Template talk:zho

This template is deprecated and should not be used. Please use {{cmn}} for Mandarin, or {{etyl:zhx}} to display Chinese in etymologies. See Wiktionary:About Chinese for more information. Mglovesfun (talk) 16:11, 29 March 2010 (UTC)

The following information has failed Wiktionary's deletion process.

It should not be re-entered without careful consideration.

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Template:zho

Template:zhx-zho

We use the code {{cmn}} exclusively for Mandarin now. These two codes both stand for 'Chinese', whatever that may be. The former is an official ISO-639 code but it is considered a macrolanguage by the standard, and I don't think we have much use for such a code on Wiktionary. When etymologies are concerned, words from the Sinitic language family are already handled using {{etyl:zhx}} which is for Chinese as a family rather than as a language. —CodeCat 19:21, 19 October 2012 (UTC)

Delete, because... erm, delete. Mglovesfun (talk) 20:08, 19 October 2012 (UTC)

What do we use when referring to a term in Han characters for which we have no information as to dialect? And what do we put in {{attention}} when the question is regarding the character rather than its use in a specific language? I would think that {{mul}} would be a bit too broad. Chuck Entz (talk) 20:32, 19 October 2012 (UTC)

If it's for the character, it should technically be {{attention|Hani}} shouldn't it? I know that isn't supported, but it might make sense as an addition. —CodeCat 21:11, 19 October 2012 (UTC)

Shouldn't we keep some code to refer to all of the Chinese lects collectively, for use in places like {{attention}}? - -sche (discuss) 22:10, 29 October 2012 (UTC)

What kind of situation would that be used in? —CodeCat 22:31, 29 October 2012 (UTC)

If a word is known to be from a Chinese lect other than Mandarin, or is simply known to be from a Chinese lect and it isn't clear if it is Mandarin or not, and it needs to be flagged for attention.

For that matter, shouldn't we have a code to catch any words which are from Chinese lects other than Mandarin, Min Nan and the other big ones for which we have codes?

What do we currently do in etymology sections if we know that a word originated from Chinese but not necessarily Mandarin? - -sche (discuss) 00:30, 30 October 2012 (UTC)

The "correct" way would be to use {{etyl|zhx}}, just like you could use {{etyl|gem}} to say the word is Germanic but we don't know from which language. —CodeCat 00:44, 30 October 2012 (UTC)

{{zhx-zho}} has been orphaned I notice. Can it be safely deleted? —CodeCat 23:10, 9 November 2012 (UTC)

Well, it's also nominated above with a consensus to delete (#Template:zhx-zho)! Yes, let's do it! Mglovesfun (talk) 23:18, 9 November 2012 (UTC)

Ok so then that leaves {{zho}}. I think a lot of the transclusions for that are the same as the ones for {{zhx-zho}} that you just cleared. Can you run through them with AWB? —CodeCat 23:23, 9 November 2012 (UTC)

{{zho}} has now almost been orphaned, and the fact that it was possible to orphan it at all is an indication that we don't really need this code for anything. :) —CodeCat 20:12, 11 November 2012 (UTC)

@-sche we still have {{zh-attention}} specifically because {{zh}} was made to display Mandarin instead of Chinese. Mglovesfun (talk) 20:13, 11 November 2012 (UTC)

• Chiming in late here. There are a lot of Japanese terms that came from Chinese, but where the original dialect and rough time of borrowing is hard to pin down. At any rate, most Japanese terms of Chinese derivation are decidedly not from Mandarin, so {{etyl|cmn|ja}} would be flat-out wrong. I *had* been using {{etyl|zho|ja}} for that, and this handily informed the reader that the term came from "Chinese". Now, however, {{etyl|zhx|ja}} renders on screen as "Sinitic", which isn't right -- many readers won't know off-hand what this is, and it also makes it sound like the JA term in question came from a whole language family, which the WP article describes as including things that are irrelevant for Japanese, such as Bai, Ba-Shu, and the whole Min sub-family.

Any suggestions? Should I be using {{etyl|ltc|ja}} instead? I'm generally okay with that, except the WP article on w:Middle Chinese gives a starting date of around 600, and Chinese characters (ostensibly terms) start appearing in JA texts even earlier than this (albeit only very sparsely). -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 00:40, 26 January 2013 (UTC)

If something can be dated back to Middle Chinese it should definitely be noted that way in the etymology and not with any modern Chinese dialect. I'm not sure on the current practice but I think unless qualified all languages are "modern", so "From Chinese" means from a modern Sinitic language and not Middle Chinese. We do the same with other languages too. —CodeCat 00:47, 26 January 2013 (UTC)

• Thanks, CodeCat. I've poked around, and we seem to have "Late Middle Chinese" as code {{ltc}}, but I can't find anything for just "Middle Chinese" irrespective of "late" or "early". Moreover, Category:Sinitic_languages doesn't seem to have anything for Middle Chinese other than "Late Middle Chinese", which strikes me as a bit of an omission.

