a Wiktionary article. That could get frustrating for users, and also breaks (to some degree) the idea that if a link is red, there is no article for it, and if it is blue, there is. Here it's almost like a false positive. Apart from this issue, I like it. I don't see a big problem with the Hanzi in the Yellow Emperor article, though... Tengu800 22:34, 1 May 2011 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Wikimedia sister projects doesn't really address the issue of false positives. Because their standard is "likely to be useful to our reader", we might want to avoid the double false positives (which are still blue, strangely) when there is no wiktionary page, either. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 01:33, 2 May 2011 (UTC)

[ Y ] Like White Whirlwind, I am against using tone marks in the flow of articles for the reason that it is not the general practice in academia. Media outlets aside, who are we to decide that sinologists have a poor grasp on Mandarin tones? The reason we don't use diacritics is because they are not common usage in English (this links to a guideline), and we are not in the business of teaching Chinese. If you want to know how a name is pronounced, go look the hanzi up in a dictionary. I believe that having tone marks in the {{Chinese}} template (or the relevant infoboxes) is enough. _dk (talk) 00:28, 2 May 2011 (UTC)

Ahh, WP:USEENGLISH helps inform the issue I brought up above about article titles, but it doesn't seem to be about usage within an article's prose. If we are to extend it to the use of Chinese in the flow of text (which I don't think is necessary), then the policy stated here that we should generally use pinyin (even without tones) would violate that.

So far, I think everybody is on the same page about avoiding tone diacritics for words and placenames familiar enough to English speakers. With that understanding, would you be okay with consistent use of tone in words unfamiliar to English speakers? What do you make of the argument that such tone markers are easily ignored for people who don't care about tone? — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 01:17, 2 May 2011 (UTC)

Note that the Naming Conventions page states that foreign terms should be transliterated, mentioning IAST for Sanskrit, and Hanyu Pinyin for Chinese. Since Hanyu Pinyin uses diacritics as part of the standard (as does IAST), then words transliterated in Pinyin should follow those standards. It is the same as using the correct accents for French or umlauts for a German word that properly uses them. Going back again to IAST as they mention, Sanskrit terms that include diacritics are generally preferred on Wikipedia, as there is a definite lack of accuracy without them. It is the same with Chinese terms, in that Pinyin without diacritics is inaccurate and goes against the Pinyin standard. As for the article title, which is what the Naming Conventions article is addressing (not the text body), I have no strong preferences, although if an article title has correct Pinyin (i.e. with diacritics), then there should be a redirect to it from the less accurate title (without diacritics). For example, Maharatnakuta Sutra is a redirect to the more accurate IAST name. Tengu800 01:33, 2 May 2011 (UTC)

Even though WP:USEENGLISH mainly concerns with article names, the spirit of the letter is that we should follow common usage in reliable sources (the criteria under "Modified letters" of the use english guideline). I concede that without tone marks people are unable to pronounce the words correctly, but we should be reflecting what's common, and not what we think is right. (Note that even the staff at Xinhua News Agency, who ought to know how to transliterate Chinese correctly, don't use tone marks as a stylistic choice) _dk (talk) 01:46, 2 May 2011 (UTC)

Okay, you're fixating on the speculation that other sources don't utilize tone marks because of authors' knowledge of Chinese, but what about the other points brought up? — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 01:50, 2 May 2011 (UTC)

The answers to your questions are implied, since my position is that I don't agree with using tone marks at all in the body of the text. If we have guidelines on how articles should be named, shouldn't the body of the text be consistent with that too? Someone said above that "apart from a few names, all words are “unlikely to be known by the average educated person” on English Wikipedia", which means that we will have to put diacritics on every Chinese word that's not Beijing or Shanghai...which makes the question rather pointless, in my opinion. Of course people who don't care about tone marks are just going to glide through them, but that's beside my point anyways that I might as well not answer the second question you posed. _dk (talk) 02:05, 2 May 2011 (UTC)

Hmmm, that seems rather dismissive.

Tengu pointed out that the guidelines on article names explicitly mention Pinyin as an exception to the policy on diacritics, so appealing to that guideline doesn't give us a clear answer. I'm not sure we can really point elsewhere at Wikipedia for a definitive answer on this.

A number of points have been made on the pro-diacritics side, including that it is an accurate representation of Chinese paralleling that of use of IAST for Sanskrit, that it allows for greater disambiguation of similar words, that it fully realizes the existing convention of using Pinyin, that it won't affect legibility, that it is fairly easy to implement, and that it has the added perk of helping anyone interested in proper pronunciation to do so.

