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Which romanization to use?

Should Zhang Xueliang be moved to "Chang Hsueh-liang", since judging by his English name (and the fact that he did immigrate to the US), Zhang/Chang personally used to WG romanization? However, google gives Zhang Xueliang slightly more hits. --Jiang

Style guide started

As Japanese had one, and I think it would be useful, I started Wikipedia:Manual of Style for China-related articles. Mosy on over and have a look. --Pratyeka 06:06, 19 Nov 2003 (UTC)

History standards started

As it would be useful, I started Wikipedia:History standards for China-related articles. Have a look. 大将军, 都督中外诸军事 (talk) 03:10, 3 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Place names

We should be redundant in titles unless there's ambiguity. If the Chinese name already has a geographical reference, then there's no need to repeat it in English. For example, Lijiang River should be moved to Li Jiang since "Jiang" already means river. This is unless, of course, there's a person named Li Jiang. Then we can maybe keep river in parenthesis to show that Jiang already means river. --Jiang 04:10, 20 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Moved from User talk:DF08:

Hi DF08,

I've noticed that you've changed all the links to the districts of Beijing on the Beijing page to contain ", Beijing". The thing is, I've included the ", Beijing" only for Chaoyang District, Beijing because there's also a district of the exact same name in Changchun.

Of course, if you think it's better to put the city name in all the district articles for the cities of China, come to Wikipedia:Naming conventions (places), where I've posted some preliminary rules (my own ideas only so far, though), and see what you think. Or just message me on my talk page.

Thanks for all the contributions you've done related to Beijing, btw. :) -- ran 15:20, Jul 16, 2004 (UTC)

Good rules. Will be progressively re-introduced. --DF08 17:10, Jul 16, 2004 (UTC)

Thanks for your encouragement on my talk page! :D As a frequent inhabitant of Beijing I figured that I could spend some time and help.

I was meaning to ask you: what do you think is better, Miyun or Miyun County? I was leaning towards Miyun County when I thought up the naming conventions, but now that I think about it, I don't think people are going to link to Miyun County when they're writing some related article -- they're just going to put Miyun. I've changed the naming conventions (and I've moved them to Wikipedia:Naming conventions (Chinese)), but I'm really looking for more opinions. Which one do you think is better? -- ran 16:03, Jul 20, 2004 (UTC)

Ni hao Ran,
Although at first sight Miyun and Miyun County may be the same, there are a few differences:
Miyun would possibly describe "Mixun Xiancheng" or the county town. However, Miyun County would describe not just the Xiancheng, but everything in Miyun County.
Example: The Jingcheng Expressway will pass through Miyun County. Accurate because the expressway won't pass directly thru Miyun Xiancheng. Or, the Jingshi Expressway will pass through Fangshan District. Accurate because it won't exactly have a portion cutting right through the centre of Fangshan Xiancheng.
Also, the pages for Tianjin point to the usage of County (e.g. Ji County).
Here's how I view the matter - views respectfully submitted. :-) --DF08 17:24, Jul 20, 2004 (UTC)
Also, the pages for Tianjin point to the usage of County (e.g. Ji County).
That's because I made it that way. :P Chongqing doesn't do it that way, for example.
What about having one article for both Miyun Xian and Miyun Xiancheng? The Beijing page, for example, describes both metropolitan Beijing and the entire limits of Beijing Municipality. (So we can say that the Great Wall passes through Beijing, etc.) In the same way, we could have an article called Miyun, and then Miyun County, Miyun Xian, Miyun Town (?) etc all redirect to it.
A bit of a fuzzy arrangement, I admit, but then you'd have to blame whoever thought up the Chinese administrative structure. :P For the same reason, Chongqing currently tries to describe both metropolitan Chongqing and the massive, province-sized Chongqing "Municipality". So far it's (kinda) working out.
Can I move what we've discussed so far to Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (Chinese), btw? We can continue from there.
-- ran 01:00, Jul 21, 2004 (UTC)
Absolutely. No problem. I'd like to hear what the others think on this. --DF08 01:08, Jul 21, 2004 (UTC)


Chinese Counties

Continuing with discussion from talk above, I suggest naming all counties followed by a "county". This is a mere suggestion, however, and I'm open to all others. Currently this format is being used with Template:Beijing. Colipon 02:54, 14 Aug 2004 (UTC)

If you add the word "county" to all the county articles, do you plan to add the word "city" to all the county-level city articles? -- ran 08:57, Aug 14, 2004 (UTC)
No, this is the current format used by US counties, and I thought it could just as well apply to Chinese ones. [[User:Colipon|Colipon -- (Talk)]] 00:42, 15 Aug 2004 (UTC)
I'm not sure if this "applying American standards onto a Chinese system" thing is a good idea. It is a necessity that American counties have to have "county" appended to their names -- American counties are named after a city by the same name (e.g., Prentiss County, MS vs. Prentiss, MS). So, the "county" suffix is a must for Americans, in order to differentiate the namesakes.
However, I don't believe this confusing duplicicity exists for most Chinese counties (excluding Taiwanese counties, which do need the "county" suffix). So, this is not a necessity to append "county" to Chinese placenames.
Secondly, it seems that in Chinese, it is customary to append qualifers to most placenmaes to sound official, e.g., encyclopedias usually title places like Beijing City, Pengshui County, State of California, etc. But then, this is a Chinese thing used to write Chinese-language literature. So, this reasoning doesn't work either.
So, I believe that "county" qualifers are not necessary for Chinese counties -- unless necessary for differentiation from a namesakes (in case of Taiwanese counties). --Menchi 02:32, 15 Aug 2004 (UTC)
The thing is, I've tried to add "county" to the Chinese county name articles before, but I quickly ran into a problem with county-level cities. If counties get the word "County" after it, why wouldn't county-level cities? And if county-level cities get the word "City" after it, why wouldn't prefecture-level cities and municipalities? Eventually you'll need to rename Nanjing to Nanjing City, Shanghai to Shanghai Municipality, etc., which would be just weird. (This may sound like a slippery slope the way now I'm talking about it, but if you're actually trying to sort out the List of administrative divisions of Jilin to make it consistent, this problem gets very real very fast. Take a look at how the list would look with "county" added here: the county-level cities have the word "city", but not the prefecture-level cities.)
So I decided that except when ambiguation is absolutely necessary (such as Menchi's example of counties in Taiwan), the word County should be left out. In fact I've considered extending this rule further to districts as well: but some districts (like the inner 8 districts of Beijing) wouldn't work withOUT the word district behind them (you don't talk about going to "Dongcheng", that wouldn't make sense). I've also considered adding the word "District" to "urban-like" districts (like Dongcheng District) and leaving it out of "county-like" districts (like Shunyi District). What do you think about that arrangement? -- ran 03:23, Aug 15, 2004 (UTC)
Google does support your view. It shows that, in English sites, the suffix "district" does follow Dongcheng in most of hits (the 11,900 of the 15,000 hits that contain Dongcheng and Beijing use "Dongcheng District"). But the overwelming majority of those amazingly numerous sites are hotels, inns, and restaurants. Not sure if these monotonous sources can be representative. --Menchi 03:51, 15 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Is the distinction between "county-like districts" and "urban districts" really that dichotomous? Aren't rural districts bound to be urbanized sooner or later? When it crosses the threshold of urbanization, should we rename the article too? (Not meant to be an interrogation. Just curious to how you'd tell.) --Menchi 03:59, 15 Aug 2004 (UTC)

It's not dichotomous, which is why I didn't put that into the conventions in the end, though that also means that we're now stuck with articles like Pinggu District 平谷区 (of Beijing), where the district is not even close to where the actual urban area actually is. And what about places like Sanshui District or Shunde District? I don't think people from 三水 or 顺德 are going to think of their homes as mere districts to 佛山 Foshan.
And once again, if Shunde is named Shunde District, why aren't counties given the same treatment? Why isn't Foshan at Foshan City? And why isn't Guangdong at Guangdong Province?
There's probably a better solution to problems like this, but I have no idea what that would be. -- ran 04:56, Aug 15, 2004 (UTC)

Place names -- Cont'd

Hello Ran, I tend to disagree with a few formats. I still wish to contend to put a "county" after the name of every county, as they do this in the US county articles, this will not apply to county-level-cities, that I agree with you. Also, when referring to Leagues, Jeke Juu I believe should be named Jeke Juu League, as in Chinese it is commonly referred to as 伊克昭盟 and not 伊克昭, there are only three remaining leagues in Inner Mongolia so this should not take much time.

