Talk:Haishenwai
Bay or Cliff?
[edit]Some works translate the 崴 (wǎi, wēi) component of Haishenwai/Haishenwei as 'cliff' instead of 'bay'- see Citations:Haishenwai. I believe that 崴 has a coast-related translation and a mountain-related translation, and that the mountain translation is cliff, while the coast translation is bay. Therefore, I see the cliff translations as wrong and the bay translation as right for Haishenwai/Haishenwei. This analysis is very simplistic, but I think it may all be just as simple as that. Of course you could say "but they mean oceanside cliffs". I am not familiar enough with the geography to comment on that or some sophisticated argument. I write this here so that my simplistic understanding can be challenged if it turns out that there is more nuance or complexity. (I also note that China News Service and China Daily were at odds using bay and cliff respectively.) --Geographyinitiative (talk) 14:17, 29 April 2023 (UTC)
The 參 character in 海參崴 is seen in the hyper frequent word 參加. There it is pronounced 'can' and not 'shen'. Based on my experice with 多音字 in sloppy English-Mandarin translations, I have absolutely no doubt that there will be chaotic spellings, both in older literature and in materials published in the future, where "can" is used instead of "shen". Here are some I found at a glance: www.google.com/books/edition/Voices_from_the_Shifting_Russo_Japanese/lH_ABgAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq="Haicanwei"&pg=PT68 www.google.com/books/edition/The_European_Diary_of_Hsieh_Fucheng/B0wBDgAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq="Haicanwei"&pg=PA180 [1] --Geographyinitiative (talk) 14:51, 24 May 2023 (UTC)
Wade-Giles Origins
[edit]There is a 1975 Foreign Broadcast Information Service document that uses the term Haishenwai, a parallel version of that same article in 1976 in the Peking Review, and two FBIS uses from 1977- see Citations:Haishenwai. It was the standard practice of both FBIS and Peking Review to ignore the hyphens and spritius aspers and whatever else of Wade-Giles, and write a plain word with plain letters. See Talk:Chungnanhai for more on that. (The transition to Hanyu Pinyin was officially done on January 1, 1979, and until the events associated with that day, you were not mainstream if you were using Pinyin stuff.)
Further, those four documents from the 1970's use unhyphenated Wade-Giles words throughout- Hsisha, etc- and hyphenated Wade-Giles for the names of persons- Li Jui-shan, Hua Kuo-feng.
Continuing, if you can acknowledge the Wade-Giles origins in that small four-year window, then I would suggest that there's a continuity between those late 1970's years of Wade and the cites immediately thereafter, like the 1980 FBIS cite where words like 'Xinhua' (can only be Hanyu Pinyin) appear. That is to say: if I were writing the etymology of 'Haishenwai' in the year 1980 on Wiktionary, I would say, "oh, this word exists as the Wade-derived word, and now it is being reinforced by the new Pinyin-derived words." If I can write that in the 1980's, then I can write it in 1990. And then 2000. And then 2023. The truth of that origin does not diminish with time, and the truth of that origin will still be as true in 2080 or 2180 as it was in 1980.
The best counterargument I can think of is that 'Haishenwai' does not represent an English language word in these 1970's publications, but instead a transcription of Mandarin. Then we would look to see if there is a publication that does not use the word in that way. However, I think that would deny and diminish a lot of the material in the Peking Review and etc for the purposes of citations in a way that is really unwarranted and would go too far. I see them as writing a transcription of Mandarin that becomes English, especially because they make no intent to mark tones or hyphenate or similar. The fact that the words are in parentheses could suggest that this is mere transcription of a sound, but in articles which don't do a lot of transcription of sounds from Mandarin, I think what the authors intend is: 'oh, this is the English language version of the Chinese name, which they used in the original'. Frankly, this is a level of finess that I usually don't get to, so if you think you can elaborate a counterargument to me here, please do- I'd like to see that and learn from that.
Plus, the closely connected Haishenwei was definitely legitimate as an English language term by this point. --Geographyinitiative (talk) 16:55, 26 May 2023 (UTC) (Modified)