So far the only argument put forward against diacritics is that the media and scholarly literature generally omit the diacritics. Since the inference is that they do so for a reason, and since it's a stylistic issue that we can differ from if we so choose, I think it's a fair burden to explore why they do so, particularly by addressing the other points made so far. If you're not up to that challenge, then say so. The issue isn't urgent and I think White Whirlwind will be a willing participant when he has time. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 02:30, 2 May 2011 (UTC)

[ Y ] Hanyu Pinyin with tonemarks is used to instruct and teach the Chinese language; I can see it being used in a language textbook, but not in an article on a specific Chinese topic. Not everyone who is after the topic at hand, be it a historical, political or geographical one, is after exact linguistic details. If that happens to not be the case, there is nothing stopping them from looking up the Chinese readings in a dictionary, which is more suited towards language learning. Hanyu Pinyin with tonemarks isn't a "must use standard" for transliterating Chinese - this is the same reason why street signs in Beijing do not have tonemarks - the roadsign on the highway to Liuliqiao in Beili, Beijing City reads ← 六里桥 LIU LI QIAO 2公里 and not ← 六里桥 LIÙ LǏ QIÁO 2公里. While tonemarks are nice for the occasional {{zh}} pinyin reading, it shouldn't be used for every single instance where a Chinese term is transliterated. -- 李博杰  | —Talk contribs email 03:40, 2 May 2011 (UTC)

I'm not being dismissive of the claims on the pro side, just to clarify. I choose not to argue against those points because they do have a point, but I believe that upholding Wikipedia's policy on following reliable sources takes precedence over ideals to educate. However, "easy to implement"? Really? Every article that has to do with China on Wikipedia is going to be affected by the decision we might eventually make here, and if we really are going to switch to diacritics, we're going to have to do so manually to hundreds of thousands of articles (and there isn't going to be a bot that can automate the process). _dk (talk) 03:19, 2 May 2011 (UTC)

Wikipedia's policy on following reliable sources is more for information than on stylistic choices. Wikipedia's use of use of IPA to indicate English pronunciation, for example, is not only atypical, it's technically original synthesis. When it comes to style, we can do that sort of thing. Thus, using sources need not conflict with the "desire to educate" (though, as I've implied, this is a rather peripheral justification anyway). — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 04:41, 2 May 2011 (UTC)

Wow, this generated more discussion than I thought it would! Some good input by all, to be sure.
I don't really know what to say other than the case I made above. Zhaonach made some good points, but also included some significant errors. For example, he stated that "As all here seem aware, only by so doing is the syllable, word or phrase at issue fully and meaningfully conveyed." Now, I think he's trying to point out that tone diacritics do remove a great deal of the homonym-related intelligibility issues in modern Chinese. However, the statement itself is patently wrong: it is actually only in Chinese characters, not in the use of Pinyin, that things are "fully...conveyed." I doubt even Victor Mair, who, if any of you have conversed/corresponded with (as I have, multiple times in the past few weeks, actually) will know has long been a proponent of increased Pinyin use in China and Chinese, would agree with such a statement.
Whatever his views on Pinyin may be, I find it unacceptably patronizing that Zhaonach would question the grasp of Chinese by "Western academics" (I think we can assume he means sinologists). I don't think I need to treat this claim with anything other than to say it is a remarkably ignorant statement from an otherwise nice post he made. He linked to several style sheets, one from Monumenta Serica and one from Berkeley's Early China series: there is not a single tone diacritic on either sheet, only the bars on the Japanese long vowels. Look at the examples they give, particularly the Early China one, which is much longer and more comprehensive. They follow my thesis' usage very closely.
Zhaonach's quotation of the Journal of the Chinese Language Teachers Association is only really appreciable in light of the organization's role as a pedagogical one, as User:Benlisquare pointed out. Incidentally, one of my undergraduate professors while I was writing the thesis I quoted earlier was President of the CLTA very recently, and he had no problems with my stylistic conventions.
Remember, Wikipedia is not a dictionary for Chinese language learning, it's simply a free encyclopedia. I was thinking about User:Tengu800's earlier posts, and perhaps this is an appropriate rebuttal to his earlier anecdotes. He talked about the term Xuanyuan and contrasted its diacritic/non-diacritic forms. To me, the point is moot because the term Xuanyuan occurring in a historical Chinese context is unquestionably going to be referring to 轩辕/軒轅. Your only other choice is probably 玄元, a term in the Huai Nan Zi, and I doubt you'd confuse those two! It's akin to the "red/read" English issue: the context is generally enough of a distinction in itself.
I'll try to be around more often to answer any questions or rebuttals that arise. Thanks for everyone's input, and especially User:Aeusoes1 for organizing all of this.  White Whirlwind  咨  10:16, 2 May 2011 (UTC)

That's fine in one case, but in others it will be more ambiguous. For example, shi, or xiang. Others have already pointed out examples where two names in a sentence would be ambiguous and construed to be possibly the same without tone marks. And as I have mentioned before, standard Pinyin uses tone marks, whereas "Pinyin" without tone marks is non-standard. Characterizing diacritics as a pedagogical tool is saying that the Pinyin standard is only for teaching young students. That is wrong, and Pinyin was meant to be standard and accurate. Without diacritics, this "Pinyin" is less accurate than Wade-Giles. Tengu800 12:01, 2 May 2011 (UTC)