Also, if you do not mind, take time to check my Highway/Railways naming conventions just below the place names, and give any suggestions that you think would be appropriate. Thanks alot --[[User:Colipon|Colipon -- (Talk)]] 19:05, 25 Aug 2004 (UTC)

above is moved from User talk:Ran

Okay, if you want to add the word "County" for all the county articles, that's fine. But we have to make a couple of decisions:
  1. If you add "County" to all the counties, shouldn't you add "City" to all the county-level cities? Seriously — what exactly makes counties and county-level cities so different from each other?
  2. If you add "City" to all the county-level cities, shouldn't you add "City" to all the prefecture-level cities? After all, it's not consistent to add "City" to only some cities and not others.
  3. If you add "City" to all prefecture-level cities, including Guangzhou, Nanjing, etc, shouldn't you also add it to Beijing, Shanghai, etc.?
  4. If Beijing has "City" or "Municipality" added at the end of it, shouldn't the provinces have "Province" added behind them as well?
-- [[User:Ran|ran (talk)]] 14:12, Aug 26, 2004 (UTC)
Number one, let's clear up the issue regarding the leagues of Inner Mongolia. Secondly, the reason that county should be added at the end of every county name is, for one, counties are usually known with county at the end, ie 密云县 and not 密云, while province and cities (both levels) are typically known by their names without the subsequent city, ie 深圳 and usually not 深圳市, and 上海 and usually not 上海市. But then again this reasoning is quite ambiguous. Simply put, in English, Miyun County sounds better and more official than Miyun, while this does not apply to Shanghai sounding more official as "Shanghai City". If you think your reasoning is absolutely correct, then I will not disagree, because the other choice is to hold a vote, which takes large amounts of time before we can decide such a simple matter. Also note that there are quite a few cases where the city and a county under its jurisdiction share the same name, in this case we must include "county" after the name. [[User:Colipon|Colipon+(T)]] 20:15, 26 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Okay, what about these cases?
These are all county-level divisions, and so should have "City" or "District" behind, according to your logic... but I think these are more well known withOUT these designations. -- [[User:Ran|ran (talk)]] 13:56, Aug 27, 2004 (UTC)
I think you badly misunderstood my logic here. Let's put this in simpliest terms without me trying to explain and confusing things. Counties should have "county" and "district" subsequent to every division's name, but only to the counties and districts, and not other county-level districts. Prefectures should have "prefecture" subsequent to every prefecture 's name, and no other prefecture-level division. This should also apply to Leagues and Banners. So basically, I agree to the following format:

--[[User:Colipon|Colipon+(T)]] 18:22, 27 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Okay, but two things:
  1. The Penglai article refers to Xixia City and Longkou City. Personally I think that in general, most county-level cities are not really well-known, and should probably work the same way as counties. Saying "Nanjing" tells me immediately that it is a city; saying "Longkou" doesn't, because I don't know what it is. Isn't that also the logic that you used in adding "county" after county names — that they sound more complete with "county" added? After all, Changdao doesn't tell me what it is, but Changdao County does.
  2. Take a place like Shunde, in Guangdong. In less than 15 years it turned from Shunde County, to Shunde City, to Shunde District. Obviously when something like this happens, we need to move articles around; but does it really make sense for us to move it from Shunde County, to Shunde, then to Shunde District? That seems to defy some sort of logic for me... shouldn't it be Shunde City when it's a county-level city? After all, most county-level cities were converted from counties; so what makes them so especially different from counties that they don't need the designation after?
Just some thoughts...

-- [[User:Ran|ran (talk)]] 14:21, Aug 28, 2004 (UTC)

The table looks good but these standards are not easily set in short period of time. Keep up the work. I shall be back in recent future. Ktsquare (talk)
these standards are not easily set in short period of time
haha, tell me about it. ;)
Let me do a bit of a summary...
I think the probably we have here, really, is that in English it's normal to say ____ County and ____ District, but not ____ City, because cities are very different things from counties and districts. This is why we can have one set of conventions for cities (no suffix), and another set for counties and districts (suffix). But in China, cities aren't exactly "cities" (cheng2shi4), they're a division just like counties and districts... so it is strange, to me at least, that they should somehow be named in a different way.
So on one hand, we have the zillion and one county-level cities of the Shandong Peninsula (no offense :P), that I've never heard of, and probably should have "City" after them... and we also have major cities like Qingdao and Yantai that would sound very strange if we added "City" after. What to do in this case? Personally, I don't know.
This is a tough topic. But I think I can agree that "County" should be added after county names. Should we change the naming conventions to reflect that? -- [[User:Ran|ran (talk)]] 03:44, Aug 29, 2004 (UTC)

Thanks a lot Ran for putting a whole lot of thought into this. I think if we can reach an agreement about the county, then let's change the naming conventions. I understand the point you have raised, and I cannot think of a good way to solve the problem regarding county-level cities. We can, of course, simply name the county-level cities by their names without the "city", but perhaps that would seem illogical. Perhaps other people can be consulted on this issue. [[User:Colipon|Colipon+(T)]] 04:14, 31 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Proposal: Italicize surnames

I propose that in cases when it is ambiguous as to which name is a person's surname that we italicize the surname. To see what this would look like, see http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Jie_Yao&oldid=5457530 --Spencer195

Jie Yao should be moved to Yao Jie. perhaps we should do this for all articles on East Asians. The Japanese articles are inconsistent - we have Tojo Hideki v. Junichiro Koizumi. Other options include underlining and putting in all caps. --Jiang 20:17, 26 Aug 2004 (UTC)
I object to the use of italics when there is already international standard in labelling surnames. The CIA's World Fact Book uses SMALL CAPS to indicate surnames. The same international convention is used in many international settings such as the Olympics. The issue was brought up couple years ago and the decision back then was to sacrafice clarity for consistency. i.e. spell all names the same way regardless of their local convention. I would like that decision reverted instead of adding a different twist to the same problem. See more in family name. Kowloonese 20:39, 9 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Mountains

I made a suggestion a while back at Category_talk:Mountains_of_China that naming articles in the fashion of "Mount Taishan" was redundant because of course 山 (shān) already means mountain. I proposed either using the style of "Mount Tai", "Tai Shan", or "Taishan". I didn't get any objections to adopting a naming convention and had just started moving pages with Taishan when I discovered this page while fixing redirects. I postponed moving any other articles before I checked if there was already a consensus here. What do other people think about the naming convention for mountains?--Jkiang 04:41, 30 Aug 2004 (UTC)

