Talk:かく

This article has non-standard format. Please avoid the term "furigana" since it is more specialized than "romaji" which is also more widely understood. Also "information" should not be in headings. Information such as headwords, hiragana spellings, etc belongs in plain text below the headings. — Hippietrail 15:07, 11 Dec 2004 (UTC)

<Jun-Dai 16:19, 11 Dec 2004 (UTC)>I'm not sure what the standard format is for Japanese furigana entries. I was basing this off of what I saw in しゅ. Since this entry and others like it will be almost exclusively of interest to people that want to know what kanji are constructed from this pronunciation (most likely broken into on and kun readings), it made sense to create a furigana section. Also, the term "furigana" should be known by anyone looking up an entry like this one, since it is Japanese 101 terminology, and this entry (which is really just a word pronunciation, albeit in Japanese) will be of zero value to someone that doesn't know at least a tiny bit of Japanese.

I haven't seen any discussion for the formatting of entries like this one, but the format I constructed here is extensible and seems useful for furigana entries, whereas the one at くる will quickly become unwieldy once it is even moderately expanded upon. The furigana pages should really just be landing/reference pages for the kanji entries (though a rudimentary meaning should be next to the kanji in parentheses, because entries like か, once flushed out, will contain references to dozens of kanji.</Jun-Dai>

Actually it is not so simple. As you know, many Japanese words have no kanji, especially particles, adverbs, and many "grammar" words. I have no idea if there are any such words spelled "かく" but it would be terribly unweildy to have one format for words which always map to kanji and a different one for words which map to kanji sometimes and not others.

Some of these topics have been discussed in random articles as they are edited, much as we're doing now. We should have a solid place to discuss these issues but such a thing has not evolved as yet.

I agree that the very terse format including a gloss is very good for words which are usually spelled in kanji. Words which can only be spelled in hiragana (note that these might be called okurigana but not furigana, whereas hiragana is always appropriate) will need a full regular entry. Words which are often spelled either way, or which were spelled pre-1947 with kanji and post-1947 with kana, ateji such as sushi, words with obsolete kanji spellings, all need to be taken into account so that we can come up with one format that fits all these oddball cases. Japanese is particularly challenging for us! — Hippietrail 16:34, 11 Dec 2004 (UTC)

<Jun-Dai 16:38, 11 Dec 2004 (UTC)>Yeah. this doens't really belong here. It belongs somewhere with more visibility, and a more centralized status. See you at Wiktionary_talk:Language_considerations_ja!