This sort of "Pinyin without diacritics isn't true Pinyin" talk smacks of pedantic naïveté to me: while true in an abstract sense, it's clearly not used in China in public places (road signs, like User:Benlisquare pointed out, building signs, posters, etc.) of any kind - a fact User:Tengu800 certainly knows, having lived here - nor is it used on the majority of official documents. I do official translation and have always been instructed to leave tone diacritics off of Chinese terms in English writing.  White Whirlwind  咨  13:22, 2 May 2011 (UTC)

Yes, I know that it is not the normal thing in China to use Pinyin with tone marks. I've also encountered issues with this, since if I did not know a word, the so-called "Pinyin" without diacritics was of very little use. It makes it impossible to know how to correctly pronounce words unless one already knows the word in question, rendering an otherwise accurate transliteration system into a very rough approximation. Since Wikipedia consists of (1) people who have no background in Chinese, (2) people who can pronounce Pinyin but do not know all the Hanzi, and (3) people who are fluent in Chinese and already know these words, Pinyin with tone marks is helpful. There simply is not any clear reason why tone marks are left off Pinyin, since Pinyin includes tone indications in its standard. Tengu800 22:51, 2 May 2011 (UTC)

[ Y ] I do not think that tones should be used in the flow of articles, basically for the reasons laid out by White Whirlwind and DK. Just about every information source that I have read renders Chinese terms in English as pinyin without the tones, and this just makes more sense in an English text. Our articles should, however, give the Chinese characters for uncommon terms that are raised. Once they have the character, any student of Chinese (or at least, any student advanced enough to want to discuss things like oracle bones in Chinese) will know an online dictionary to copy and paste it into to get the pronunciation. We need to format our pages for the vast majority of readers who do not have any interest in learning a foreign language.--Danaman5 (talk) 13:28, 2 May 2011 (UTC)

Following up on the not-so-widespread usage of tonemarks outside of teaching Chinese, here are a few pointers:

• 
  No tonemarks here
• 
  No tonemarks here
• 
  No tonemarks here
• 
  These are in English, not pinyin. Still no tonemarks
• 
  One would expect there to be tonemarks here, but surprisingly there aren't any
• 
  (non-free image at File:Xinhua zidian.jpg) Pinyin with tonemarks here

There is very little evidence of usage of tonemarks for romanization in the real world at all outside of language education. Generally you can find them in primary school posters, Chinese-as-a-second-language textbooks, and children's books (tried to find images on Commons for a long time, and couldn't find any), and nowhere else. Yes, Hanyu Pinyin is the de facto and de jure standardised method of romanization in the PRC, ROC and Singapore - however, there is little real world evidence to show that this is the case with tonemarks. -- 李博杰  | —Talk contribs email 13:47, 2 May 2011 (UTC)

Yet, tone marks are part of the Pinyin standard, and they are very significant for correct pronunciation, as well as disambiguation (although this is not perfect, but on par with spoken Chinese in terms of accuracy). Since when did traffic signs in Beijing become the standard for correctness? Isn't the aim here to use a transliteration system correctly? "Pinyin without diacritics" is simply not following the standard, and as I have pointed out, is even less accurate than the 19th century Wade-Giles system. As the Pinyin article already notes, the Chinese themselves are not always clear about proper Pinyin use, and Pinyin is often used with spaces between every syllable, which is not really following the standard either. Use in the "real world" should not be the primary concern here. Consistency and correctness to standards can be established, since this manual of style is for Wikipedia, and established by Wikipedians. Tengu800 22:51, 2 May 2011 (UTC)

Obviously, Pinyin is the ascendant system for the transcription of Mandarin, and obviously, Pinyin most often appears without tonal diacritics in journals, books and other forums both within and without China. Given these obvious facts, I first wanted to clarify a couple of my previous points:

1) Untoned Pinyin is simply not "a convention followed by every major scholarly organization and publication," as was stated above. Such organizations tend rather to leave individual authors to make their own decisions regarding transliteration: Wade-Giles, Gwoyeu Romatzyh, so-called "Common Alphabetic", etc., along with toned and untoned Pinyin, continue to appear. Further, where Pinyin is in fact specified, no specification regarding inclusion or not of tone marks tends to be made. For instance, in the publications I happen to have right in front of me at the moment, a fifteen-year-old edition of the Journal of Chinese Linguistics along with a ten-year-old conference proceedings from the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, the choice to include tonal diacritics or not varies from author to author.

2) If, as is clear, the general tendency to leave Pinyin untoned is not a matter of policy, it must be a matter of something else. This reason seems to be simply that including tones is felt by authors and editors to be an inputting and/or printing hassle. (My own experience is that this is often down in part to issues of personal competence, but as many objected to this observation, I am happy to abandon it.) My point, then, is only that there is no reason whatsoever why tones should not be included here by those Wikipedia editors for whom doing so is not a hassle.