I made a similar proposal above at Wikipedia_talk:Naming_conventions_(Chinese)#Place_names. I agree with you. Choose the most common variation among those. --Jiang 05:46, 30 Aug 2004 (UTC)
There's also a city called Taishan (广东台山). I think it's confusing if we make Taishan the city and Tai Shan the mountain.
The thing is, we know that "Shan" means mountain, but the vast majority of Wikipedia readers do not. So I don't think that "Mount Taishan" is that redundant; and leaving the article as simply Tai Shan is more confusing than making it Mount Taishan or Mount Tai.
On the other hand, I think "Mount Tai" would work. Googlefight.com also gives many more results for "Mount Tai" than "Mount Taishan", and it is, after all, less redundant. -- [[User:Ran|ran (talk)]] 07:27, Aug 30, 2004 (UTC)
On a related note, what about:
  1. Mountain ranges: 秦岭, 阴山, etc? Qin Ling or Qinling Mountains or Qin Mountains?
  2. Lakes: 巢湖, 天池, etc? Chao Hu or Lake Chao or Lake Chaohu? Tian Chi or Lake Tian Chi or (!) Lake Tian?
  3. Rivers: 湘江, 淮河, etc? Xiang Jiang or Xiang River or Xiangjiang River?
  4. Ancient zhou? These are a bit weird: how do you translate 扬州? Yangzhou province or Yang province or Yang Zhou? Note that the modern city of 扬州 is at Yangzhou.
According to the precedent of Mount Tai, we would have: Qin Mountains, Lake Tian, Xiang River. According to the precedent of Tai Shan we would have: Qin Ling, Tian Chi, Xiang Jiang.
-- [[User:Ran|ran (talk)]] 07:33, Aug 30, 2004 (UTC)
Mount Tai is commonly used, but following that convention elsewhere could lead to some really unsatisfactory article names in my opinion. For instance, if it is to be "Mount Huang" (黄山), then why not "Huang River" instead of Huang He? Or even "Chang River" instead of Chang Jiang? In the case of Taishan, I think a disambiguation link at the top of the separate articles would be enough to keep things straight. Or perhaps just handling things case by case (yuck!) is best?--Jkiang 08:15, 30 Aug 2004 (UTC)
yuck is right! But I think sometimes that's the only way to do it. Chang River and Huang River sound horrible. Both Chang Jiang and Yangtze River sound better, though it's hard to decide between the two... same goes for Huang He and Yellow River.
Perhaps we'll let these two rivers be special cases and use a common system for other rivers: Huai River, Hai River, etc...
As for mountains, lakes, etc., I think a similar system would work as well. Though I still don't like the sound of Qin Mountains instead of Qin Ling or even Qinling Mountains... -- [[User:Ran|ran (talk)]] 09:04, Aug 30, 2004 (UTC)
Google gives 2320 hits for "Qinling Mountains", 987 hits for "Qin Ling", and 73 hits for "Qin Mountains". I think that muddles our situation even further... -- [[User:Ran|ran (talk)]] 09:12, Aug 30, 2004 (UTC)
Isn't this a little like the names for some U.S. geographical names like "New York City"? The parallel is especially clear in the case of villages or towns that incorporate the word "city" in their actual name. (The village of Megopolis City, population 634...) Qin Shan would not do as a replacement for Qin Ling in a Chinese-language text, right? The same would go for Chang He or Huang Jiang. Ranier Mountain wouldn't work very well either. So I think "river", "city," etc. are sometimes incorporated in the proper names for geographical features, and in such cases we should leave them that way. Probably nobody but the native of a certain city would know what the Tam River is (or the River Dan if you insist on Mandarin). P0M 01:45, 31 Aug 2004 (UTC)
I think we are in agreement. Certainly nobody is proposing to interchange accepted Chinese geographic terminology ala Qin Shan instead of Qin Ling. The question is whether to replace Chinese geographic terms with their English counterparts ie Qinling vs. Qinling Mountains vs. Qin Mountains as Ran mentioned. I think my preference remains to use the Chinese terms, in this case Qinling. To me, the geographic terms are instrinsically part of the name.--Jkiang 04:44, 31 Aug 2004 (UTC)

By the way, should Chang Jiang be at Chang Jiang at all? Shouldn't we use the most common English expression, i.e. Yangtze River? - Nat Krause 08:43, 30 Aug 2004 (UTC)

We should really take a vote on this... same goes for Huang He. -- [[User:Ran|ran (talk)]] 09:04, Aug 30, 2004 (UTC)
With redirects, it makes no difference one way or the other. However, my own philosophy is to preserve the name closest to its original native usage. For example, use Beijing not Peking despite there were century worth of literature that used Peking. Along the same line, I vote for Chang Jiang at the article title and then use redirect from Yangtze River. Kowloonese 20:58, 9 Sep 2004 (UTC)
When Peking became Beijing, Yangtze River became Chang Jiang. Yangtze is an outdated reference and romanization. Pinyin is used now. --Jiang 08:04, 15 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Survey

Alright, let's do a survey. We'll do it category by category until we've covered all of them. -- [[User:Ran|ran (talk)]] 17:23, Sep 1, 2004 (UTC)

I think it is unnecessary to do each category differently. We should follow the same convention through out. For example, Tai Hu means Lake Tai. It is silly to call it Lake Tai Hu because the redundency of Lake and Hu. I propose the article title should be Tai Hu while have redirects from any combination that you can imagine. Kowloonese 20:49, 9 Sep 2004 (UTC)
I agree. My preference is to have the most common romanization in all cases. I think that this would generally mean Pinyin, though if there is another more commonly used romanization for a particular item, it should be used instead (ie for locations in Taiwan and Hong Kong).--Jkiang 05:11, 10 Sep 2004 (UTC)

I don't think redundancy makes it an open-and-shut case. As far as I can see, though, categories are unnecessary. There are two issues here: (1) Whether redundant placenames are okay, e.g. Yanshan Mountains. (2) When a Chinese name does not include the name of the relevant geographical feature (e.g. Daxing'an), whether the name of the feature should be Chinese (Daxing'an Ling) or English (Daxing'an Mountains). IMHO, redundant placenames are fine (Lake Tahoe!) and the English name of the geographical feature should always be included.

Besides, my proposal has the Mandate of Heaven. --Xiaopo ℑ 00:22, Sep 14, 2004 (UTC)

What's so fine about redundant placenames? It implies ignorance of and disregard for the meaning behind the transliterated words. People reading "Chang Jiang River" will think the editors here are idiots for not knowing that Jiang already means river. Why dont we move Rio Grande too? --Jiang
I don't think you understand the target audience of these articles. Better not to confuse the monolingual English speaker with "Chang Jiang" and incur the scorn of the Chinese reader than vice versa. After all, most of the people who knows that "江" means river are already: (1) Here, participating in this discussion (2) On the Chinese Wikipedia or (3) Reading the scholarly literature on Chinese geography, not the Wikipedia articles Our main goal is to inform, not look smart.
I never said that all place names should be redundant as a matter of course -- simply that redundancy is acceptable when there are corresponding good reasons for it. My example of Lake Tahoe proves this, I think. Why don't we move it to Tahoe? The examples are myriad: Connecticut River -- Connecticut is derived from the Mohican word for "long river place". Or Ohio River -- "Ohio" comes from the Iroqois word for "beautiful river". Or Allegheny River, which is similarly redundant. This solution also neatly avoids the problem of what to do about cities of the same name, like Taishan.
Anyway, I think Chang Jiang in particular should go under Yangtze River, its more popular English name. Same with Yellow River. My points still hold for other features though, like "Yanshan Mountains", "Xiangjiang River" and "Lake Honghu". -- Xiaopo ℑ 06:28, Sep 15, 2004 (UTC)

The title does not need to tell all. As long as the first sentence calls Chang Jiang a "river" and the redundant form redirects, then we're fine. Clueless people won't be getting lost. Even with links within the text, the good thing about wikipedia is that if some term is confusing, people have the option of clicking on it. I really don't see the issue here.

As for Connecticut River, Ohio River, etc., the most common name in English is being used. If it doesn't take a separate word, don't count it as a geographical term. Zhu Jiang, Chang Jiang, etc. do take on separate terms. When we say Jiang in Chinese, we actually mean "river". We dont treat it as a name and then have no idea what it means. Why promote a different usage among non-Chinese speakers?

