User talk:Explosivo

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Again, welcome! Wyang (talk) 06:28, 21 September 2017 (UTC)

Wu
Thanks for adding the Wu pronunciations! Wyang (talk) 06:32, 21 September 2017 (UTC)
 * I mainly use this: http://wu-chinese.com/minidict/index.php. --Explosivo (talk) 17:40, 22 September 2017 (UTC)

Pronunciation edits
Hi, thanks for adding pronunciations, especially the Wu ones. Just a little note, please do not mark pronunciation edits as minor (since it's essentially adding a new language, at least for Chinese). — justin(r)leung { (t...) 15:47, 4 April 2020 (UTC)

Dialectal pronunciations
Hi, did you have a source for these? RcAlex36 (talk) 03:32, 30 April 2021 (UTC)
 * Hi, these are the spellings taken from the respective Wikipedias, which are linked on the right side. Personally, I don't like them because they are mostly obsolete systems developed by Christian missionaries and hardly anyone actually speaking the Chinese varieties knows how to read them, but that's what's been established on Wikipedia and in the Wiktionary. With regard to whether the spellings are indeed correct or not, you'd have to consult a pronunciation dictionary with the IPA transcriptions and check if the vowels, consonants and tones correspond to the designated Latin letters and diacritics in the respective systems. It is a tedious task, so I mostly rely on the belief that those writing the Wikipedias know what they're doing. --Explosivo (talk) 14:22, 30 April 2021 (UTC)
 * Since you took them from Wikipedia, I have removed them. Wikipedia is not a reliable source when it comes to dialectal pronunciations. For variants of Chinese other than Standard Mandarin and Cantonese, we do not infer pronunciation of compounds from the pronunciation of individual characters. RcAlex36 (talk) 18:20, 30 April 2021 (UTC)
 * Sorry, but this was totally innecessary. Hardly anyone else is ever going to fill these blanks. The templates in the Wiktionary are designed to work with Pha̍k-fa-sṳ, Pe̍h-ōe-jī and Bàng-uâ-cê only. This was not my decision, and I'm simply trying to work with the existing principles. I am aware of tone sandhis (连读变调) and literary/vernacular differences in pronunciation (文白异读) when it comes to compound words since it happens in my native Wu area as well. I've also attended a course on Min Nan, so I do understand how the structures work. But I doubt that anyone has ever attempted to write down the city of Shangrao in Pha̍k-fa-sṳ, Pe̍h-ōe-jī and Bàng-uâ-cê before Wikipedia. And I even doubt that Shangrao would appear in the speech of these dialects. Any notation would be original work and someone has to be the first at some point. Also, I didn't create these pages on those Wikipedias. Min Nan Pe̍h-ōe-jī is usually written with the citation tone. This was adopted by About_Chinese. It doesn't matter if the characters undergo pronunciation changes or not. These are systematical and can be deducted from the combination of the tones. Shangrao would simply be the combination of the literary readings since it's a place name that doesn't have historic ties to the Min Nan area. Let's examine the Min Nan readings for the entry 上海, the city which shares a character with "Shangrao". It gives you the three readings Siōng-hái / Siǒng-hái / Siāng-hái. I have the 《闽南方言大词典》 by 周长楫, a professor at Xiamen University and basically the authorative voice for Min Nan in mainland China. It includes pronunciations for all the Chinese provinces and their capitals on the pages 1174 and 1175. It's [sjɔŋ6hai3] for the Xiamen dialect, [sjɔŋ4hai3] for the Quanzhou dialect and [sjaŋ6hai3] for the Zhangzhou dialect. The dictionary counts tones in the order 阴平、阳平、阴上、阳上、阴去、阳去、阴入、阳入. However, Pe̍h-ōe-jī counts all the yin tones first and then the yang tones. The character 上 is pronounced with the sixth tone in the dictionary, which is 阳去. The 阳去 tone in Pe̍h-ōe-jī is the seventh tone and marked with a macron, a straight line over the main vowel, so it's "siōng" in the Xiamen dialect. In the Zhangzhou dialect, we have a different vowel but the same tone, so it's "siāng". In the Quanzhou dialect, it's the fourth tone in the dictionary, which is 阳上. This tone only appears in the Quanzhou dialect, and I have seen a pointy circumflex or a round breve sign for this tone. So it's "siǒng" or "siŏng". 海 is pronounced the same in all three dialects. It has the third tone in the dictionary, which is 阴上. 阴上 is simplified to a common 上声 in Pe̍h-ōe-jī because, as highlighted before, splitting the yin and yang tones in the 上声 category is only characteristic of the Quanzhou dialect. It doesn't exist in the prestige Xiamen dialect. 上声 in Pe̍h-ōe-jī is marked with an acute accent, so it's "hái". So Siōng-hái / Siǒng-hái / Siāng-hái in the Wiktionary correspond neatly with the Xiamen, Quanzhou, and Zhangzhou dialects. We have no reason to doubt that the 上 in "Shangrao" is pronounced differently than the 上 in "Shanghai". For the second character, the dictionary by the RoC Ministry of Education (https://twblg.dict.edu.tw/holodict_new/) cites "jiâu" and "liâu". 