I would also like to make one new point in response to comments above: while I understand the concern for respecting the most common usage of "reliable" sources, we need to consider the trajectory of sophistication among academics and the public alike regarding the Mandarin language. A useful parallel might indeed be the Hepburn macron for indicating Japanese long o and u mentioned by White Whirlwind: indication of length by this means was earlier only very irregular, but now has become the standard in academic writing. The interesting result is that, today on Wikipedia, we have Tokyo on the one hand (not Tōkyō), but Kenpō, Man'yōshū, etc. on the other, even though "common use" would dictate Kenpo/Kempo, Manyoshu, etc., which "make more sense in an English text" (!). Wikipedia has chosen here to reflect the front end of the trend, as it is the more informative and the more correct. My opinion is that it would be regrettably backwards of Wikipedia not to catch the front end of the trend in the case of Mandarin--and from the perspective of informational content, of course, Pinyin without tones is vastly more impoverished than Romaji without macrons.

Finally, while it would be nice from my perspective if this were something that were paid attention to going forward, I wasn’t at all worried about how quickly, if ever, existing articles would be brought into compliance with an "include tone marks" policy. I was concerned, however, about actually mandating, on the basis of flawed argumentation, the use of a relatively uninformative system of transliteration when a fully informative one is readily available.

(Random notes:

The implication that practice in China itself might be a reasonable benchmark for the use of Pinyin is, I will only say, extremely peculiar. Pinyin is of little use to Chinese people for obvious reasons; therefore, the model for the useful application of Pinyin is not to be found there.

Regarding my statement that by the use of tone marks "the syllable, word or phrase at issue [is] fully and meaningfully conveyed," White Whirlwind claims that this is "patently wrong" and that non-ambiguity is actually only possible "in Chinese characters". Well, I should point out that in China, people tend to speak to each other entirely unambiguously without recourse to Chinese characters, and that literature indeed exists written entirely in toned (not untoned) Pinyin. I highly recommend it!) Zhaonach (talk) 16:27, 2 May 2011 (UTC)

Yes, I see Zhaonach's point, though we should be clear that references to characters are significant in Chinese speech. When introducing oneself, the characters for one's name often need to be explained; when stating the name of a location, building, or landmark, the characters are generally necessary for full comprehension; in classical poetry and literature, knowledge of the specific characters are also generally essential for true comprehension. If one doesn't know the term, one needs to either be given another more commonly known term of which they are a part, or be told the radical and phonetic elements directly. While these of course don't constitute a majority of spoken language (Heaven help speakers of the language if they did), I contend they're a significant part nonetheless. Diacritic pinyin can and does fall short here: characters do not.  White Whirlwind  咨  08:19, 3 May 2011 (UTC)

True enough; perhaps we can agree that as far as modern Mandarin is concerned, toned (and word-divided!) Pinyin text is capable of essentially the same degree of disambiguation as the spoken language--excepting matters of intonation, etc. However, as regards your points above one should also recall that 1) the balance of ancient literature was surely aurally comprehensible at the time of composition, with our modern sense that understanding requires "knowledge of the characters" being only an effect of language change; and 2) the counterparts of the cases of ambiguous speech you mention (though I'm dubious about toponyms fitting here) are the much more numerous cases in which ambiguities in character-based representations disappear in a phonemic orthography like toned Pinyin: such are collected by the score in so-called duō​yīn​zì zìdiǎn... Zhaonach (talk) 15:44, 3 May 2011 (UTC)

Zhaonach, you mentioned that the Journal of the American Oriental Society has no problem with diacritics, but the few articles available at JSTOR that I glanced at didn't seem to use them. Could you point out a few articles that do? — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 16:33, 2 May 2011 (UTC)

Just to be super clear, my point was only that journals such as JAOS, as you say, "have no problem with diacritics" (i.e., they do not exclude tonal diacritics as a matter of policy), not to dispute the fact that untoned Pinyin is in fact most commonly used. I actually based the statement on an indirect personal involvement with a recent submission to the journal. However, I did pick up the most recent copy of JAOS available in my library, January-March 2010, and for whatever it's worth, the book review by David Prager Branner and Yuan-Yuan Meng, pp. 83-87, uses tone marks (and there don't seem to be other China-related articles in this edition). It may or may not be material that Branner is currently the journal's East Asian section editor: he is a younger (shall we say "progressive"?) sinologist and linguist whose earlier articles in JAOS, such as Common Chinese and Early Chinese Morphology, from 2002, also show nice use of toned Pinyin. Zhaonach (talk) 17:09, 2 May 2011 (UTC)

