Wiktionary:Beer parlour/Chinese language issues

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Chinese character meanings

Chinese Characters, Han Characters, or whatever is the most correct term at the moment, usually have a meaning when they stand alone. The modern written Chinese language, however, mostly uses terms with two or more characters. I would like to add these single character meanings to the translation lists of English words but what should I write in the language field? I might begin adding them under "Han Character" soon unless somebody provides a better solution. Hippietrail 04:14, 21 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Chinese translation

I am wondering if there is a standard for the translation in Chinese, since there are two different writing system in Chinese: traditional Chinese (繁體中文) and simplified Chinese(简体中文), should I add both of them in the translation? and should I also add Chinese Pinyin for English readers? and which kind of pinyin should I used? there are some different system in mainland and Taiwan (esp in Taiwan)? --Samuel 17:58 Jul 27, 2003 (UTC)

In Unicode, isn't the difference between Simplified and Traditional purly a choice of which font is used? That is, there is only one code point for the word in the abstract, regardless of how it's drawn. —Długosz

No. An example is simplified 龟 (U+9F9F, gūi, "turtle") vs. traditional 龜 (U+9F9C, same). Some places are more "simplified" than others; e.g. Japanese uses many "traditional" glyphs but does use 龟... what it would come down to is changing languages by changing fonts, which is not the Right Thing to do. As far as how to express things in the translations, that may be a bit complicated. Probably the best thing to do is divide the lines:

• Chinese, Simplified: 龟 (gūi)
• Chinese, Traditional: 龜 (ㄍㄨㄟ, guei)

...with the simplified in w:hanyu pinyin (for Mainland China) and the Traditional in w:tongyong pinyin and w:bopomofo (for Taiwan). (Perhaps the zhuyin needn't be linked; perhaps the pinyin should? I am thinking of the Japanese translations, which generally link the kana.)

For characters that are the same in simplified and traditional, a simpler format could be used, similar to other languages:

• Chinese: 一 (ㄧ, yī, yi)

(with the same reservations about what representations should be linked) ...As a Chinese speaker (Samuel), which way do you think would be most useful (and most like the forms for other languages)?. —Muke Tever 17:33, 20 Apr 2004 (UTC)

How to use Pinyin

Similar to the above problem of when to use/include simplified and traditional characters, what should we do when we want to include the Pinyin phoneticization? Look at one of the example 'good entries' fox.

* Chinese: 狐狸 (húlí)

Here the Pinyin uses the marked tone characters "húlí". Another way of writing the same thing is "hu2li2". See the Wikipedia section on Tones, where they mention that some computers may not be able to display some tone characters.

Since some people may not be able to correctly display Pinyin tone characters, should we also include the numbered phonetics variant, as demonstrated in Pinyin under Translations?

Shenme 03:02, 17 May 2005 (UTC)