Wiktionary talk:About pinyin romanization

Discussion moved from rfd page

 * Shijian - This one will be OK
 * Shi2wu4 - Kept temporarily as a redirect
 * Long list has been deleted except the two above, which can serve as a basis for dealing with the problem.

These aren't the actual words in the actual scripts at all. They are transliterations with pronunciation information embedded. The articles on the actual Chinese and Japanese words, such as ?, give the romanizations of those words, and Wiktionary:Chinese Pinyin index allows readers to look up the actual words from the romanizations. Uncle G 11:36, 30 Apr 2005 (UTC)
 * Note that the anonymous user giving us these articles is also going through all of the linked-to English word articles and wikifying the pronunciations for the Chinese translations. Uncle G 01:03, 1 May 2005 (UTC)


 * The list is growing too large to continue enumerating further individual articles here. I'm therefore listing the IP addresses (that I have noticed so far) that have brought us these articles (and which are adding corresponding "translations" to other pages).  Uncle G 11:38, 1 May 2005 (UTC)
 * Perhaps instead of tagging these as we could add a  template for future entries, so they can go into an rfd sub-category?  Just a thought...  --Connel MacKenzie 21:31, 2 May 2005 (UTC)

Several IPs contributing tons of numeric romanizations. IPs include: Don't know how many more were used, but reportedly all were anon IPs. --Connel MacKenzie 04:40, 1 May 2005 (UTC)
 * Special:Contributions/84.66.86.250 - Done. Ec
 * Special:Contributions/81.76.91.7 - Done. Ec
 * Special:Contributions/84.66.54.87 - Done. Ec
 * Special:Contributions/81.77.9.217 - Adapted
 * Special:Contributions/81.77.139.181 - This one done. Ec
 * Special:Contributions/81.79.109.247 - Will come back to this one. Contains possible basis for solving this problem. -Ec
 * Special:Contributions/84.65.152.126 - This one done. Ec
 * Special:Contributions/84.66.11.59 - This one done. Ec
 * Special:Contributions/84.66.56.23 - This one done. Ec
 * Special:Contributions/84.66.241.237 - This one done. Ec
 * Special:Contributions/84.68.57.254 - This one done. Ec
 * I would like a Chinese speaker to weigh in on the conversation at WT:RFD...doesn't Chinese have one written language, but dozens or hundreds of spoken varients? These entries don't look entirely like they are entirely meaningless.  I'm begining to regret blocking the one IP I did block for 24 hours.  --Connel MacKenzie 05:54, 1 May 2005 (UTC)  Edit: Changed wiki User: to Special:Contributions/.  --Connel MacKenzie 08:23, 3 May 2005 (UTC)

Most of the ones being edited already have pinyin, tone counts aren't necessary. --Blastu 20:58, 7 May 2005 (UTC)
 * So, those are called tone counts then? Cool.  I suppose, now I know enough to ask: what's a tone count?  Any why aren't they necessary?  (Or perhaps the question is, why do some people think they are?)  --Connel MacKenzie 06:48, 16 May 2005 (UTC)

Pinyin is the romanization of pronunciation of chinese characters, they are represented by symbols above roman letters commonly found in romance languages such as "ú" or "à", pinyin has assigned a number to each of those symbols, what is happening is that instead of actually inserting in pinyin you see in, lets say, textbooks, the person is placing the pronunciation without the tone. like "yuán" would be condensed to "yuan2" because the mark above the "a" is the second tone. He's placing them in everywhere! Even places where real pinyin has already been placed, and sometimes placed in place of a character. I suppose he finds it easier to do this rather than typing out the actual tone (which isn't hard, you can find hem below the editing box) or typing out the character itself. --Blastu 14:15, 26 May 2005 (UTC)


 * This is not an easy one to sort out. As currently formulated the entries are pretty useless.  Who, after all, is our audience for transliteration?  For an example I looked at Mu3niu2.  The article tells us that it means "cow" in English.  It doesn't even give us the chinese characters.  This article could as easily appear as "mŭniú" or "mu3niu2, as well as in variants with a space or hyphen between the two syllables.  Both tone marks and superscript tone numbers are common.  Tone numbers at line level seem to be designed to accomodate those who can't handle tone marks, or find it too much work to create superscripts.  This is similar to the IPA vs. SAMPA discussions.  SAMPA limits itself to what is available on an ordinary keyboard.


 * Pinyin by itself is not Chinese. An unaccented pinyin romanization is ambiguous.  A person without an elementary understanding of Chinese will be confused by the representation of tones; we cannot even assume that he will be able to connect tone marks with their corresponding tone numbers.  If he wants to look up pinyin romanized text that he encounters while reading he needs a strategy for doing so.  (We aren't even touching the question of Wade-Giles or a multitude of idiosyncratic romanizations ... yet.)  I think that this can most easily be done by typing in unaccented pinyin.  This will lead to a series of pages which will effectively be mini-indexes that include comparisons of various tone patterns and links to the pages for the Chinese characters themselves.  For two-character combinations I tending to favour the pinyin representation with a hyphen. Eclecticology 00:45, 27 May 2005 (UTC)