Oops, I found JAOS April-June 2010. "A Note on the Etymology of the Tangut Name Ngwemi," pp. 259-260, by Guillaume Jacques at CNRS in Paris, uses toned Pinyin. Another book review by Branner, pp. 312-314, naturally uses toned Pinyin. A book review by Moss Roberts, pp. 306-309, in fact also uses toned Pinyin outside of book titles, a bit surprising as Roberts belongs to the older generation of sinologists. A review by Matthias Richter (a youngish German scholar), pp. 309-311, uses toned Pinyin including book titles. That's everything China-related I see. Hmmm... I don't want to get ahead of myself, but this looks to me like an exciting preference, if not yet a policy, on the part of JAOS towards the use of toned Pinyin. Zhaonach (talk) 17:36, 2 May 2011 (UTC)

Since it might be relevant, I thought I might take a quote from Hilary Chappell's "The Romanization Debate" (1974)

In pinyin, the tone marks... are only used for language primers, textbooks and dictionaries and whenever new vocabulary or difficult words occur in novels and newspapers. This simplifies printing without any cost to clarity or intelligibility. If and when pinyin is used as a literary form, readers would need tone indications as little as English speakers need stress and intonation markings in the written language (p. 113).

Claims about legibility aside, it seems as though Chappel is saying that un-toned pinyin is still valid pinyin. Perhaps things have changed since 1974, though, since Chappell makes quite liberal use of tone diacritics in this book chapter — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 00:59, 3 May 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for the illustrative sample of Chappel--the comparison between phonemic tone and English "stress and intonation" feels like it should be a hair older than its mid-30s. Interestingly, the answer to the question of whether or not users of Mandarin need indication of tone to process Pinyin text is almost certainly "no". Howefer, I taresay reaters of Enklish hafe efen less neet for the pinary foicink tistinction on opstruents to pe rechisteret orthokraphically, such that suppressink it woult "simplify printink without any cost to clarity or intellichipility." Simply put, there is no reason to single out the omnipresent phonemic category of tone for omission from alphabetic representation of Mandarin as long as so doing does not provide us any special convenience. I think we will continue to see fairly brisk movement towards this view among at least academic publishers over the next few years. Zhaonach (talk) 16:36, 3 May 2011 (UTC)

[ Y ]My view is:

• If a term is presented as a foreign word, in italics, then it should use the full foreign script, which in this case means using tone marks.
• In the current state of the Zhou Dynasty article, the tone marks on dynasty names are distracting and significantly degrade the readability of the English text. If a word has been "naturalized", it should not be marked. (I see people are arguing for Pinyin rather than Pīnyīn.)
• For less well-known names, it is useful to know the proper pronunciation, which includes tones. Then again the characters are similarly useful. But maybe we don't need to keep repeating them, as they do interfere with readability. Currently we give the characters once only, and omit them when they can be found in the article on the subject. Perhaps we could do the same with tone marks. Kanguole 08:17, 5 May 2011 (UTC)

So far, you're the only one who's argued that liberal use of tone marks (as in Zhou Dynasty impedes legibility. This definitely goes against my own perceptions. I've been under the impression that English readers typically ignore diacritics like this. Does anyone share Kanguole's difficulty in reading Zhou Dynasty? — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 20:24, 5 May 2011 (UTC)

I also think diacritics impede legibility, although I must say the Zhou Dynasty page doesn't seem too bad to me. Perhaps it's because most of the diacritic-bearing terms are monosyllabic and not italicized.  White Whirlwind  咨  03:14, 6 May 2011 (UTC)

I believe Philg88 raised legibility as a relevant issue above.

In the book chapter you referenced above, Hilary Chappell does indeed use tone marks to accurately convey the Chinese words (in italics) in her examples, as well as the term pǔtōnghuà, but she also uses a considerable number of proper names that come from pinyin, in Roman and without tone marks. This is presumably a deliberate choice, since we can surely rule out technical difficulties or incompetence in this case. Kanguole 16:36, 6 May 2011 (UTC)

Philg88 never clarified if Yellow Emperor had legibility issues because of the diacritics (which are few and far between) because of the hanzi issue that I mentioned when I responded to him.

We haven't really talked about how common a term has to be before we would consider diacritics unnecessary/inappropriate, but I think everyone agrees that there are a lot of words that are common enough in English that diacritics would be unwarranted (and in this sense, Zhou Dynasty most certainly is going overboard). Pinyin is one of these terms, as are the names of very prominent historical figures. In a sense, it is as if these are the English terms, which are commonly written as pinyin without diacritics. This is how I would explain Chappell's choices. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 20:10, 6 May 2011 (UTC)

If the Zhou Dynasty article hadn't used tone marks for dynasty and province names I wouldn't have minded so much, and I do agree that pronunciations are valuable (as are the characters). But leaving a fuzzy dividing line may be a recipe for endless argument. It seems to me Chappell is following a simple rule: if she's talking about a Chinese word it's in italics with tone marks; if it's in Roman (as all the proper names are, including unfamiliar personal names), there are no tones. One possibility would be to add tone marks only if the name doesn't have its own article (same as the rule for characters), or where needed to avoid ambiguity. Kanguole 23:34, 6 May 2011 (UTC)

