Talk:Gwoyeu Romatzyh/Archive 2

GA passing commentary

I've passed this as a good article with a few comments. It passes all of the criteria being well written, referenced, broad

• there are numerous uses of "some" as a qualifyer that are unnecessary. Chao himself later published some influential works in linguistics using GR and Chao later published influential works in linguistics using GR have the same meaning so the "some" and "himself" are redundant.
• the article is fairly long - 44kb. So before extending it please consider either reducing some of the detail or splitting off sections that can sustain a separate article and leaving an appropriate summary

Other than that a good article and very enjoyable read.

- Peripitus (Talk) 06:48, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

Congratulations! --Ideogram 06:56, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

Many thanks for your time & kind words. I shall act on your comments—in particular by shortening the article. --NigelG (or Ndsg) | Talk 11:43, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

Seperate article for description?

I'm beginning to wonder whether or not we should split off the section that explains the spelling rules of GR in detail. We could put it into a new page labeled "Spelling of Gwoyeu Romatzyh" and make the description here summary-style. After all, the article is becoming pretty large. The ikiroid (talk·desk·Advise me) 02:05, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

[First off: since this is a language page, I feel I should correct your typo—it's separate!]

Now to the nub of the question. Yes, I think your suggestion is excellent, & will make the whole article more easily digestible & appealing.

As you're more familiar with restructuring etc, could I ask you to create the new article & copy the whole Description section to it as a first step? Please leave the original text where it is, though, so I can work on summarizing it. Many thanks.

Shouldn't the new page be called Gwoyeu Romatzyh:spelling? Somehow that seems more in line with WP grammar. --NigelG (or Ndsg) | Talk 10:30, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

In the article namespace, the use of colons and slashes to create subpages is discouraged. But, on userpages and wikipedia pages, slashes are put in for subpages. So, you are partially correct. Take a look at articles that use summary style sections with main articles, like IPA or PIE. I'll go ahead and begin the page. The ikiroid (talk·desk·Advise me) 18:21, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

P.S. It will also be necessary to migrate the appropriate references into the new article. And if you want to find one of the founding opinions against article subpages, read m:Case against subpages. The ikiroid (talk·desk·Advise me) 20:46, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

No, I wasn't really suggesting a subpage. What you've done looks excellent (I haven't had time to check all the links & references yet!).

I've tried to give the gist of what is now a new article in the Description section. Getting the right balance isn't easy: you don't want to swamp the reader with details (which they can get from the main article in any case); yet the GR article should be reasonably self-contained—sufficiently so for the reader to be able to follow the Example. I hope I've got it about right. --NigelG (or Ndsg) | Talk 00:08, 21 March 2007 (UTC)

Both pages now look reasonably consistent & self-contained. Please check them over! --NigelG (or Ndsg) | Talk 11:38, 21 March 2007 (UTC)

You've done a good job balancing size and information. It gives the reader enough information that they can understand the system, but not so much that they are swamped by details that they may not want to know. I made a very minor edit with a very long edit summary (diff) but you've done well. I'm glad you migrated the references to the spelling article; I was about to ask you to do so. The ikiroid (talk·desk·Advise me) 20:30, 21 March 2007 (UTC)

I actually do have one request: in the sample words which depict colored letters for tone change, could you use the same set of syllables for each group? I'll also add a T1 example as a base reference. The ikiroid (talk·desk·Advise me) 20:36, 21 March 2007 (UTC)

Summary description section

(continuation of the above )

Good idea! It certainly would make the whole thing clearer. I'll see if I can think of some syllables which

• exist in all tones
• illustrate the whole range of tonal modificaitions.

The point is that it looks a bit silly to Chinese-speakers if some of the syllables don't exist!

Your minor edit with the bullet point is a great improvement. --NigelG (or Ndsg) | Talk 20:52, 21 March 2007 (UTC)

I would use the tones (in T1 form) chi, shiue, jeng, and lhan. I hope I spelt the last two correctly, that's qi, xue, zheng, and lan in pinyin. The ikiroid (talk·desk·Advise me) 21:06, 21 March 2007 (UTC)

Well, I chose shiue, chuan, chang and hai! I purposely omitted any sonorants such as lan, because they're treated separately at the end of the section. Their inclusion earlier on would only serve to further confuse the reader, whose head is probably already spinning ... I'm not sure *jerng (zhéng) exists in T2, BTW. --NigelG (or Ndsg) | Talk 21:53, 21 March 2007 (UTC)

You're right. Funny...I'm always seeing 正 so often, I figured there would be a T2 variation. The ikiroid (talk·desk·Advise me) 14:33, 26 March 2007 (UTC)

