Talk:Heavenly Stems

My Last Change To The Table

Remove the hidden message I created when it's clearedup.68.148.164.166 (talk) 08:21, 26 February 2008 (UTC)

If you want to hide your comment, use <!-- -->. Yours was wrong. - TAKASUGI Shinji (talk) 09:31, 26 February 2008 (UTC)

Etymology

from "Chinese Characters, their Origin..." by Dr. L. Wieger, S. J. "ji" was threads on a loom "xin" was an up-symbol shang, over a double-edged grinder (meaning "to offend a superior") "gui" was a pair of out-turned feet, over a man who's stabbed through the middle (representing the outward motion of two arrows toward their victims, i.e., kinetic energy) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 12.75.42.27 (talk) 19:02, 9 March 2009 (UTC)

Article should probably be moved to "Heavenly Stem"

Currently the lede reads

The ten Celestial Stems (Chinese: 天干; pinyin: tiāngān), sometimes known as Heavenly Stems

which is certainly wrong. "Heavenly" is the more common translation for adjectival 天 generally and in this phrase: Google pulls up 4.8k results for "celestial stem" -wiki and 84.6k for "heavenly stem" -wiki.

If there is some scholarly consensus towards using "Celestial" as a term of art here, despite its less common usage, someone should note it here or on the page. Otherwise, we should probably move it to the 20* more common translation of the term. -LlywelynII (talk) 04:38, 19 November 2010 (UTC)

Google Books gives 1010 versus 1180 results. I don't think there's much point, and in any case celestial stem sounds better in English. Xanthoxyl ^< 09:36, 19 November 2010 (UTC)

Requested move 6 July 2018

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

Moved. See general agreement below to rename this page back to its earlier title. And like Earthly Branches, it seems correct to consider the title a proper noun phrase. Have a Great Day and Happy Publishing! (nac by page mover)  Paine Ellsworth  ^put'r there  17:26, 8 August 2018 (UTC)

---

Celestial stem → Heavenly Stems – Per Google Ngram. Also see discussion above. Either way, "stem" needs to be capitalized and pluralized to match the title of Earthly Branches. "Heavenly Stems" was also the original title before someone moved it in 2007. Timmyshin (talk) 03:53, 6 July 2018 (UTC)--Relisting. Dekimasuよ! 17:18, 19 July 2018 (UTC)--Relisting. Dekimasuよ! 21:05, 27 July 2018 (UTC)

• Support - ngram evidence looks convincing. -Zanhe (talk) 00:24, 8 July 2018 (UTC)

• Comment: I note this reverses 10:56, 10 July 2007‎ Zy26 (talk | contribs | block)‎ . . (28 bytes) (+28)‎ . . (moved Heavenly Stems to Celestial stem). However it seems supported by wp:plural. Andrewa (talk) 04:12, 13 July 2018 (UTC)

• ​​Why should either Celestial/Heavenly stem(s) or Earthly branches be capitalised? They're not proper names. (Don't be fooled by the Ngram results; when you click through to the Google Books results, most of them are not capitalised in the texts.) —  AjaxSmack  19:06, 15 July 2018 (UTC)

• That's not what I observe. I see approximately 60% "Stem" vs. 40% "stem" in Google Books. Timmyshin (talk) 18:39, 16 July 2018 (UTC)

• I am not a great fan of our capitalization rules, but that would normally mean the title we'd use would be the lowercase version. The uppercase version is currently only preferred if the term is consistently capitalized in reliable sources. Dekimasuよ! 21:58, 21 July 2018 (UTC)
• This would seem to be the applicable Ngram. It is true that the capitalized version is most common. How to apply WP:NCCAPS is a topic for further discussion. Dekimasuよ! 21:04, 27 July 2018 (UTC)

• Oppose. Swayed by the mixed results in User:Dekimasu's Ngram results, fall back on WP:TITLECHANGES ("If an article title has been stable for a long time, and there is no good reason to change it, it should not be changed.") I was also influenced by User:Xanthoxyl's final comment in the section immediately above this. I also agree with User:Dekimasu on WP:NCCAPS. —  AjaxSmack  15:21, 28 July 2018 (UTC)
• Support - of all the myriad variants with plural/non-plural and different caps, the proposed form seems to be quite significantly the leader from the mid-1980s onwards.[1]— Preceding unsigned comment added by Amakuru (talk • contribs)

---

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page or in a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

First point under Current Usage: Book referred to in Notes 11 and 12, and "representing letters"

The first point under Current Usage contains Notes 11 and 12, which refer to this externally linked book: Li Shanlan: The Scientist Who Changed Modern China By Yang Ziqiang(links go to Google Books, original (Chinese) version)

I don't see the book mentioned elsewhere on the page (e.g. bibliography).

The first point under Current Usage ("Korea and Japan also use heavenly stems...") seems to include a separate point about Heavenly Stems being used to represent (Roman) letters ("The 11th to 22nd letters (K–V) are represented by the terrestrial branches...").

This is my first contribution to Talk, and I apologize if I have missed anything important, either on the page in question, or in etiquette. I come only to participate, not to criticize. Today's Teraphim (talk) 17:39, 16 November 2023 (UTC)

Mass removal of most of Heavenly Stems and Earthly Branches articles

I came to the Heavenly Stems and Earthly Branches articles and was puzzled by how short and uninformative these articles were, when I remembered them being previously being much more useful and informative. Even the most basic information such as the pronunciation of stems and branches in Chinese was absent when it is standard practice in articles about Chinese topics to give pinyin for the subjects in question, hence Wikipedia's pinyin templates for that purpose.

When I checked the article history, I found found that the articles looked, as recently as a couple months ago, like this for Heavenly Stems and like this for Earthly Branches, with a wealth of information added by the combined efforts of many editors over the course of twenty years of editing. On June 30, half these articles were removed by a single user without discussion, leaving the article like this for Heavenly Stems and like this for Earthly Branches.

I object to the removal of all that information and believe the articles were previously better. The mass unilateral deletion of most of the articles and of the decades-long work of so many other editors without discussion is not okay. What do other people think?

—Lowellian (reply) 10:05, 22 August 2024 (UTC)