I should add that even in cases where it would seem reasonable to use diacritics to disambiguate terms, the Chinese government is most reluctant to use them, as we see in the example of Shanxi and Shaanxi. But Kanguole's idea above seems to be a good compromise. _dk (talk) 01:09, 7 May 2011 (UTC)

Well, this is heading somewhere much preferable to the complete exclusion of tone marking, so I can't complain. However, as many may not have been able to see beyond the first page of the article by Branner linked above, here and here are a couple first pages, from articles by W. South Coblin, which include numerous examples more representative in my view than Chappell's chapter of the current direction of the academic standard (and yes, at least one mistake.) Note for instance in the second article omission of characters for Guānhuà following first occurrence, complete omission of characters for Fúzhōu, etc. -- in general not too far from what the Zhou Dynasty editors wound up with. Zhaonach (talk) 05:14, 8 May 2011 (UTC)

I can't help saying this, but Kanguole's compromise is quite close to what I wrote in my first post on this subject where I quoted several thesis excerpts. Diacritics can be used for italicized Chinese terms but not for most personal names, places, etc. I suppose the lengthy discussion that followed is just the necessary process of getting some consensus.  White Whirlwind  咨  02:48, 10 May 2011 (UTC)

Well... Kanguole spoke in favor of tone marks in the case of "foreign word, in italics" (so from Zhou Dynasty: "the fēngjiàn 'feudal' system") and against tone marks in the case of "naturalized" vocabulary (so certainly "Laozi", "the Zhou Dynasty", etc.) What remains to be hashed out is everything in between -- how are non-naturalized Chinese words in running text in general to be treated? I suppose I took Kanguole's final comment that in the case of "less well-known names, it is useful to know the proper pronunciation, which includes tones" to imply that s/he felt that most of what now appears tone-marked in Zhou Dynasty, this largely being "less well-known names", should continue to... though perhaps I misinterpret. Again, though, I want to emphasize that diacritics "can be used" in a variety of ways depending on authorial preference: it's just a matter of whether consensus here supports something more "Chappellian" or more "Coblinian"... Zhaonach (talk) 06:03, 10 May 2011 (UTC)

OK... I suppose I have to add that I think the notion of tonal diacritics affecting legibility stems simply from unfamiliarity and thus discomfort with the look of the full script. For those interested, please see Hanoi for a sense of the balance between naturalized and non-naturalized names and terms that will tend to obtain in any remotely specialized article, for a further sense of what a robust alphabetic orthography for a language with phonemic tone tends to look like, and indeed for a sense of how all this might come together with Chinese characters. Zhaonach (talk) 06:27, 10 May 2011 (UTC)

The problem with the conventions described is that eventually they will fail in some cases – many cases, actually. Then more complicated exceptions will be dealt with. There is also the matter of who knows which words, and which words are common enough that they should not be italicized or put into diacritics. This issue always arises with the idea of italicizing foreign words as well, which becomes impossible or annoying for texts which are aimed at a readership that relies heavily on these words. For example, in the subject of Buddhism or Hinduism, it is simply impossible to follow a convention of italicized text for foreign words, because texts are so reliant on them. Any subject can be like this if it uses a specialized vocabulary, because the rules will be broken or ambiguous in so many cases. The solution for scholars in these fields has been a simple one: diacritics are always preferable, and omission of them is a sign of poor quality and carelessness in the text. Just as in Chinese, diacritics are required in Sanskrit to represent the accurate pronunciation. For Sanskrit, these pages are examples that use diacritics heavily as scholarship in the field does: Mahāsāṃghika, Caitika, Prajñāpāramitā. I have never heard of legibility issues regarding Sanskrit diacritics on Buddhism articles, and some of these pages with heavy diacritic use have had very broad readership. Tengu800 00:15, 11 May 2011 (UTC)

Agree completely; problem is that such a convention in Sinology, for a variety of reasons, is only just gaining a foothold -- such that a (toneless) "common use" persists in opposition to "that which is accurate / complete / officially mandated / analogous to the standards in other fields", and a need for accommodation arises... Zhaonach (talk) 02:12, 11 May 2011 (UTC)

An underlying issue behind the lack of "progression" from non-diacritic to diacritic romanization that Zhaonach and Tengu800 have been talking about is that we're noting a convention from academic Sinology; in other words, if you're reading an article and see a Chinese term/character (for example, "South Commandery 南郡") and don't immediately know the correct pronunciation(s), you're probably not the type of person who's going to be reading such a Sinological article in the first place. I personally am not interested in cluttering my romanizations with diacritics because of our standard practice of including characters, and encountering a character I don't know is a quite rare occurrence, to be perfectly honest. However, as this is Wikipedia and not an academic journal, I can see the need for "accommodation", as Zhaonach says. I can live with a reasonable compromise on this issue.  White Whirlwind  咨  04:17, 11 May 2011 (UTC)