Did I miss something, and perchance there is a more generic "Middle Chinese" lang code hiding somewhere? -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 18:51, 28 January 2013 (UTC)

I don't know if there is a code for it, but if not, we could probably repurpose {{ltc}} for it? —CodeCat 19:03, 28 January 2013 (UTC)

There is also {{lzh}}, is that any better? —CodeCat 19:06, 28 January 2013 (UTC)

• Thanks, yeah, I'd seen {{lzh}}, but Literary Chinese is actually a specific kind of Chinese that doesn't necessarily have much to do specifically with Middle Chinese, if I've understood it correctly.

And I'd be fine with repurposing {{ltc}}, provided we remove the word "Late" from the descriptor on the {{ltc}} page. The WP article on the ISO lang codes that lists {{ltc}}, at w:ISO_639:l, links through to w:Middle_Chinese. SIL International's page lists {{ltc}} as "Late Middle Chinese", but without much detail. MultiTree's page lists {{ltc}} as just "Middle Chinese", with a bit more detail in the "Brief Description" field towards the bottom of the page. The dates given there of the 6th through 10th centuries is pretty much right when a lot of Chinese terms were imported into written Japanese. -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 19:47, 28 January 2013 (UTC)

Why can't we simply have a code for "Chinese language"? Now we have Category:Vietnamese terms derived from Sinitic languages, Mandate of Heaven, Zen, Sinae, reiki, yin-yang, galangal, wampee etc. all these ridiculous terminologies. God. It's called Chinese language on Wikipedia. Why is it so hard for people to accept this? 129.78.32.21 05:32, 29 January 2013 (UTC)

• If I understand the argument correctly, it's because there is no one Chinese language. The WP article itself makes this clear -- "Chinese" is somewhere between 7 and 13 main dialects/languages (and even whether to call them "dialects" or "languages" seems to be a matter of some debate).

So using a single label of "Chinese" without specifying which variety could perhaps be likened to using a single label of "European" without specifying which variety. I.e., overly broad and ultimately not that useful. Although the label "Chinese" might suffice in daily speech, Wiktionary strives for a certain level of precision, making the ambiguity unacceptable.

I'm really not sure what you mean about "ridiculous terminologies". I'd be happy to address your point, but I'm afraid that I cannot discern what it is. Perhaps you mean that you'd prefer to call the language family "Chinese languages" instead of "Sinitic languages"?

With regard to Japanese etymologies, I'm happy with "Middle Chinese" -- this classification fits with other Japanese-language descriptions I've read. -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 06:15, 29 January 2013 (UTC)

Does anyone know why we have {{cmn}}, but {{etyl:zhx}}? Shouldn't that be {{zhx}} instead? What if we want to use {{zhx}} as a lang code -- such as in {{term|lang=zhx|...}}, in cases where the term in question is from some earlier but indeterminate form of ancient or middle Chinese? Or should we use {{etyl|zhx}} and then link to the Mandarin term using {{term|lang=cmn|...}}? Or leave out the lang code altogether, using {{term|sc=Hani|...}}? -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 18:40, 29 January 2013 (UTC)

zhx is a language family code, and is part of ISO-639-5 which describes codes for families. Linguistically speaking, the difference between a language and a family is not always clear, just like it's hard to make a difference between a language and a dialect. On Wiktionary, though, we do make a clear difference. Terms belong to languages. Languages belong to families. Families don't have terms. I think what you mean is that we currently don't have a separate code for Middle or Old Chinese, which was a single language and not a family. If you need such a code then you could request one in the Grease Pit, or you could ask if {{ltc}} can be changed to encompass all of Middle Chinese instead of just Late Middle Chinese. I don't know enough about this to answer it myself. —CodeCat 18:47, 29 January 2013 (UTC)

• Thanks CodeCat, I'll post there. -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 19:00, 29 January 2013 (UTC)

The above is an illogical argument.

