Category talk:English terms derived from Hanyu Pinyin

Material Included in this Category

I would like to briefly summarize how I see this category and its contents. Since the beginning of interaction between Europe and China, there have been numerous attempts to borrow/derive words from Mandarin and other Chinese languages into European languages, usually in an at least partially systematic manner. The Pinyin (Hanyu Pinyin) system was developed in the 1950's in mainland China (PRC). There are words like Shanghai which reference books will tell you (correctly) are consistent with Hanyu Pinyin. But if we treat the word Shanghai like we treated any other term in English, it is clear to see that Shanghai predates the Pinyin system and hence was not created by (derived from) that system. In my view, it is an act of ahistorical presentism to (see diff) to say that Shanghai is derived from Hanyu Pinyin, or Wade-Giles, or Tongyong Pinyin or similar, because we know from Citations:Shanghai that the word predates all of these systems of romanization. To me it is more correct to say that pinyin comes from 'Shanghai' than that 'Shanghai' comes from pinyin.
So what words are to be included in a category called 'Category:English terms derived from Hanyu Pinyin'? After meeting whatever the basic criteria for being a Wiktionary page are at the time you read this, I would say that an English language word is derived from Hanyu Pinyin IF:
(1) The word first appears sometime in or after 1956/1958 (in fact, usually in/after 1979). (Chronological Criterion)
(2) The spelling of the word is consistent with (either perfectly or not) the Hanyu Pinyin scheme. (Consistency Criterion)
(3) There is no obvious alternative explanation for the origin of the word. (No Alternative Criterion)
The first criterion (Chronological Criterion) means that words that are found in materials written before the creation of the Hanyu Pinyin Fang'an are just NOT derived from Hanyu Pinyin. The earliest unquestionably Hanyu Pinyin-derived word I know of can be seen at Citations:Beijing. I imagine that it's possible that some word consistent with Hanyu Pinyin could incidentally have been created and used one time, similar to what we see with the 19th century use of the word 'hobbit' (see Citations:hobbit), and that might be allowable. But if there are two or three cites before 1956/1958 (usually actually 1979), the argument that a given word is derived from Hanyu Pinyin gets weaker and weaker. I imagine that you CAN make an argument for a word to have entered English by one route and then reentered via Hanyu Pinyin; I am not clear what that would exactly look like though.
The second criterion (Consistentcy Criterion) just means that words inconsistent with the Hanyu Pinyin Fang'an are not to be included in this category- words like Shaanxi (see diff) which although Hanyu Pinyin adjacent (due to the <x->) seems to be an arbitrary spelling. A word like Lvliang should probably be included because it is derived from a shift in the rules of Hanyu Pinyin.
The third criterion (No Alternative Criterion) recognizes that Hanyu Pinyin overlaps in content and chronology with other romanization schemes like Wade-Giles, Tongyong Pinyin, postal romanization-derived schemes, MPS2 and similar. For instance, Taibei is consistent with Tongyong Pinyin and Hanyu Pinyin, so one might be tempted to include both in the etymology. That would be a mistake in my view, because the word Taibei originated in English via Hanyu Pinyin, as can be seen from the cites on that page: if a word existed post-1956(1979) and pre-1998, and is consistent only with HP and TP, it's got a HP origin. Words in the post-1998 cites consistent with HP and TP may be either HP or TP; you'd have to look closely at the early uses to see what the authors were intending. This goes the same for words first found in the 1956/8-1978 period (Talk:Beijing) that are consistent with both Wade-Giles and Hanyu Pinyin: what does the context indicate as the method of derivation for the word? However, 'no alternative' does not mean 'throw common sense out the window in search of alternatives'.
Why did I need to write this? Well, there is a consistent pressure to ignore or diminish anything not Hanyu Pinyin. Pinyin is great, but it's not the only ball game in town- you don't get to ignore other romanization schemes. 罷黜百家，獨尊儒術 is Han Dynasty policy, not Wikipedia policy- we don't need any "罷黜百種音譯，獨尊漢語拼音". No no, and thank you. --Geographyinitiative (talk) 11:15, 26 August 2022 (UTC)