White Whirlwind, I refrained from drawing attention to this above, but now it might be useful to remind that while choice of romanization scheme is often left to the individual author, what is a matter of policy at Sinological journals is that Chinese characters may not appear in running text without accompanying romanization of some kind: strings like your "South Commandery 南郡", in all my experience, are forbidden. This is not so much because readers might "not know" the characters (though they might perfectly well not), but, I suppose, simply because Roman-letter reigns as our fundamental literary currency, the form in which all informational content, to the extent possible, is to be made available. Perhaps our difference comes down to the fact that I would like to push this idea to its obvious conclusion (i.e., permit our romanizations to include more complete information), while you are comfortable with certain information being accessible only by reference to the characters. Zhaonach (talk) 16:07, 11 May 2011 (UTC)

That's true, but the reason I chose "South Commandery" is because it is one that is so common in scholarly literature that a romanization is not needed, sort of like dynasty names. The AOS was fine with it. Nice try, though.  White Whirlwind  咨  03:30, 12 May 2011 (UTC)

It's seeming more and more like there is not a shared agreement on what does and does not constitute a disruption of the flow of prose. Hanoi, for example, puts foreign terms/names in bold text and translations in italics, which is not how we normally do it at Wikipedia; to me, its use of Hanzi and parenthetical translations disrupts the flow of the History section. Another thing: while foreign words are generally italicized, this is also done to words being emphasized. I would thus caution a general policy of italicizing every instance of a word if it can be avoided. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 01:15, 12 May 2011 (UTC)

Hanoi seems to use boldface to mark the earlier names of Hanoi in particular rather than foreign terms in general, but definitely the formatting is idiosyncratic in lots of ways (as the italicized translations you mention) -- so food for thought more than a model to follow. My own position on italics is that they should be used basically to mark mention as opposed to use and by no means to mark foreign terms as such, by which principle Chappell's "standard Mandarin, or pǔtōnghuà" is OK, whereas "the definition of pǔtōnghuà was achieved..." to me should definitely not carry italics. As far as providing some of the information parenthetically, whether the Chinese or an English equivalent, this is done in academic writing but seems to be avoided whenever possible for stylistic reasons with preference for "pīnyīn 字字 'translation'", paraphrastic devices like "term, or pīnyīn 字字" / "pīnyīn 字字, or term", etc. One thing you certainly don't see is the characters separated from their romanization with parentheses as "pīnyīn (字字)"; those two are very much felt to be an inalienable unit... though to me personally (doubting others will agree!), toned Pinyin with mouse-over for characters, as explored above, might make a nice solution if workable. Zhaonach (talk) 02:39, 12 May 2011 (UTC)

Italics are pretty well covered by the Manual of Style: "Use italics for phrases in other languages and for isolated foreign words that are not common in everyday English. Proper names (such as place names) in other languages, however, are not usually italicized." I think we mostly agree that italicized pinyin should be tone-marked; it's the extent of tone-marking of proper names that's in dispute.

Regarding mouse-overs showing characters, I think Rjanag's point about copy-paste is the fatal flaw there. Kanguole 23:37, 12 May 2011 (UTC)

Oh! Fabulous, many thanks, and please pardon my wide-ranging ignorance. I'll just cast a vote for tone-marked proper names and beat my retreat... perhaps to meet again at Old Chinese, as I'm in the midst of some (hopefully not too misguided) research on the subject. Zhaonach (talk) 00:28, 13 May 2011 (UTC)

[ Y ] I feel like quoting Alexander Pope...

Yes, the PRC and even Taiwan officially transliterate their own languages with pinyin.

No, that still doesn't make pinyin English.

There seems to be some confusion above about what the names in these articles are. They aren't Chinese: they're English. When the New York Times Style Guide or the Chicago Manual of Style mandate general use of pinyin in preference to Wade-Giles or Postal Map, they aren't attempting to improve their readers' Chinese: they're advocating a preference in English spelling. Never does Běijīng appear unitalicized in the running text of an newspaper article: it's not a word. The place is Beijing in English and 北京 in Chinese. (And of course, every editor above knows this: as one wag pointed out, we're debating pinyin and not pīnyīn.)

This is the MOS for the English encyclopedia. WP:ENGLISH and WP:COMMONNAME aren't going anywhere, and the English common name in every instance will be the atonal version. Zhōu is no more the common name of Zhou than Huáng Hé is that of the Yellow River. Appeals to italics run afoul of proper names; appeals to Sinological journals run afoul of WP:JARGON; appeals to vote tallies on this page run afoul of WP:LOCALCONSENSUS. [And it's 7-5 for the guideline.]

Running text accents are unsightly and off-putting. One editor above supported the proposal so long as it didn't produce an aesthetically-unpleasing (his words, "looks crap") amount of pinyin: he seems not to have realized how many Chinese proper names appear in Chinese encyclopedia entries. In one paragraph on the Zhou article, more than 1 in every 4 words is accented. Given that this is an encyclopedia for the general public, that should be reason enough to support the guideline to avoid extraneous tones.