The most common name is "Chang Jiang" not "Chang Jiang River" (Yangtze is outdated - just look up a new atlas). With the absence of consensus, then perhaps we should just stick with "use common names". --Jiang 08:15, 15 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Well, Yangtze easily wins any Googlefight. But fine.
You're missing the point by calling "Ohio River" the English name. My point was that redundancy shouldn't necessarily be avoided at all costs. A lot of arguments here basically amounted to "Ooh, that's redundant, how stupid. Full stop." And the point about when we say "Jiang" in Chinese, we actually mean River -- that's irrelevant as well. When the Iroquois say "O", they mean river as well. You also didn't address the other advantage of the redundant naming scheme, namely, that it serves to distinguish geographic names from placenames. Just like Ohio '''River''' neatly distinguishes itself from Ohio, the state, Mount Taishan distinguishes itself fromt he city of Taishan (I actually think Mount Taishan should be Mount Tai though).
My point is that the redundancy argument isn't very strong, and that redundant placenames shouldn't be dismissed outright. And for placenames with no common English form, like "Lake Honghu", the solution of just using the most common form doesn't work. Even if we regard redundancy as a negative, I think the two advantages of (1) More information in the title and (2) Convenient disambiguation from similarly-named cities, etc. outweigh it. I'd like to see some input from others on this. --Xiaopo ℑ 17:31, Sep 15, 2004 (UTC)

This is not an Iroquois language encyclopedia. Redundancy should be only accepted if it is the most common and very widely used form in English. I really don't see the point of providing more information in the title. The title should be as simple as possible as long as it is not ambiguous. If we run into problem with similarly-named cities, then use English (e.g. Mount Tai, Lake Hong) - what's wrong with that? Or should we take it further and move Chang Jiang to Yangtze River Chang Jiang Long River? That's why we have redirects... --Jiang 19:10, 15 Sep 2004 (UTC)

OK, first the position was that redundancy is never acceptable, now it's only if it's the most widely used English form? I disagree -- I think redundancy is okay so long as there's any good reason for it. I still haven't seen a compelling argument as to why redundancy should be considered a negative at all. The reason I brought up examples like the Allegheny River was because Jkiang and others gave the Rio Grande as an example for their case. If Allegheny River is irrelevant because "that's the English name", then likewise for the Rio Grande.
The issue boils down to whether we think of something like "Yanshan" as a proper name in English or not. I think it's clear that we do, or else there would be no question -- we'd call it "the Yan Mountains". Therefore, in my opinion, there are two legitimate possibilities: (1) Treat the Chinese proper name + the Chinese geographical feature as simple English proper nouns, e.g. "Yanshan Mountains", "Mount Taishan", "Lake Honghu" or (2) Treat the Chinese proper name as the English proper name, and translate the Chinese geographical feature name, e.g. "Mount Tai", "Lake Hong", "Yan Mountains". Either of these is fine by me, so long as it's applied consistently (except, of course, where there is another universally used English name).
It is sometimes useful to have extra information in the link or the article title, instead of using redirects. For instance, take 紅湖. Most articles will refer to this as either "Lake Honghu" or "Lake Hong", because otherwise sentences like "He then proceeded to cross the Honghu" will be confusing as hell without having to click through. If something like "Honghu" is used as the title of the article, then almost all links will be redirected, which is stupid. To minimize redirects, we should put the English name of the geographical feature somehow into the article title.
Maybe this would be clearer with a non-Chinese example. If I wrote in an article that "Maharashtra is divided in two by the Godavari", you'd be pretty confused without clicking on "Godavari", eh? But "Goda" actually means river -- so "Godavari River" is redundant (and thus out of the question, by your argument). --Xiaopo ℑ 23:20, Sep 15, 2004 (UTC)
I don't think that some of the examples cited here are analogous. It may be that names for many American locations are derived from native languages that already imply some sort of geological formation, but that meaning has been virtually lost over the years. The "Allegheny River" is the whole and accepted name for that geological feature, both officially and in local vernacular.
As for confusion or ambiguity in the article text, I don't see this as much of a problem. I don't think anyone objects to establishing context within the text of the article. For example, you might say that "the Grand Canal connects the rivers Chang Jiang and Huang He". That surely is a contrived example, but it's hard for me to imagine a case where the nature of what is being referred to cannot smoothly be established without explicitly identifying everything in the article names themselves. After all, the debate here is what the article titles' proper should contain. In your Indian example: "Maharashtra is divided in two by the Godavari", that sentence fragment is indeed confusing by itself. But if that sentence fragment was not preceded by some previous contextual information, then at least it could be rephrased in a clear way without relying on the article names. You might say something like "the state of Maharashtra is divided by the river Godavari". This may seem like cheating with regard to the redundancy argument, but it preserves the article title if that is the desired convention. By the way, clearly we are not the only ones with this type of naming convention issue. Further browsing some of the Indian articles shows no apparent prevailing system.--Jkiang 09:29, 16 Sep 2004 (UTC)
You're right, in that there's no prevailing system for the Indian rivers -- and this is largely because there's no prevailing system for Indian anything, something I've been meaning to fix for some time and putting off.
I can buy the argument that the original meaning has been lost, but the reason we use Allegheny River or Rio Grande is because they're both the almost universally-used English name. Our problem is that there really isn't any accepted English name for these geographical formations, so we have to choose the best one for our purposes. To me, that means the most informative one (within limits).
So yes, it's possible to preserve the article title -- but is it really needed? No one's managed to demonstrate any negative to the article title being redundant (Chinese names are, after all, basically meaningless to the monolingual Anglophone). But I'm willing to compromise -- we can keep the Chinese proper name and translate the geographical name, e.g. Mount Tai. Along with proposals like Mount Taishan, this provides info about the type of geographical feature in the title and serves to disambiguate it with the city of Taishan.
Another question -- is "Chang Jiang" really in more use by Joe Sixpack than "Yangtze River"? While the former might be used in atlases, I was under the impression that "the Great Wall, the Yangtze River and the Yellow River" were the three things Joe Sixpack knows about China. :P The reaon Peking is under Beijing is not because Beijing is "native", but because it was overwhelmingly adopted by the English world. This was also the same reasons Calcutta was not changed to Kolkata (see Talk:Calcutta). --Xiaopo ℑ 14:58, Sep 16, 2004 (UTC)
I'm alright with translating the geographical portion. It's not my first preference, but if that's the consensus, it's fine with me. I also don't have any problems with using Yangtze River or Yellow River, or others where there is an accepted English name. However, it seems that these names are increasingly being replaced by Chinese names on most maps and in scholarly publications, so maybe they are following out of general favor? As a curious anecdote I checked a Rand-McNally atlas I have, and it just said "Chang" and "Huang" next to the rivers. Strange.--Jkiang 15:23, 17 Sep 2004 (UTC)
Just for informational purposes, Encyclopedia Britannica seems to largely translate the geographical name, e.g. Mount T'ai or Min Mountains. I'm okay with this, except (1) It sounds weird as heck -- "Minshan", etc. seem to be lexemes in Chinese, not two separate words as they would be in English. (2) It sometimes required disambiguation -- for instance, there are two Han Rivers -- Hanshui and Hanjiang.
It seems that the redundant proposal (e.g., Minshan Mountains, Lake Honghu) is the only proposal that doesn't require any disambiguation. Just using the Chinese name would make problems with Taishan the city and Taishan the mountain, for instance, and translating the geographic name would make problems with Hanshui and Hanjiang. This seems to me an advantage, and I still don't see why it being redundant would be a disadvantage (besides maybe making us look stupid to some very judgemental hypothetical Chinese user). That's why, on the balance, I consider the redundant proposal, with Lake Honghu, Hanshui River, Minshan Mountains, etc. to be better. --Xiaopo ℑ 21:59, Sep 17, 2004 (UTC)

For the votes from the first survey, see Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (Chinese)/Old votes.

New Survey

I decided to create a new survey, because the old one was sort of confusing. I think this is because all those categories are really reducible to three categories, which are listed below. Note that this survey is not meant to address Chinese features with very popular, or universally used English names, but rather the features for which there is no existing English custom. Note that the second and third categories would be the same for some features, e.g. Mount Wutai. For now, please try to vote for just one.

For those just tuning in, the question is: How should the articles on Chinese geographical features be titled? Running tally (please update!): (4/1/4)

Chinese name, wholesale

wait... What do you mean by Wholesale?

This would involve titling the article with a romanization of its Chinese name. Vote here regardless of whether you support spaces in the names or not; whether Tai Shan or Taishan. Examples: for 泰山、洪湖、汉水、五台山、鄱阳湖、松花江 we use Tai Shan, Hong Hu, Han Shui, Wutai Shan, Poyang Hu, Songhua Jiang.

