Talk:Chinese characters/Archive 5

Archive 1

←

Archive 3

Archive 4

Archive 5

Structure section

The Structure section describes conventions codified during the imperial period, and thus does not apply to earlier characters. I would suggest putting the History section first. Kanguole 09:08, 25 October 2023 (UTC)

Kanguole, I agree, I'll look at it later if you don't feel like making the change now — Remsense聊 09:12, 25 October 2023 (UTC)

images

@Kanguole would you like me to change the pictogram evolution images while i'm at it? and also, if anyone else has suggestions for media to add to the article, i'm happy to take a crack at it! Remsense聊 21:07, 24 October 2023 (UTC)

The pictures on the left don't look very encyclopedic, and probably aren't necessary anyway. Also, the zigzag arrangement doesn't convey any meaning, does it? Kanguole 09:10, 25 October 2023 (UTC)

Kanguole, good points! I figured keeping as much as possible in optimization at first was the move, but yeah. I assume the zigzag is as much to save horizontal space without crowding if it means anything, but I'll take a crack at spiffying the trio up further. — Remsense聊 09:12, 25 October 2023 (UTC)

do you think the 象 example suffices now? i'm trying to find better sources to possibly replace 日 and 山 with Remsense聊 11:54, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

The elephant was the worst, and is certainly much better now. Kanguole 12:21, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

Wiki Education assignment: Linguistics in the Digital Age

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 21 August 2023 and 11 December 2023. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Bring a mojo (article contribs).

— Assignment last updated by Fedfed2 (talk) 00:54, 9 December 2023 (UTC)

Radical positions

There are many possible ways to form compounds and position the radicals. Showing them is not very informative. Vacosea (talk) 23:54, 5 November 2023 (UTC)

I've been trying to come up with ideas for additional graphics I could create for this article/related articles lately. Do you think it would be good to have concrete examples of compounds for each position, instead of just the abstract positions themselves? Remsense聊 23:59, 5 November 2023 (UTC)

I'm not against that, in addition to the one animation under compound ideographs, but considering how many different combinations there are, do you think it would be that more informative compared to writing "many positions or combinations are possible"? Regarding the diagrams I removed, why were they under the phono-semantic compounds section specifically? Vacosea (talk) 00:18, 6 November 2023 (UTC)

Vacosea, I think having one 'enclosure-style' example and perhaps one or two others max would be sufficient. As for its exact placement, I couldn't really tell you—it reflects the article how I found it before I really started digging into it and I haven't happened to apply too much thought to it yet in lieu of everything else.
Now that you mention it, I share your skepticism for the placement—it's a bit crowded near the top of the article for one thing. Maybe it would do well in the 'structure' section instead. Remsense聊 00:22, 6 November 2023 (UTC)

Yes the examples you mentioned in the structure section would be an improvement. The top of the article already explains the components in text and with an animation. Vacosea (talk) 00:58, 6 November 2023 (UTC)

The one thing about the animation is that information should never rely on it, since people may view an article in situations where the animation can't play, so I do want the other graphics I do to be static. Remsense聊 13:50, 6 November 2023 (UTC)

Maybe the structure section can be adjusted and placed before the classification schemes. It would then be able to provide some basic background knowledge first. Vacosea (talk) 14:58, 6 November 2023 (UTC)

I originally put it there, but Kangoule suggested that it should be placed further down. Since the aspects of the system are so interconnected, I'm not sure either way is better, but there's still some content I need to shuffle from one section to the other (namely, "Standards" ↔ "Other Languages", "History" ↔ "Styles", etc.) Remsense聊 15:01, 6 November 2023 (UTC)

"Ideographs"

The top section correctly notes that Chinese characters are not "ideographs", but then the rest of the article continues to use terms like "ideograph", "ideogram", etc. In some cases, that might be inevitable (e.g., if the official Unicode terms is "CJK Unified Ideographs", there probably isn't much to be done about that), but the casual usage elsewhere should be made consistent. 114.43.194.196 (talk) 06:45, 14 November 2023 (UTC)

The article only uses those terms in the phrases "simple ideogram" and "compound ideograph", two ways that characters were constructed. The idea is that characters are not ideographs, but some of them are ideographic in origin. Kanguole 08:27, 14 November 2023 (UTC)

overall, there is a difficult distinction to manage between the characters themselves and higher concepts of a 'writing system', the boundary between the two is often unclear and is somewhat different according to various authors in the literature. there are definitely ideographs in a literal sense (i.e. characters whose forms are just made of idea-based components), but the system itself is flatly not ideographic.

