Talk:ختو

guduo / guduxi

@Fay Freak These are the modern Mandarin pronunciations, which are probably not suitable for this. In addition, the Khitan appears to be a Chinese sound-transcription, not native script. —Suzukaze-c (talk) 00:42, 26 July 2021 (UTC)

(We have {{ltc-l}} for producing Middle Chinese with reconstructed pronunciation. —Suzukaze-c (talk) 00:43, 26 July 2021 (UTC))

@Suzukaze-c: I know that the forms may have been different, therefore I did not give them. Will this template get together the correct tones for a whole not yet created word, considering that the sum of component signs may not have the same tones as the parts? (The tones influence each other, yes?) Strangely Anya King gave these Mandarin forms but without tones, perhaps so one does not pretend that thus were the exact forms.

We have some Khitan words in Chinese script right now. Khitan is a Trümmersprache anyway and probably we can’t securely enough guess the native script from the Chinese one. Fay Freak (talk) 00:51, 26 July 2021 (UTC)

Middle Chinese does have not tone sandhi. 咄 (MC twot|twat) has two different pronunciations. The difference in sound and meaning ("another pronunciation") is minor, so specially choosing one over the other is probably not worth it. (@Frigoris)

As for Khitan: indeed, although those entries at least appear to have a reconstructed Khitan pronunciation (but, whose?) instead of modern Mandarin. —Suzukaze-c (talk) 01:03, 26 July 2021 (UTC)

@Suzukaze-c: Thanks for the enunciation that Middle Chinese lacked tone sandhi, that was my concern. As for multiple pronunciations, that is sometimes too, but If I remember correctly {{ltc-l}} uses to take the first pronunciation anyway and apparently we need the first one anyway.

Another problem I had to deliberate then is how do we get the Khitan word’s transcription with Middle Chinese sound values by using {{ltc-l}}? You see for now we have just the conventional modern pronunciation to stay uniform. The issue is just like the one about whether obscure 8th-century Latin words should be given Classical Latin pronunciations, to which topic I took the position that why not if this is how one transmit those words in general parlance.

An easy solution would be of course to write {{der|xqa|zkt|-}} {{ltc-l|}}, which looks unproblematic to human readers but the markup is as if it were a Chinese word. Fay Freak (talk) 01:16, 26 July 2021 (UTC)

There is currently no template for just the pronunciation, but making one would probably be trivial. —Suzukaze-c (talk) 02:33, 26 July 2021 (UTC)

@Suzukaze-c, The various readings probably just reflected regional variations at that time, especially for "popular" speech (as opposed to the "learned" readings for characters well-attested in the classical literature, for which the editors of the word books tended to give more context or detail). --Frigoris (talk) 07:54, 26 July 2021 (UTC)