Votes:

  1. [[User:Ran|ran (talk)]] 16:44, Sep 19, 2004 (UTC) -- Choice 1
  2. Jkiang 04:39, 20 Sep 2004 (UTC)
  3. Jiang 18:23, 21 Sep 2004 (UTC) -- Choice 2
  4. [[User:OldakQuill|Oldak Quill]] 08:24, 22 Oct 2004 (UTC) -- No spaces
  5. huaiwei 19:40, 11 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Chinese proper name, English geographical name

With this, we'd translate the name of the geographical feature into English, while leaving the proper noun untouched. By proper noun, I mean the part that does not, by itself, denote the geographical feature. Examples: for 泰山、洪湖、汉水、五台山、鄱阳湖、松花江 we use Mount Tai, Lake Hong, Han River, Mount Wutai, Lake Poyang, Songhua River.

Votes:

  1. Menchi 05:51, 18 Sep 2004 (UTC) -- Choice 2
  2. DF08 12:21, Sep 20, 2004 (UTC) -- Choice 2
  3. Jiang 18:23, 21 Sep 2004 (UTC) -- Choice 1
  4. [[User:Ran|ran (talk)]] 16:44, Sep 19, 2004 (UTC) -- Choice 2

Chinese name plus English name (redundant) for monosyllables

Here we would take the name we'd use in the second option. In addition, we will add the Chinese geographical name, but only if the name would otherwise have only one syllable. This option exists because it's debatable whether Chinese proper nouns behave in the same way as English ones do — some people may consider "Honghu", together, to be a proper noun, and would object to the use of "Lake Hong". This would, in some cases, be redundant. Examples: for 泰山、洪湖、汉水、五台山、鄱阳湖、松花江 we use Mount Taishan, Lake Honghu, Hanshui River, Mount Wutai, Lake Poyang, Songhua River.

Votes:

  1. Xiaopo ℑ 22:41, Sep 17, 2004 (UTC)
  2. Menchi 05:51, 18 Sep 2004 (UTC) -- Choice 1
  3. DF08 12:07, Sep 20, 2004 (UTC) -- Choice 1
  4. [[User:Colipon|Colipon+(T)]] 17:14, 21 Sep 2004 (UTC) -- Choice 1

Comments

Please keep comments here, not in the votes!

  • I would prefer the third option, based on weighing the respective advantages and disadvantages. The only disadvantage I can see for the third option is that it's redundant, and to be frank, I'm not very sure why that's a disadvantage. Maybe someone can explain that to me. Here are the disadvantages I see with the other two options:
    • First proposal: For one thing, this does not give any information to the monolingual English speaker in the title as to what sort of geographical feature it is. For another, it can cause confusion between, for example, Taishan the city and Taishan the mountain. This would have to be solved by either confusing spacing differences or cumbersome parentheses.
    • Second proposal: There are also two problems with this one. The first is that these things seem to be treated as lexemes -- Honghu is thought of as a single word, rather than "Red Lake". This would make the resulting "Lake Hong" sound odd to a Chinese speaker. The second is that this causes confusion as well; f'rinstance, both Hanshui and Hanjiang are translated "Han River".
Hence, I think any potential disadvantage in the third option is outweighed by the clear disadvantages in the first two proposals. --Xiaopo ℑ 22:42, Sep 17, 2004 (UTC)
You forgot two things:
  1. Some things simply can't be subject to this survey. Like peninsulas. Is anyone seriously going to support "Shandong Bandao" or "Shandongbandao Peninsula"?
  2. The one-/poly-syllable distinction, Why can't I support "Songhua River" and "Xiangjiang River"?
-- [[User:Ran|ran (talk)]] 05:19, Sep 18, 2004 (UTC)
The penninsula thing is true, and I hadn't thought about that. So let's ignore them for now.
As for the one-/poly- distinction, I think I addressed that in the introductory paragraph. For those, options 2 and 3 give exactly the same result. --Xiaopo ℑ 05:22, Sep 18, 2004 (UTC)
I don't think you addressed it... I've changed the options to address that issue. -- [[User:Ran|ran (talk)]] 16:41, Sep 19, 2004 (UTC)
Ah, I see what you mean. I hoped it would be implied, because I don't think anyone really supports Songhuajiang River :-P. --Xiaopo ℑ 17:58, Sep 19, 2004 (UTC)
Isn't the peninsula/plateau type intuitive in that it's Type 2 ("Chinese proper name, English geographical name")? Maybe it's a thing with larger regions, like we'd never say Hunansheng Province, and rarely Hunan Sheng in (semi-)official English texts. It'd be quite weird. --Menchi 06:18, 18 Sep 2004 (UTC)
§ Isn't it relevant that people can say things like, "Ta shi Hunan ren," rather than "Ta shi Hunansheng ren"? But you can't do that with names like "Yu4 Shan1". In English, "I climbed McKinley" might contain an embarrassing ambiguity in some (social) contexts. "Mt. McKinley" is generally taken as a single proper noun. P0M 04:04, 20 Sep 2004 (UTC)
Mmm, that's an interesting point. We could try a few more cases:
  • Municipality: 他是北京人 Ta shi Beijing ren. -- YES
  • City: 他是南京人 Ta shi Nanjing ren. -- YES
  • County: 他是密云人 Ta shi Miyun ren. -- YES (assuming the listener knows what Miyun is)
  • County 1 syllable: 他是蓟人 Ta shi Ji ren. -- NO
    • 他是蓟县人 Ta shi Jixian ren. -- YES
  • District distant: 他是顺义人 Ta shi Shunyi ren. -- YES
  • District urban: 他是朝阳人 Ta shi Chaoyang ren. -- NO
    • 他是朝阳区人 Ta shi Chaoyangqu ren. -- YES
For physical features, though, I think you always need the designation:
  • Mountain peak: 我爬上了五台 Wo pa shang le Wutai. -- NO (? I climbed the dance stage?)
    • 我爬上了五台山 Wo pa shang le Wutai Shan. -- YES
  • River: 我游过了松花 Wo you guo le Songhua. -- NO
    • 我游过了松花江 Wo you guo le Songhua Jiang. -- YES
Except in Jinyong's wuxia novels, of course.
  • 她是峨嵋派的掌门人 Ta shi Emei Pai de zhangmenren. (She is the Master of the Emei School) -- YES
  • 他是嵩派的掌门人 Ta shi Song Pai de zhangmenren. (He is the Master of the Song School) -- NO
    • 他是嵩山派的掌门人 Ta shi Song Shan Pai de zhangmenren. (He is the Master of the Song Shan School) -- YES
Of course, then there's the question of: how much Chinese grammar should we consider when building an English-language wikipedia? -- [[User:Ran|ran (talk)]] 04:23, Sep 20, 2004 (UTC)

I'm choosing the Intentional Redundancy Method as my numero 1 because it seems like it's what's commonly practised in PRC news, tourism, and even the UN (which indeed calls that great mountain Mount Taishan, when referring to it as on of its many recognized heritage spots of the world). I know, the redundancy really bothers some people. But then, it's so informative and fluffy and cute, you gotta love it. (Think "Sahara Desert, Sahara Desert....") But without the redundancy would do too. Not having any translation is just brutal. --Menchi 06:18, 18 Sep 2004 (UTC)

You're right, it is used by UNESCO, I didn't know that. In fact, their list of World Heritage Sites lists, along with "Mount Taishan", "Mount Huangshan" and the similarly redundant "Jiuzhaigou Valley". And not only is it fluffy and cute, but it has the tianming! So there. --Xiaopo ℑ 14:44, Sep 18, 2004 (UTC)

Basically, I would reiterate my previous comments. Obviously there is no overall convention in use on Wikipedia, so there are existing article titles both with and without English geographic titles appended. Some quick examples: Amur vs. Amur River, Nile, Alps, Pyrenees, Himalayas. Someone previously noted the Sahara. Obviously there are myriad examples the other way too, but my point is that with proper context in article references, there isn't and shouldn't be much confusion. So really the question in my mind is whether the stylistic issue of lack of redundancy merits a slight added bit of ambiguity. In my opinion it does. I previously suggested that I'd support the proper name followed by the translated geographic, but I now think that this is the worst of both worlds. It leaves room for ambiguity and also disjoints the real name.