1. First, "it's because there is no one Chinese language" - may I ask what made you so sure that this proposition is true? There has never been a clear-cut distinction between languages and dialects. A language is a dialect with an army and navy, or in terms of modern society, "a dialect with a Department of Education". It's funny how people here desperately want to treat the language-dialect distinction as somehow linguistic, although it obviously is and always has been political-sociological-cultural. If people just drop the whole idea that linguistic criteria should be used, most of disputes on Mandarin vs. Chinese here vanish.
2. Second, you may say that mutual intelligibility is a useful criterion in distinguishing languages from dialects. In that case, could you explain to me why a double standard exists in Wiktionary, in that mutually intelligible Slovak-Czech, Kyrgyz-Kazakh, Macedonian-Bulgarian, Danish-Swedish-Norwegian, Belarusian-Russian-Ukrainian, Thai-Lao, Portuguese-Galician languages are treated as decomposed languages? It is obvious that whether these languages are perceived by Wiktionary editors as languages or dialects is inevitably intertwined with linguistic self-perceptions by the language users themselves. Why does a double standard exist for Chinese?
3. Third, you may say that it is because Chinese is treated as a macrolanguage in ISO 639. In that case, could you explain why other macrolanguages are simply treated as single languages here, for example the cases of Serbo-Croatian (3 languages), Albanian (4 languages), Arabic (30 languages), Persian (2 languages), Estonian (2 languages), Mongolian (2), Hmong (21), Inuktitut (2), Kurdish (3), Malagasy (10), Malay (36), Quechua (44), Uzbek (2), Yiddish (2), Swahili (2), Zhuang (16)? Why does {{ar}} still exist but not {{zh}}?
4. Fourth, you may say that an etymological explanation of "from Chinese ..." is chronologically non-specific and ambiguous, which is a fair point. May I ask, then, why is this issue not applied to other potentially as chronologically ambiguous languages as Chinese, most notably Arabic? Why are the entries in Category:English terms derived from Arabic freely expressed with wordings such as "from Arabic ..." without a proper and specific identification of the then stage of Arabic (eg. alkali)?

As above. Please explain. 129.78.32.21 05:06, 31 January 2013 (UTC)

• I stumbled across an archived discussion that might prove informative: Wiktionary:Beer_parlour_archive/2009/May#Recurring_problem_with_Chinese_vs._Mandarin

And as an addendum, borrowings from any variety of Chinese entail some additional ambiguity, as the written form is shared across the Chinese linguistic spectrum, and across the span of multiple millenia. So 生 may be any of several different things at the spoken level, such that it becomes very useful to specify which dialect/language was the source for the spoken form of a word borrowed into some other language. Meanwhile, languages written in more phonetically-dependent scripts will often change the spelling of a word once the pronunciation has drifted sufficiently far from its orthography (with English perhaps as the oddball), such that the written forms and spoken forms track each other much more closely, thereby at least partially avoiding the ambiguities at issue with Chinese. -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 22:55, 31 January 2013 (UTC)

• So what is the basis for the current separate treatment for Chinese? That messy discussion appears to say that "Chinese is broken down into varieties because 1) the varieties are not mutually intelligible and 2) 'zh' is a unified code for Chinese", despite the fact that mutual intelligibility and language codes have never been used as concrete criteria either on their own or in combination for distinguishing languages-dialects in Wiktionary (as I said above), and the language-dialect merge or split here basically lacks a convincing rationale, depending almost entirely on the opinions of some participating editors.

Wrt to ambiguities in source, there are many examples of languages with phonetically-dependent scripts using fixed written forms, eg. Arabic, Tibetan (since 8th century), Burmese. The etymologies at candy, coffee, yak are arguably equally ambiguous. Even (unsimplifiable) kanji in Japanese are largely unchanged since their import, eg. the nullification of "Chinese" in etymologies has resulted in the chronologically inconsistent and contradictory etymology at [[Zen]]. The stage of Japanese (Old, Middle, Modern) when the borrowing occurred is not specified, and labelling Mandarin as the source of Japanese is just blatantly wrong (probably in fact "Early Middle Chinese", according to Western terminology, if not earlier in the form of Late Old Chinese; Mandarin wasn't even born until five centuries later). 129.78.32.97 00:29, 1 February 2013 (UTC)

We're currently working on fixing those etymologies. And there should probably be a code for Old and Middle Japanese if there isn't one yet. —CodeCat 00:34, 1 February 2013 (UTC)

What CodeCat said. A couple months back, there was a decision to bot-replace all instances of {{zho}} (and maybe {{zh}} too?) with {{etyl:zhx}} or {{cmn}}. I very much disagree with the decision to use {{cmn}}, but I was busy elsewhere IRL and didn't participate in that discussion. Consequently, a lot of JA etymologies (my personal area of interest) are now borked, and us JA editors are in the process of finding and fixing them.

FWIW, JA is broken down historically into:

• Old Japanese: {{ojp}}, up through 794 CE -- w:Nara period and earlier
• Early Middle Japanese: no code, 794 CE through 1185 -- w:Heian period
• Late Middle Japanese: no code, 1185 through maybe 1600 -- w:Kamakura period and w:Muromachi period, Japan's "middle ages" of a sort (中世, chūsei)
• Early Modern Japanese: no code, 1600 through maybe 1850 -- w:Tokugawa period
• Modern Japanese: {{ja}}, 1850 to present -- w:Meiji period, etc.

The ISO codes really don't cover a lot of the historical varieties that we wind up dealing with here on WT. Not really sure what to do about that. -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 01:34, 1 February 2013 (UTC)