Transliterating

Is there a reason why the term “Transliterating” does not appear in this article? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 17.202.45.135 (talk) 01:16, August 22, 2007 (UTC)

No particular reason, except that I prefer to restrict "transliteration" to transcription from one alphabet to another (eg Greek or Russian to Latin). But romanizations such as Pinyin & GR can, of course, also loosely be called transliterations. Do you have any specific part of this article in mind? --NigelG (or Ndsg) | Talk 11:25, 22 August 2007 (UTC)

Example order

I wonder if the GR and pinyin might be better next to each other, for most english readers it is likely comparing those two systems would be the most informative part of that section, and it would be easier if they were next to each other I think. --86.129.7.144 02:57, 22 August 2007 (UTC)

Please see the main article on Spelling in Gwoyeu Romatzyh (there's a link at the top of the Description section of the GR article): this includes several Pinyin comparison tables. --NigelG (or Ndsg) | Talk 11:15, 22 August 2007 (UTC)

this system is a mess

A system like this would never pass muster these days because of the ridiculous way it represents tone. AFAIK there is *NO* system of transcription currently used that works the way this system does. Benwing 05:22, 22 August 2007 (UTC)

Well, there's something to be said for spelling holding meaning. The ikiroid (talk·desk·Advise me) 16:26, 22 August 2007 (UTC)

Not unique!

A quote from the article: 'GR is unique among romanization systems in indicating the four tones of Mandarin by varying the spelling of syllables ("tonal spelling").' This is not true. I know of one other system that does the same, the Simplified Wade invented by the Swedish linguist Olov Bertil Anderson. It never was used much, but still it's not completely unknown of, and he has written books on it. When I get the time to, I'll add an article about it. Til then, I'll change that sentence unless someone disapproves. I'm thinking: 'GR is one of the few romanization systems that indicates the four tones of Mandarin by varying the spelling of syllables ("tonal spelling"), it is also the most widespread of these.' I'll wait for approval from a few first, since this is a Featured article. Yenx 08:06, 22 August 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for this useful information: I must admit I wasn't aware of the Anders[s?]on system. Your edit sounds OK, though it might be sufficient to say simply " ... is almost unique among ..." & add a footnote to the Andersson method (& a link when you've written your article). --NigelG (or Ndsg) | Talk 11:08, 22 August 2007 (UTC)

I guess better wording would be "one of two romanization systems...," which sounds a bit more positive than "almost unique." The ikiroid (talk·desk·Advise me) 14:32, 22 August 2007 (UTC)

On another note, I've gone ahead and created an article on Simplified Wade. The ikiroid (talk·desk·Advise me) 15:03, 22 August 2007 (UTC)

Glad to see the old Ikiroid diligence & speed remain undiminished. I changed your wording slightly (we can't claim that it's unique if it's now 1 of 2!), & moved the ref to the end of the sentence per MoS.--NigelG (or Ndsg) | Talk 15:29, 22 August 2007 (UTC)

Thanks. We've really taken care of everything, haven't we? I mean, so far no major copyedits have been needed, and no blue cleanup tags have been thrown in the article (knock on wood...) The ikiroid (talk·desk·Advise me) 16:25, 22 August 2007 (UTC)

I wonder if it would be worth mentioning that there are other tonal spelling systems in use. RPA, the principal system for writing some of the Hmong languages, uses tonal spelling. Thai (and other members of the Tai group) use a modified form of tonal spelling, although they got to it by an interesting route. In the other direction, the tonal spelling of GR is explicitly imitated in the Barnett-Chao system for Romanizing languages in the Min group, and especially Cantonese. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.37.24.173 (talk) 13:57, 12 September 2008 (UTC)

"Officially replaced" in Taiwan?

This sentence says GR survives in Taiwan in certain dictionaries, but that it has been twice-over "officially replaced." What is the result of it being officially replaced? That it was pushed out of school textbooks, and now it lingers in dictionaries that aren't part of the public curriculum? Here's the whole sentence:

"In Taiwan GR survives as a pronunciation aid in monolingual dictionaries,[23] but was officially replaced in 1986 by a modified form known as MPS II, which was in turn replaced by Tongyong Pinyin in 2002.[24]"

I welcome some clarification, because the way this graph reads currently, it sounds like a possible contradiction. Preston McConkie 20:01, 22 August 2007 (UTC)

I've posted a request for details on a Chinese listserv, & will report back when I've had a response. --NigelG (or Ndsg) | Talk 10:13, 25 August 2007 (UTC)

Suspicious Picture Change...

