Talk:Taibei

Caution: Not All "Taibei" Are "臺北"

I had previously realized that Taibei High School (THS) is named 臺北市私立泰北高級中學. Hence references to that particular high school by the name Taibei/泰北 are not instances of Taibei/臺北. --Geographyinitiative (talk) 12:28, 29 August 2022 (UTC)

Origin of 'Taibei'

The spelling 'Taibei' is consistent with Hanyu Pinyin (1958), Mandarin Phonetic Symbols II (1984) and Tongyong Pinyin (1998). The word 'Taibei' existed in the late 1970's as can be seen at Citations:Taibei. Should the most correct etymology of the English language word 'Taibei' incorporate all three romanization schemes? I say no, but I could be wrong. The spelling 'Taibei' clearly exists before MPS2 and Tongyong Pinyin were promulgated. Someone using these later systems might independently generate the word 'Taibei' via those romanization schemes, but when it comes to how the word 'Taibei' entered English originally, it seems there can be little doubt but that Hanyu Pinyin was the point of origin. Whether the word 'Taibei' can re-enter English multiple times, and whether this would affect the etymology of the word 'Taibei' is somewhat murky to me. You might then say- 'ignore the romanization schemes!' No, I know how this word entered English. If 'Taibei' could also be consistent with a new Japanese transliteration in 1995 (referring to the same city), it would not matter a wit to the actual origin of the word in English itself- the word would still have a Mandarin origin in English since it was created in English with Mandarin before it could have been created in English with Japanese. I would not suddenly say "hey, there are two potential origins for the word, and some people use either way, hence I will just add both to the etymology- that or ignore both." No, this is not how etymology of English language words works. This is a question of documented historical origins for an English language word. By analogy, just because other romanization schemes can produce a given English word doesn't mean they did. The real estate was already taken. The word was already extant. The orthological discovery had already been made. That doesn't mean that 'Taibei' isn't consistent with MPS2 and Tongyong Pinyin. It is! But the English language term itself is just not derived from those systems. To put it another way: on the day that MPS2 was promulgated, did the etymology of the pre-existing English language word 'Taibei' suddenly change? No, it did not. Now, in my view, there may be a 'grey area' when it comes to words without a strong tradition in English, like the town of Sansha. It may have emerged under one scheme of romanization, been lost and then re-emerged under another romanization scheme, with the same spelling. I'm not sure how to assess or handle that correctly. And maybe you could prove that there was a Tongyong Pinyin origin for Taibei, separate from Hanyu Pinyin Taibei. What if books from the 2000's showed a marked increase in 'Taibei', and these same books were saying that they were using Tongyong Pinyin. Would that be a separate etymology? --Geographyinitiative (talk) 17:05, 29 August 2022 (UTC)