As for the third option, I wouldn't really oppose it, but it's not my first choice. I'm a bit curious as to the syllable distinction that some people seem to see, though. Some things sound OK to me with translated geographic translations and some don't, but syllables aren't the deciding issue for me. I admit that single syllables are a bit irksome, but it's not always that way for me. Mount Taishan seems to be a canonical example, but to me Mount Tai sounds OK. In fact, when I visited there a couple years ago, anecdotally the English name seemed to be universally Mount Tai.--Jkiang 04:37, 20 Sep 2004 (UTC)

The syllable distinction basically refers to the fact that the third option does not support options like "Songhuajiang River". It only supports adding the "River" on if the Chinese proper name is one syllable, e.g. Wujiang River or something. And of course, we're not proposing using any of these suggestions in lieu of an already accepted name for the place. And I would just seek to note that most of the examples given (e.g. Nile, Alps, Pyrenees, Himalayas, Sahara) are famous features, and generally known to the average English audience. 洪湖, however we decide to write it, is not. In fact, most geographical features on Wikipedia seem to me to be irrelevant as examples, since they're well known enough to have a universal English name.
Incidentally, if you have other choices you're okay with, you can mark them as Choice 2, etc. as Menchi and ran have done. --Xiaopo ℑ 05:49, Sep 20, 2004 (UTC)

I'm going to do an about-face and change my vote. (Don't kill me!) Reason? Because the more I think about it, the more Huai He River and Qin Ling Mountains begin to sound annoyingly repetitive. Wasn't the main problem the fact that Qin Ling and Huai He sound too mystifying for non-Chinese? Well, we can always solve that, by saying:

Qin Ling is a mountain range in Shaanxi province, China...

and, when we need to link to it, we can say:

North China and South China are separated by the Qin Ling mountains and the Huai He river.

Yes, it's still repetitive, but the name and location of the actual article do not have to be repetitive along with it!

So that's why I've changed my vote. By the way: Please vote on the county survey below too, we have only 3 responses so far. -- [[User:Ran|ran (talk)]] 01:49, Oct 4, 2004 (UTC)

a little suggestion

  • Why don't we name according to this order (1) the names that are already known universally, especially to English users, (2) the names based on Pinyin (only for places under PRC), (3) add the words "River -", "- Bay", "- Sea", "Sea of -", "- Channel", "- Gorges" or "Mt. -" if the names do not contains common names like "- He", "- Jiang", "- Wan", "- Hai", "- Haixia", "- Xia", "- Shan", "- Ling".
  • After all the English names for places in other countries are not standardised. Even for places in countries where English is spoken the naming process is not standardised.
  • note: For geographical names in Hong Kong and Macau I guess we should follow the local official rule, which is already well-established and commonly known. For places in Taiwan, let's do it according to the choice on Tongyong or HanyuPinyin by the local authorities.

   --Steve 12:54, Oct 24, 2004 (GMT)

another suggestion

  • Follow China Daily which is published for foreignors to read.

   --Steve 13:01, Oct 24, 2004 (GMT)

With the votes evenly split, it seems that consensus is impossible at this present stage. So how about we let it "grow naturally" for a while, and then see how everyone feels? As long as all the redirects are in place there shouldn't be too many problems. -- [[User:Ran|ran (talk)]] 20:52, Nov 11, 2004 (UTC)

China or People's Republic of China

This is nonsense. Overloading pages with the unwieldy "People's Republic of China", especially when China is linked to PROC is ridiculous. It's established in context what's being spoken of (it's not the 'civilization' or the 'Chinese people'): it's clearly the nation. I am referring to a minor edit-war with Jiang on the India page. SHe/he/it is forcing this name on a paragraph in which Pakistan and China are spoken of and Pakistan hasn't the rule (nor India for that matter) that forces them to be referred to as Republics of this or that for political differentiation. India has the same problem in some senses, in that it represents an (at least) 4,000 year old cultural name but also a nation. In the context of a page it is readily understood what is meant. Why am I insisting? The style and readability of a given sentence in this case is subjected to a naming convention that is not even necessary to employ. I disagree with the 'rules' here.--LordSuryaofShropshire 04:17, Sep 15, 2004 (UTC)

I'm not sure what you mean by "nation". The word itself implies the civilization and the people. I think the more proper term for this context is "state".
Please take a look at the discussion at Talk:China/old, Talk:People's Republic of China, Talk: China (Archive 1) and Talk: China (Archive 2), Talk: China (Archive 3), Talk: China (Archive 4) (have no idea where the last four went). The reason we don't make the equation China=PRC when it's convenient not to is simply because the civilization is now also a communist state, but because treating the PRC as the sole successor state of China is polical POV. There is only one India in the world, but in the special cases of People's Republic of China, Republic of China, Republic of Ireland, and Republic of Macedonia, we spell the whole thing out for NPOV sake. --Jiang 04:56, 15 Sep 2004 (UTC)
I agree with Jiang; this issue has been hashed and rehashed for ages here, and a consensus has been reached. Your examples of Pakistan being used in lieu of "Islamic Republic of Pakistan" are irrelevant, as Pakistan is not subject to the same political situation as China. If you weren't aware, there are currently two states which claim to be the successor state of the pre-ROC Chinese state, namely the Republic of China and the People's Republic of China. In cases like this, for NPOV purposes, we use the full name of the state, even though the identity of the state in question may be obvious from context. NPOV considerations outweigh stylistic ones.
You'll notice that Ireland, Korea, Macedonia, etc. all concern apolitical entities. This is because their political situation is similar to that of China. Any reference to "China" where the state ruled by the Beijing government is meant is simply NPOV and unacceptable. --Xiaopo ℑ 06:54, Sep 15, 2004 (UTC)

China Includes Taiwan, and Tibet. At least Until Today

As the PRC have not declared in any form the independence of taiwan or tibet, and there have been no conflict, specifically war, that would have altered the stats of the two reigons, they are still officially part of china, therefore should not be considered of equal status as the PRC, the PRC would be the national government, taiwan and tibet should be considered the regional government. I myself, being abouslutely annoyed of Taiwanese ignorance, would prefer it if they were a seperate nation. BUT I have to accept the fact that it is not. I do hope that whoever runs this site would look into the facts and correct the mistakes made. --Primexx 23:17, Sep 17, 2004 (UTC)

Rather than object to your facts, let me just point you towards Wikipedia:Neutral point of view. Basically, we're supposed to write about what people believe, as opposed to how we think things are. As there are people who consider the ROC government to be more than just a regional government, by treating it as a rebel provincial government, we would be espousing a certain, non-neutral point of view. --Xiaopo ℑ 23:26, Sep 17, 2004 (UTC)
We never denied that Tibet and Taiwan are not part of China. "Wikipedia reflects the neutral reality and considers the term "China" not to coincide with any particular sovereign state or government." In other words, in the absence of any peace treaty or declaration of independence, Wikipedia cannot declare one government legitimate and the other renegade. The fact of the matter is that there was a civil war that ended with a non-complete victory for the Communists, who declared the new state (the PRC), and a non-complete defeat for the Nationalists, who clung onto the old state (the ROC). (Since the PRC does not exercise sovereinty over Taiwan and never has, we cannot claim China to be synonymous with the People's Republic of China because that would either imply Taiwan is not part of China, as western media are doing, or imply that Taiwan is renegade. Both are POV) We must reflect that the People's Republic of China (whether de facto or dejure) exercises sovereignty over mainland China, Hong Kong, and Macau and that the Republic of China (whether de facto or dejure) exercises sovereignty over Taiwan, Penghu, Quemoy, Matsu, Green, and Orchid Islands. Just because it is does not mean we endorse it by stating so, but we cannot mislead over what is. It is important that we mention what everyone believes together with what already exists, and not what should be. What should be is already attributed in what everyone believes. --Jiang 03:03, 18 Sep 2004 (UTC)

By puting the ROC in writing is already misleading. So saying "dont mislead" is not your job is it? -- Primexx

Why would it be "misleading"? There is precisely one governing entity in the world that calls itself the "Republic of China", and fulfills the functions of government in a sizeable area, and is recognized as having this right, formally or informally, by many people, though it is also deemed as not having this right, formally or informally, by many people. By NPOV we have to represent the situation as precisely that, no more and no less. -- [[User:Ran|ran (talk)]] 04:51, Sep 18, 2004 (UTC)

Apostrophes

The guidelines right now read:

The Library of Congress Guidelinesgive the following rules for using the apostrophe in Hanyu Pinyin:

  1. Whenever a syllable begins with "a", "o", or "e", and follows another syllable: Bei'an (北安), Chang'e (嫦娥), Jian'ou (建瓯).
  2. Whenever a syllable ends with "-n" and the next syllable begins with "g-": Jian'guo (建国).

