Talk:Chungnanhai

Comment on Proscribed Status

As was written by LlywelynII elsewhere, I think it is hypothetically possible that this dashless form of the word was considered 'lower' or 'proscribed' by some vis-à-vis the dashed form. However, dashless Wade-Giles does seem extant from the beginning (perhaps not equally pervasive at first) . It always seems to me that the more cerebral publications will use the dashes, while newspapers and the like will use dashless Wade-Giles forms, and this pattern exists from the 19th century: see Citations:Hsinchu, Citations:Matsu, etc. In my perception, as time goes on in the 20th century and up to this date, the dash is removed from English generally whenever the editor wants to and these dashless Wade-Giles forms also tend to be more common. There is a large body of CCP literature, KMT literature and Western sources that avoids the dashes, from the diff and all the 'China Reconstructs' cites, to all the 'Free China Weekly' cites, to Western sources [1][2][3]. Here is a Gazetteer with numerous examples of dashless and dashed form side by side: Leon E. Seltzer, editor (1952), “Chitu or Ch'i-tu”, in The Columbia Lippincott Gazetteer of the World‎^[4], Morningside Heights, NY: Columbia University Press, →OCLC, page 402, column 1. The result of vicissitudes of history is that the government-endorsed forms of the Taiwan Wade-Giles names like Taipei and Kaohsiung are dashless. So I do think that "sometimes proscribed" might be correct for Chungnanhai on some views from the old days, but would it be correct on Taipei too somehow, for the early period? The brain drain on Wade-Giles knowledge has left it in such a sorry state that I am here asking questions. (See also Talk:An-ch‘ing.) --Geographyinitiative (talk) 19:11, 12 May 2022 (UTC) (Modified)