Plantiff Welfare changed the original picture of the article to another image with entirely different spellings (original picture shown here). Anyone care to examine this to see whether that picture is correct or not? The image was originally reverted by WarthogDemon as vandalism.¤~Persian Poet Gal ^(talk) 23:11, 22 August 2007 (UTC)

The second image is wrong. The uploader just duplicated and removed random parts of the original. Some idiot has a very sophomoric sense of humor. I've deleted it. The ikiroid (talk·desk·Advise me) 23:21, 22 August 2007 (UTC)

Thanks Ikiroid. I reverted to the original version.¤~Persian Poet Gal ^(talk) 23:22, 22 August 2007 (UTC)

can I edit this article?

I've made some edits on the article, but all have been reverted without giving reasons. Some of my edits were made to correct some obvious errors. For one thing, Gwoyeu Romatzyh literally is not "National [Language] Romanization", literally it should be "Roman character(s) for the National Language". To translate back "National [Language] Romanization" into Chinese, we'll have "國[語]羅馬化", never 國語羅馬字. I don't know whether I can edit this article again, or all edits will be reverted automatically. I don't know that a featured article is something that you can't edit.--K.C. Tang 01:30, 23 August 2007 (UTC)

I've checked the "Article History", and found that it's User:Hermant patel who'd reverted my edits. These reverts were the user's first contributions to the article; the user is not any of the original authors of the article. So it's not a kind of "Featured Article Protectionism", which I thought it was. I'm sorry for my rashness, and apologize to the original authors of the article, who've done a great job.--K.C. Tang 04:21, 23 August 2007 (UTC)

First of all, of course you can edit the article (featured or not!). But I don't personally think "romanization" is an obvious error: naturally we know that Romatzyh means "Latin characters", but "romanization" is a pretty well-established term. But different people may have other opinions. --NigelG (or Ndsg) | Talk 14:17, 23 August 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for your reply, Ndsg. Yes, different people may get a different impression. Of course the translation is not wrong, but it seems to me it can't lay claim to be a "literal" one. Forgive my fussiness. Cheers.--K.C. Tang 00:10, 24 August 2007 (UTC)

[why the huge indent?] Well, if you're going to be really fussy, the words "for the" don't appear in the Chinese—but I'm not going to be that fussy! What about "Latin [Roman if you prefer] script [letters?] for the National Language"? I think "Roman characters" sounds odd. --NigelG (or Ndsg) | Talk 11:30, 24 August 2007 (UTC)

[the indent is due to typo] That's fine, but it suddenly occurs to me that the easiest solution is simply to delete the word "literally" :-) Cheers.--K.C. Tang 02:38, 25 August 2007 (UTC)

Suggestions

Just some nitpickings for your consideration:

• These tones are a fundamental part of the Chinese language: they are considered to be a component of the word just as different vowel sounds are recognized as different in English, and determine the meanings of otherwise identical syllables. The phrase different vowel sounds are recognized as different in English sounds tautological. The sentence can be reworded into something like: 'they are perceived to be a component of a Chinese word by a Chinese speaker no less than the vowels in an English word by an English speaker, and determine the meanings of otherwise identical syllables. In other words, tones in Chinese are phonemic.'
• The basic unit of speech is popularly thought to be the character (字 tzyh, zì), which represents a (meaningful) syllable or morpheme, a smaller unit than the "linguistic word". This statement is a bit vague. Strictly speaking, a "character" is a unit of written Chinese, not a unit of spoken Chinese. And there is a number of characters which are not morphemic. To be more precise, we might write 'The basic unit of speech is popularly thought to be the monosyllable represented by a character (字 tzyh, zì), which in most cases represents a meaningful syllable or morpheme, a smaller unit than the "linguistic word".'

--K.C. Tang 01:44, 24 August 2007 (UTC)

Both these suggestions are succinct and admirable improvements: please feel free to go ahead & change the text (not that you need my permission to do so!). I'm glad you suggest retaining the unusual phrase "linguistic word", which I used to distinguish it from Chao's "sociological word", mentioned in the footnote.