周长楫's dictionary gives [dziau2] for Zhangzhou and [liau2] for Xiamen/Quanzhou. The second tone is 阳平, while in Pe̍h-ōe-jī it is the fifth, denoted with a circumflex. So the dictionaries agree with each other. Since most editors on the Min Nan Wikipedia are from Taiwan, mixing the readings of the three cities is common. The Tainan onset /dz/ due to Zhangzhou influence has spread to other parts of Taiwan, so "Siōng-jiâu" is a valid form. "Siāng-jiâu" would be the traditional Zhangzhou variant, and "Siōng-liâu" the traditional Xiamen variant. This is as far as "sourcing" can go. For Min Dong, there is 《福州方言词典》 from the 《现代汉语方言大词典》 series. It says that the character 上 has the tone contour 242, which is marked with a circumflex in Bàng-uâ-cê, so they agree at least here. I admit I'm not that well read on the double endings they can take. For Hakka, 《梅县方言词典》 in the series 《现代汉语方言大词典》 says that the character 上 has a 去声 and it is pronounced soŋ. According to Pha̍k-fa-sṳ, this tone is not marked with a diacritic, so "song" is correct. And the problem with Hakka is that there are too many varieties. Again, you have a dictionary by the RoC Ministry of Education (https://hakkadict.moe.edu.tw/). My Min Nan teacher from Taiwan said these dictionaries had a lot of problems. They care more about speaking than transcribing them correctly into Latin letters. So let's agree the pronunciations for the single characters are correct, and your only problem is tone sandhi. Pha̍k-fa-sṳ itself seems like to have multiple versions and it is nowhere specified whether tone sandhi is reflected in spelling, but from the examples I've seen, it's not. If you're so concerned about accuracy, you should have done the work I've just presented you. What you do is voiding people's contributions and discouraging them from continuing. Transferring names from different Wikipedias is already a lot of work, let alone the thinking and checking I've done for you. This should be a community effort. Realizing something after a year and deleting edits adds nothing. Wiki projects are forever going to be unfinished, constantly changing products. You should try to stack the work of people on top of each other and not get a kick out of keeping everything so clean it blocks out well-intentioned input. Instead of using your time antagonizing me here, why don't you go to the Min Nan, Min Dong and Hakka Wikipedias and ask them for clarification? It is also important that Wikipedia and Wiktionary be congruent. A native speaker familiar with the system they use will surely help you, but you'll have to simply believe their word too. Not many people know about how local Chinese varieties work linguistically; you know this is a very niche area. And even less people care about contributing to what is a foreign website to China. You need to know English, Chinese characters (simplified and traditional) and have deep understandings about historical Chinese linguistics. This is not a matter of some debatable information. This "source" argument is really lazy and overused. It's a question about how to spell a name according to an unofficial system that is poorly developed and understood. By this logic, you would have to delete the entire Wu section as well, as the romanization used is completely invented by Wiktionary, which mixes different systems. This leaves no other option than to interpret and transfer the information with your own abilities. --Explosivo (talk) 23:37, 30 April 2021 (UTC)
 * Hello, I think the issue is not whether the romanization is right, but whether the pronunciation is correct according to native speakers of those varieties. While your reasoning may be okay, it doesn't guarantee that they are right because pronunciations may have exceptions. While 饒 may only have one pronunciation in these lects, 上 has more than one pronunciation, and while one pronunciation is more likely than others, it is not clear whether that is good enough evidence for the word in question. Looking at the Wikipedia entries, the Hakka entry was created by a Hakka speaker, but the name of the user (Tshong-tin-nyin) points to the fact that they probably speak Changting dialect rather than Sixian dialect, which is the dialect that PFS records. The Min Nan entry was created an IP, and subsequent edits were only made by IPs and bots, so it is unclear whether they are native speakers. The same issue is seen in the Min Dong entry; it was created by an IP and has not been touched by any other editors. For "source", we are good with most sources, whether that be a recording of the word spoken or any written record that somehow records the pronunciation in the respective lects. — justin(r)leung { (t...) 00:50, 2 May 2021 (UTC)