However, the second rule isn't consistently applied on Wikipedia or elsewhere. For example, Anguo gives many more results than An'guo on Google. For now, just follow the first rule, and ignore the second. Discussion is welcome on the talk page.

Don't use the apostrophe in any other case: Henan (河南).

The second "rule" doesn't exist -- not in the official orthography for Hanyu Pinyin and not in the LOC guidelines either. (At least I haven't been able to find it in the LOC Web pages on this.) The first rule is all that is needed -- well, perhaps that and a reminder that syllables begin with consonants unless something indicates otherwise (e.g. an apostrophe or the beginning of a word).

The LOC guidelines give "Zhang Zhan'gang" instead of "Zhang Zhangang". -- [[User:Ran|ran (talk)]] 20:28, Sep 28, 2004 (UTC)

Thanks for the example. I searched the LOC site for this and found it on an old page. The LOC's New Chinese Romanization Guidelines (Aug. 30, 2004), however, conform with the rules of Hanyu Pinyin rather than adding the extra apostrophes. Here are some examples from the newer guidelines: "Chang’an Shi to distinguish it from Changan Shi; Yan’an Shi to distinguish it from Yanan Shi; Zhang Zhang’ang to distinguish it from Zhang Zhangang; Liu Zheng’an to distinguish it from Liu Zhengan." --Taibeiren 07:17, 4 Oct 2004 (UTC)


"Jianguo" is unambiguously "jian" + "guo". Because there's no independent "uo" (it always becomes "wo" as an independent syllable), perhaps a better example would be "Changan". This is "chan" + "gan" according to the rules. "Chang" + "an" is written "Chang'an". It's really quite easy.

For examples, see Test your knowledge of Hanyu Pinyin syllable breaks.

Adding apostrophes where they're not needed and not called for is not a good idea. --Taibeiren

What about say, "Bei'an", or "Ma'anshan"? -- [[User:Ran|ran (talk)]] 20:26, Sep 28, 2004 (UTC)

The apostrophes in those two cases are correct. --Taibeiren 07:17, 4 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Should we close the case now and update the project page with the new rules of LOC, which conforms with the official orthography of Hanyu Pinyin? -- Felix Wan 19:37, 23 Oct 2004 (UTC)


The apostrophy convention should include: Whenever a syllable ends with "-n" and the next syllable begins with "a-".
That way we don't get Ji'nan (濟南) and Jin'an (晉安) confused. --Yu Ninjie 04:48, 14 Nov 2004 (UTC)

That rule is already included. That's why we have Jin'an (晉安) vs Jinan (濟南). -- [[User:Ran|ran (talk)]] 05:07, Nov 14, 2004 (UTC)

Yes but by using Ji'nan as well as Jin'an, there's no ambiguity for someone who is not familiar with our naming convention. --Yu Ninjie 06:20, 14 Nov 2004 (UTC)
Why couldn't it be Ji'nan with the apostrophe? --Menchi 05:55, 14 Nov 2004 (UTC)
Well, because "Jinan" is more common than "Ji'nan". If we want "Ji'nan" then we would also need "He'nan", "Hu'nan", which would be unusual. Also, the rule that we have now, i.e. to put ' before all a, o, e that follows another syllable, already disambiguates all possible cases.
"Ji'nan" isn't wrong, since there's no rule saying that's it's right, or wrong. It's just unnecessary, that's all, and we do need some sort of standard in naming articles. -- [[User:Ran|ran (talk)]] 06:09, Nov 14, 2004 (UTC)
It is academic convention for provinces to not include apostrophes. This is because there are only a few provinces so there's no real ambiguity. I just think that we should follow the normal academic convention. That way, a student of Chinese history is able to relate our writing back to an academic text and not be confused.--Yu Ninjie 06:20, 14 Nov 2004 (UTC)
Well, googlefight gives many more results for Jinan than Ji'nan. So spelling Jinan without the apostrophe is also conventional practice. -- [[User:Ran|ran (talk)]] 06:29, Nov 14, 2004 (UTC)
Yes but conventional among whom? Our goal is to produce an encyclopedia for reference, which is why we should follow the leading academic standard of the day. --Yu Ninjie 06:37, 14 Nov 2004 (UTC)
So is "Ji'nan" academic convention? -- [[User:Ran|ran (talk)]] 15:09, Nov 14, 2004 (UTC)
Yes, that's right. --Yu Ninjie 01:49, 15 Nov 2004 (UTC)
...Are you sure? I must say that I've never seen the spelling "Ji'nan" anywhere, in any context. The predominant spelling on the net (by 50 times) is "Jinan", the Wikipedia article is located at Jinan, and the official hanyu pinyin rules (see below) also gives "Jinan". Are you sure that academic literature usually uses "Ji'nan"? -- [[User:Ran|ran (talk)]] 01:59, Nov 15, 2004 (UTC)
Yes, I am completely sure. Almost all the academic texts which use pinyin use Ji'nan instead of Jinan. For example, the Cultural Atlas of China uses "Ji'nan". It was compiled by Caroline Blunden (studied painting at the Central Academy of Fine Art, Beijing) and Mark Elvin (Lecturer in Chinese history at Oxford and a Fellow of St Antony's College).

--Yu Ninjie 02:23, 15 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Personally, I've never understood why the PRC decided to use apostrophes to break syllables. It is an unfortunate choice from the standpoint of all the people in the world who already uses the apostrophe to do other things. A similar case is the sometime use of the umlaut to indicate the difference between, e.g., the "u" sounds in "female human being" and "slave". It is quite helpful when it is used, but problematic when the non-expert is expected to remember that "xu" is supposed to be interpreted as though it were written "xü". The convention saves dictionary and textbook authors a microsecond or two every time they annotate the pronunciation of certain words, but it creates problems for the thousands of people who use their materials on a casual bases. (New announcers for instance.) The same goes for really dumb conventions like writing "hui" instead of "huei." It wouldn't really be noticed by the authors once they learned to type "huei," but it would save language teachers lots of time correcting the mispronunciations it causes.

We should not expect readers to carry around a rule book of arcane spelling and punctuation rules. In the case of "ji'nan" vs. "jin'an", even if one of them goes against the conventions used by native speakers and preparers of educational materials, we should use an apostrophe in either case. How many times have you heard "cud zoo" instead of "coo dzoo" for "kudzu" because people who know Japanese know that "of course" Japanese does not have syllables ending in consonants and so they do not insert any signal that it breaks between "u" and "d"? We are not supposed (I think) to be posing as experts and guardians of the arcania, but instead to help the reader get it right on the first shot every time that we can do so. P0M 16:35, 14 Nov 2004 (UTC)

So should we move kudzu to ku-dzu? Perhaps shonen should be moved to sho'nen so that people don't read it as shon'en? Perhaps every foreign word should be annotated, so that Wroclaw is now located at Vrotswav and Paris at PaHRee?
We can't expect the reader to know everything, but we shouldn't be misspelling things and breaking conventions either. -- [[User:Ran|ran (talk)]] 17:06, Nov 14, 2004 (UTC)
My suggestion is this: let's respect the national standards and conventions as far as technically feasible in the title and the introductory sentence. Add redirects and whatever aids for the reader in the beginning paragraphs: syllable separation, IPA, SAMPA-X,... -- Felix Wan 05:39, 2004 Nov 15 (UTC)


