Talk:ou

I notice we've just deleted the Japanese entry for ojo which acted as a mini index to ojō, ōjo, and ōjō. The Chinese entry for ou acts as a mini index to ōu, óu, ǒu, and òu.

All of the arguments for and against seem to apply equally to both languages.

The specific arguments which resulted in deletion in that case were:


 * romanization with no indication of vowel length seems to be what you might call a "common misromanization".
 * This is what was designed for.

See Talk:ojo

The only linguistic difference is that the diacritics for Japanese indicate vowel length whereas the diacritics for Chinese indicate tone.

If we have no policy that "mini indexes" are suitable for languages whose romanization indicates tone but not vowel length then the existing policies must be applied equally to all languages.

The only other difference I could identify in the Japanese page from the Chinese page is the format. If the issue is the format then this should be clearly stated rather than the arguments in the previous RFD. &mdash; hippietrail 07:04, 11 June 2009 (UTC)

Note that Fantizi is also currently under RFD for being a Chinese romanization without dicritics. &mdash; hippietrail 07:20, 11 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Strong keep. We have several thousand of these entries, one for every Chinese language. While that alone is not a basis for keeping them, they are not indexes, but definitions. It is easy enough to come across texts containing transliterated Chinese phrases where the diacritics are left out altogether, meaning that the reader looking up the term will not know which tone to use (or even which tones can be used for a particular word, or that the Chinese language has tones). We have two alternatives - have a short definition indicating that ou is a Chinese word which is missing a necessary accent (akin to a common misspelling), or to list all the Chinese words for which this error can be made in each unaccented form (which, in some cases, would yield a list of hundreds). I suggest that it would not be worth the labor of removing these thousands of entries to the end of making our dictionary less informative. bd2412 T 18:44, 11 June 2009 (UTC)
 * All of these points apply equally well to Japanese other than the "status quo" argument. We have of course made much more sweeping changes in the past so I'm sure we have any real basis for keeping status quo as a basis for policy, de facto or otherwise. Changing the first-letter capitalization of the entire Wiktionary a few years ago was a much bigger change for instance. &mdash; hippietrail 08:34, 12 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Well then let me reiterate what is really my primary point: these entries properly define the words as they are actually used in print. We would fail as a reference if a person reading a Chinese transliteration with missing diacritics could get no sense from this dictionary how the words in the text before him are actually defined. bd2412 T 17:54, 12 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Wouldn't this logic apply to every romanization scheme for every language? At some point, our users have to learn to use the Google.  It's one thing to have all common romanization schemes represented in the real entry (which we can and should do); it's another thing to treat them all like they were words in their own right.  That said, my objections would evaporate at once if there were three citations of this being used to convey meaning (that is, not merely being quoted for pedagogical or analytic purposes).  Maybe some of those Mandarin children's books that have allegedly been written in Pinyin omit diacritics?  I would try to find out, but funny thing -- after years of intermittent debate, no one has yet provided so much as the title of a single Pinyin book.  -- Visviva 14:17, 17 October 2009 (UTC)


 * On that note, I've just discovered the Pinyin Bible. Why didn't anyone mention this before?  It certainly forces me to moderate my attitude (though not with regard to this particular class of entry). -- Visviva


 * Delete, ridiculous. And I'd love to RFV ōu, óu, ǒu, and òu, for that matter.  It has never been satisfactorily explained why transliterated Chinese and Japanese should get a free pass around here.  -- Visviva 02:31, 17 October 2009 (UTC)
 * Delete, no dismabiguation pages on Wiktionary. Mglovesfun (talk) 12:48, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

Deleted. Mglovesfun (talk) 22:15, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

RFV discussion: January–March 2020
I hate to RFV something like this (an obsolete dialectal word), but the only evidence of this I can find is a mention in William H. Marshall (1789 / 1796)'s work on the dialect of Gloucester. It's not in the EDD, the OED, or Century (in the EDD I checked under not just ou but also a, he, and she). (For the record, if the entry can't be verified and is deleted, it was a pronoun meaning "he, she, it" indiscriminately, a falling-together of reduced forms of he or she, like also the better-attested .) I've no idea where our suggested pronunciation came from or whether it's accurate. - -sche (discuss) 07:07, 9 January 2020 (UTC)
 * The pronunciation was added in edit. It may well have been inferred by analogy of . ←₰-→  Lingo Bingo Dingo (talk)  12:25, 27 January 2020 (UTC)


 * RFV-failed. - -sche (discuss) 04:01, 21 March 2020 (UTC)