Actually, I'm still not quite happy with the phrase determine the meanings of otherwise identical syllables. This isn't true, is it? If syllables are considered in isolation, we can distinguish between the 4 tones of yi, for example, but not between all the possible meanings of the 4th-tone yì. Perhaps you can come up with a further improvement that makes this clear: something along the lines of and allow speakers to discriminate between otherwise identical syllables. --NigelG (or Ndsg) | Talk 11:20, 24 August 2007 (UTC)

Yes, I thought of this before. But homophones occur in every language, not just in Chinese, so I thought perhaps it's not necessary to be so meticulous. But your suggestion is wonderful, with the word "allow" clearing all possible ambiguity. Cheers.--K.C. Tang 02:46, 25 August 2007 (UTC)

 Done I've made the necessary changes (rewording where I felt it appropriate for stylistic reasons). --NigelG (or Ndsg) | Talk 10:11, 25 August 2007 (UTC)

Replacing image with plain text

User:Remember the dot says:

"replaced image with plain text - this will load faster and work better for screen readers and text-only browsers"

It's true that this may well load faster; but this change has the unfortunate consequence that readers without Chinese-enabled browsers (ie most general, non-specialist readers) will be unable to see the characters. Instead, they'll see a series of annoying empty boxes. I recommend changing back to the image. Are there many text-only browsers out there? For their sake we could include the GR versions (guo, gwo, guoo, guoh) in the caption. --NigelG (or Ndsg) | Talk 10:24, 25 August 2007 (UTC)

Text-only browsers aren't too great of a concern. All the latest widely used operating systems have support for Chinese characters right out of the box, so any issues with Chinese character support will slowly resolve themselves over time. The advantage to text is that it's scalable (users can zoom in on it, copy & paste, etc.), loads faster (just a few hundred bytes as opposed to 20,000 bytes), has a transparent background, and will be visible to screen readers without extra code. Besides which, the article clearly states that "This article contains Chinese text. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Chinese characters."

I did add class="Unicode" to the code just now, which should improve the proportion of Internet Explorer users that can view the characters. —Remember the dot ^(talk) 15:44, 25 August 2007 (UTC)

For the people who can't see the characters, I have provided a link to the image below the table. The ikiroid (talk·desk·Advise me) 20:33, 25 August 2007 (UTC)

[written before Ikiroid's addition (edit-conflict)]:

I'm still not convinced by your argument. Is it really true that "all the latest widely used operating systems have support for Chinese characters right out of the box"? I recently upgraded to Windows XP, & had to select East Asian scripts during the installation process—an option that few users without a specific interest in such languages will select. And anyway, if you're assuming that most users have the latest hardware & software, what's the problem with loading a few K bytes?

The fact remains that if we use text for the characters a (possibly sizeable) proportion of anglophone readers are going to feel excluded from the very outset when they see empty boxes right at the top of the article. In fact, the only Chinese characters they see may be "Zhōngwén" in the ChineseText infobox! This article isn't supposed to be the exclusive preserve of Chinese-speakers. --NigelG (or Ndsg) | Talk 20:43, 25 August 2007 (UTC)

PS re Ikiroid's link. This is certainly a step in the right direction. I've made the caption of the link rather more explicit. --NigelG (or Ndsg) | Talk 21:05, 25 August 2007 (UTC)

Comment on example

I've removed the comment added to the Example by User:NewSinology:

汉学是清朝早期的一个针对宋明理学的称谓，其大意是宋明理学不是原汁原味的儒学，需要追溯到汉朝去品位寻找真正的儒学。这是中国人自己搞的名词，跟欧美学者无关。

This may or may not be a valid point; but it is out of place in a section intended merely to illustrate the use of GR. In any case, the short excerpt appearing in the article is only part of a full-length essay, included in its entirety in Chao's Sayable Chinese, which discusses the concept of Sinology in considerable detail.

In fact the Example text is a deliberately exaggerated statement of one argument (not the author's) against the very concept of Sinology, as is made clear in the preceding introduction:

所谓汉学，有许多人反对这个名称。站在这种立场的，有下列的一些理由：

(1）。。。[followed by the Example quoted in the article]

(Many people object to the term "Sinology". Those who take this position adduce the following arguments: (1) ...)

Perhaps we should include this introduction—or even replace the Example with a less controversial passage! (This would involve more work, though.) What do others think? --NigelG (or Ndsg) | Talk 10:42, 28 August 2007 (UTC)

GR in Personal Names

Another "vestigial use" that might be worth noting is that one does from time to time run into Chinese people who use GR to spell their personal names. (I happen to like this, because as soon as I see their name I know exactly how to pronounce it.) It might be interesting to give a few examples of well-known people who use GR for their names (the late Berkeley mathematician Shiing-shen Chern comes to mind). -- Tomtab (talk) 04:01, 29 November 2007 (UTC)

Excellent idea: why don't you start the ball rolling? --NigelG (or Ndsg) | Talk 12:31, 29 November 2007 (UTC)

PS I've just rearranged some of the sections in the article on Chern. --NigelG (or Ndsg) | Talk 13:03, 29 November 2007 (UTC)

PPS I've now added a reference & link to Chern in the History section. --NigelG (or Ndsg) | Talk 21:29, 2 December 2007 (UTC)