But further, it isn't helpful. Some editors above appear to be students of Chinese and claim the words read wrong or can't be followed by Chinese speakers. Pinyin can't be followed by Chinese speakers, even those who know Mandarin. Comparisons with Vietnamese articles are poorly taken: Vietnamese articles may run afoul of the objections above (beginning the "Hanoi" article with "Thủ đô Hà Nội" instead of "Hanoi" certainly does) but can still get away with it because those diacritics are the name. The Chinese language will remain written in 汉字 until it acquires more tones or consonants, simply to distinguish the homophones. It's claimed in a limited number of contexts, tone marks can be used to elegantly distinguish two otherwise identical-looking Chinese words. In such contexts, tone marks cannot accomplish such distinction more easily or elegantly than a link can. (Of course, the links should go to wikipedia entries and not wiktionary ones. If the word under discussion isn't notable enough for its own entry, the value of rendering it in Chinese in the first place is questionable or better served by a parenthetical including the character and pinyin together.)

Removing pinyin from the main article space does not remove information from the encyclopedia. Students of Chinese, Chinese history, or Chinese culture can still get the information they want by clicking through the link to the main article. A compromise here might be to provide the tones (or the characters and the tones together) as roll-over text.

Ƶ§œš¹ was kind enough to remove the diacritics once owing to MOS's note. It would be nice if we could wrap up the conversation and restore the pages already. — LlywelynII 16:33, 5 September 2011 (UTC)

I mostly agree: we should provide tone marks, but we don't need to keep repeating them when that is not the usual practice in English. For example, the Zhou dynasty article gives the spelling Zhōu 135 times – that is 134 times more than one would expect in accounts of ancient Chinese history in English, which routinely use the common English name of the dynasty (without tone marks). Dynasty names and province names, at least, occur commonly in English without markings. Kanguole 17:45, 5 September 2011 (UTC)

Permitting any use of tone marks in the running text produces the ideas seen above that it's English practice or that names of Chinese people and places aren't part of the English language; both are mistaken. The accented pinyin should certainly appear: in the first line of the article. Likewise, the accented pinyin for Shang should certainly appear: in the first line of its article. &c. &c.

Overuse of characters is already dealt with by banning them if we can link through to an article which provides them. That is precisely the manner in which to treat the accented pinyin transliteration of a foreign language, distinguished from the pinyin-based spelling now employed by English itself. — LlywelynII 17:56, 5 September 2011 (UTC)

use dictionary/grammatical spacing

I would like to draft a proposal that "dictionary spacing" be used: I often see pinyin being used where there is space between every syllable, and words like "xingfu" are separated into "xing fu" -- this is dreadfully ugly and not at all how the mind thinks! Pinyin should show how the mind naturally segments the speech stream; the clitic-like particle "de" should be appended to the nouns or verbs it modifies, so Sun Yanzi's album would be "wo yaode xingfu" or "woyaode xingfu", not "wo yao de xingfu" and certainly not "wo yao de xing fu". Elle _{vécut heureuse} ^{à jamais} (be free) 20:51, 14 July 2011 (UTC)

That word distinction is really more of a Western imposition. The Chinese themselves often think in terms of the characters, causing the spacing you're complaining about, and they have fairly good reasons to do so. When you're grouping some words and separating others, decisions about what to do with adjectival clauses and particles like 的 and 吗 become pretty arbitrary. Still a nice general policy for rendering Chinese for the English wiki. — LlywelynII 16:40, 5 September 2011 (UTC)

Lang template

Per Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Accessibility#Other languages, this part of the MoS should advise editors to wrap non-English text in {{Lang}}. How should we word that, in this case? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 19:41, 5 September 2011 (UTC)

The templates section already recommends use of {{zh}}, which uses {{lang}}, for consistent romanization. That recommendation could be modified to say that {{zh}} should be used even if no romanization is provided, for accessibility. Quigley (talk) 19:50, 5 September 2011 (UTC)

Unless I've misunderstood, that's doing something different, because it ways prefixes the language-name. Consider {{Lang|zh|毛泽东}} which renders as simply 毛泽东; or {{Lang|zh|Zhu De}} which renders as Zhu De. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 21:54, 5 September 2011 (UTC)

I believe there is a marker to turn off the titles for {{zh}}. Look over there for more details, though. — LlywelynII 10:08, 3 November 2011 (UTC)

Should "dynasty" be capitalized in wiki titles?

There is an ongoing discussion at Wikipedia talk: Naming conventions (Chinese) about whether we should continue to capitalize "dynasty" in titles like "Han Dynasty," "Tang Dynasty," and the like. Several editors have already voiced their opinion, but we need more people to discuss the issue so that we can establish a thoughtful and long-lasting consensus. Those who are interested should leave their comments at the link above. Thank you! Madalibi (talk) 06:33, 23 October 2011 (UTC)