Talk:街

gāi

@RcAlex36, Justinrleung en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Ssupingkai#Etymology says: "Borrowed from Mandarin 四平街 (Sìpíngjiē), using the dialectal pronunciation gāi for 街." This location is in Jilin, not Chengdu. Does/did dialectal Mandarin in Manchuria have gāi? It seems to (or something similar). If it does, should gāi be added as a Hanyu Pinyin under Mandarin in zh-pron here? May not be able to resolved today. --Geographyinitiative (talk) 16:37, 5 June 2021 (UTC)

@Geographyinitiative It should not be under zh-pron because it is neither standard Mandarin nor Beijing Mandarin. Using pinyin gāi to represent the sound may therefore be inappropriate; perhaps it should be written as /kai/ instead, even though people online may use gāi to represent this common dialectal pronunciation. That said, the gāi pronunciation is pretty common across Mandarin lects as you can see in the section "dialectal data", and many Northeast Mandarin dialects have it. RcAlex36 (talk) 16:52, 5 June 2021 (UTC)

Thought: Reflecting on "even though people online may use gāi to represent this common dialectal pronunciation"-- that quote raises my suspicions that there's nothing wrong with the way RcAlex has written that etymology, and that we SHOULD add it as a Hanyu Pinyin under Stan Mandarin.-- Wiktionary is descriptive not prescriptive --Geographyinitiative (talk) 17:01, 5 June 2021 (UTC)

@Geographyinitiative It's still dialectal (at least perceived as such) and not a feature of Standard Mandarin, and we do not include dialectal Mandarin pronunciations (except Beijing dialect which we allow. If we do gāi for 街, we may also have to do hái for 鞋. Variants that we include in {{zh-pron}} should be features of Standard Mandarin. RcAlex36 (talk) 17:18, 5 June 2021 (UTC)