Not saying that we should use Ji'nan, but a question we have to ask: How official is the LOC Guideline that we have to obey it? It isn't even consistent between its documents, for seemingly no reason at all. In the HTML version, it says: "张占钢: Zhang Zhan’gang, not Zhang Zhangang". But the PDF version says the exact opposite: "Zhang Zhang’ang (张章昂) to distinguish it from Zhang Zhangang (张占钢)". It doesn't sound like those documents are that official. --Menchi 17:24, 14 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Not very official, which is why there is googlefight to help us...
Perhaps we should revise to the rule to: if in doubt, use googlefight. :P Jinan gives 50 times more hits than Ji'nan so it's clear which one is more "conventional". -- [[User:Ran|ran (talk)]] 17:40, Nov 14, 2004 (UTC)
But according to google, both Jin'an and Ji'nan would lose to Jinan ([1], [2]). So they should both be Jinan? While google may be useful to test the importance of a subject, I don't think that it's a good indicator of what good spellings should be, especially with those delicate umlauts, accent marks, and apostrophes not found in English
Doesn't the PRC have a cartographic department that regulate romanization of the placenames? There are a number of PRC atlas like that probably. Some list like [3] (which systematically confirms like it's Jin'an vs. Jinan). --Menchi 18:32, 14 Nov 2004 (UTC)

The official orthographic rule of pinyin is that in multiple syllabic words, whenever the second and subsequent syllables starts with a, o and e, put an apostrophe before it when there is ambiguitiy. Every Chinese dictionary published by PRC has that rule. See Hanyu Pinyin (In Chinese). The apostrophe is never needed before n and g. Jinan is unambiguously Ji-nan. Jin-an should be Jin'an. LOC made a mistake in the beginning and later corrected it. I think we should follow the official rule when there is one. -- Felix Wan 23:35, 2004 Nov 14 (UTC)

What about when there's no ambiguity? e.g. 同安: is that Tong'an or Tongan? -- [[User:Ran|ran (talk)]] 00:13, Nov 15, 2004 (UTC)
Good question, and I have no idea. The Hanyu Pinyin Fang'an says exactly, "add apostrophe (geyin fuhao) before a, o and e whenever there is ambiguity." We may need to do some more research. -- Felix Wan 04:16, 2004 Nov 15 (UTC)
An explanation for googlefight results: most sites on the web which use Jinan instead of Ji'nan are from inside China. Hence they may not comply with the academic standard in the West. --Yu Ninjie 02:27, 15 Nov 2004 (UTC)
I believe that these days the academic communities in the West respect national standards. That's why LOC made the correction in the newer document. See discussions at the beginning of this section. -- Felix Wan 04:16, 2004 Nov 15 (UTC)

I have a question for Yu Ninjie. Do you know any academic authority formulating the rules of adding apostrophes in the way you described? Having many articles using Ji'nan is not enough, especially if they are from the same academic field. People may have propagated a mistake by referring to other people's work. They are not experts on Hanyu Pinyin. -- Felix Wan 05:23, 2004 Nov 15 (UTC)

What if there is really a conflict between some academic authorities and the national authority? Once upon a time the academic standard was Wade-Giles, but the trend is to follow the national standard. -- Felix Wan 05:23, 2004 Nov 15 (UTC)

The rule is to add apostrophes in any case when there might be ambiguity. So in any case when a name may be interpreted in two or more ways, you need to add an apostrophy to differentiate. There are very few sinologists who do not follow this rule. --Yu Ninjie 07:05, 15 Nov 2004 (UTC)
That is not possible, unless you define that no one in PRC is a sinologist. Can you quote any source material supporting your claim? I am interested to know if there is really a widely accepted conflicting standard. -- Felix Wan 18:17, 2004 Nov 15 (UTC)

To be fair, I want to add that Google can be inaccurate in resolving this issue. Even Xian wins Xi'an by 2:1. The reason is that people tends to forget about the apostrophe, do it on purpose, say in URLs, and Xian can mean some other things. The bias can be big for famous places. (Try Tiananmen vs. Tian'anmen, although that will involve the question Ran asked: Tongan vs. Tong'an.) -- Felix Wan 18:48, 2004 Nov 15 (UTC)

Sinologists are by definition experts on China who are from outside China, so people in the PRC, Taiwan etc. would not usually be considered sinologists. The reason that we should follow their standard is because most English texts about China read by English-speaking people will be written by them. How many English books on the history of China, for example, are available by historians in the PRC? The apostrophe standard I've been talking about is so widespread that it would be very hard to find a recent academic work which does not follow it. So Felix, if you don't believe me, then I challenge you to find me one recent work which does not use "Ji'nan" in favour of "Jinan". I'm sure you'll find it very difficult to do so. --Yu Ninjie 19:26, 15 Nov 2004 (UTC)
Whether I believe in you or not is not the issue. It will be difficult for me to find any work using either Ji'nan or Jinan because I am not an expert in sinology. I hope that you can show a solid source of rules used by sinologists. Then we can discuss and document the rationales behind the decision. Otherwise argument like this will come up again and again. I think sinology is a relevant academic field because sinologists are experts on China. -- Felix Wan 19:40, 2004 Nov 15 (UTC)
However, I have a serious question for everyone in Wikipedia: since sinologists are by definition experts from outside China, does it mean that for whatever issue about China, we should follow the opinion of outsiders and not that of the insiders? Does it mean that experts of China inside China does not count? (Now I begin to realize why some people discounted the opinion of Chinese linguists in another discussion.) -- Felix Wan 19:40, 2004 Nov 15 (UTC)
It's not about discounting experts of China inside China. Their opinions do matter and must be judged according to each opinion's own merits. But on the issue of transliteration, we should go with the form which is most prevalent in the English language. --Yu Ninjie 23:41, 15 Nov 2004 (UTC)

One more request for Yu Ninjie: Could you list the complete set of rules of academic standard dealing with the apostrophe? You mentioned earlier that there is an exception for names of provinces. Is there any other exception? If the Wikipedia community decides to follow that standard, we need it to be clear. -- Felix Wan 20:00, 2004 Nov 15 (UTC)

The rule is relatively simple. As I have stated:
  • whenever there is ambiguity, use apostrophes to differentiate.
  • The one exception I can think of is in the case of contemporary provinces. So for the present day province we would use "Henan" but for the Han Dynasty commandery we would use "He'nan".
  • Standards for contemporary well-known names such as Tiananmen (or Tian'anmen) are less well established in the academic community.
I'll try and find an authoritative source soon. --Yu Ninjie 23:48, 15 Nov 2004 (UTC)

My National Geographic Atlas also uses "Jinan".

I still have very strong doubts about the spelling "Ji'nan". This spelling would be against both the original Hanyu Pinyin Fang'an, as well as the Library of Congress guidelines (any version); moreover it is outranked by "Jinan" 50 to 1 on Google. Does anyone have an example of any organization or authority with a rule that the apostrophe needs to go before a syllable beginning with "n-"? Neither the Chinese government nor the Library of Congress do. -- [[User:Ran|ran (talk)]] 03:30, Nov 16, 2004 (UTC)

The average well-informed reader of English will see "jinan" as "jin'an." That's not quite as bad as what happened to the name of the popular Chinese pet, the shi1 zi3 dog -- which is known far and wide by a somewhat crunched version of the Wade-Giles romanization. I sort of cringe whenever I hear a radio or tv announcer, or a dog fancier talk about the lovely "shiht'zu" winner of the day's competition. It would be helpful if we could at least direct people toward an explanation of the correct way to say these words. People who make guidelines for the Library of Congress are probably primarily concerned with keeping their records straight, not helping patrons pronounce things properly. P0M 09:07, 16 Nov 2004 (UTC)

If the academic literature follows strict pinyin for province names (e.g., Ji'nan) rather than the nonstandard pinyin used by the PRC (Jinan), how do they romanize 陝西省? --Xiaopo ℑ 00:26, Nov 30, 2004 (UTC)

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