In general, this article should be about the characters, and Written Chinese should be about the writing system, but of course to try to fully divide the two would be an artificial, counterproductive, confusing exercise, but I do want to present that distinction as well as I can. Remsense聊 12:10, 14 November 2023 (UTC)

Outside "CJK Unified ideographs", the term is used mostly in the discussion of 會意字, translated in the article as "compound ideographs". We can do better than that. Mattos and Norman (translating Qiu Xigui) suggest "syssemantograms" (we could also just call them "compound logograms"). Since this is a subsection rather than an article title, WP:COMMONNAME doesn't apply, so we are free to use a lesser-known term that does not conflate a discredited theory as "compound ideographs" does. We should still mention it (and be sure to {{anchor}} the section heading if renaming would break any incoming links), but we're not stuck with it. Unless we want to redefine "ideograph" for our purposes as 會意字, it is probably being misused here. Folly Mox (talk) 13:39, 14 November 2023 (UTC)

Yeah! I think that's a really good idea. I would like to avoid jargon as much as possible in an article that requires a fair amount, so I'm not sure about 'syssemantographs' in particular, but. Remsense聊 13:42, 14 November 2023 (UTC)

If we wish to expunge all mentions of ideographs/ideograms, we need alternative translations of both 指事字 zhǐshìzì and 會意字 huìyìzì. The translations of Qiu Xigui (via Mattos and Norman), "diectic graphs" and "syssemantographs", are hardly more informative than just using the Chinese terms. How about the approximate translations "indicative characters" and "semantic compounds", each of which is used by some authors? Kanguole 17:47, 14 November 2023 (UTC)

I think 'indicative characters' or simply 'indicatives' are fairly viable, natural terms. Remsense聊 17:59, 14 November 2023 (UTC)

Quote: "there are definitely ideographs in a literal sense (i.e. characters whose forms are just made of idea-based components), but the system itself is flatly not ideographic." I really do not understand what distinction you are trying to make. Can you give examples? I think much of this discussion is wobbly; it is unlikely to lead to an article which ordinary readers will understand easier. (Not to mention ludicrous coinages like "sysswhateveritwas") And what is the "discredited theory"? Imaginatorium (talk) 17:41, 14 November 2023 (UTC)

Certain Chinese characters are ideographs—"idea-drawings"—where their graphical forms derive wholly from the ideas they represent, as opposed to their pronunciations, or some other source.

Writing systems that use Chinese characters do not—and cannot—primarily function by "interpreting" these ideographs. When you read a text written in Chinese or Japanese, you are not receiving a sequence of pure, abstract ideas, and then assembling them in your head. All of the characters are ultimately associated with syllables in a spoken language, and that is the way they must be read. Some of these individual characters can be ideographs—moreover, the presence of ideographs within the lexicon is fairly important to it. Nonetheless, the characters' association with spoken syllables is still necessary to read a given text.

Using an example in the article: 明 is an ideograph for our purposes: it means 'bright', because it represents the shared idea of the 'sun' and 'moon': there is ostensibly nothing about the character that tells you it is pronounced 'míng' in Standard Chinese (etc.) If you don't know this pronunciation, you will not successfully read a text using this character. Thus, the writing system is not ideographic, even though it has ideographs within it.

Regarding your final points, I would ask that you be a little less flippant: 'syssemantograms' is a technical term used in some of the relevant literature referenced to write this article, it has a precise meaning—though I don't think its use within this article intended for a general audience would be ideal. But it was a worthwhile suggestion. The discussion is not wobbly, it is simply a bit abstract and complex.
The "discredited theory" is Xu Shen's sixfold categorization as presented in the Shuowen Jiezi, as is profiled in the first section of the article. I'm conflicted as to whether it is given too much space in the article, since it is such an important model—but more flexible, apt models better explaining how characters work have emerged in recent decades. Xu's system remained rather prominent as different scholars presented different iterations of it throughout Chinese history. Remsense聊 17:56, 14 November 2023 (UTC)

User:Imaginatorium, when I said "discredited theory", I meant the idea that Chinese characters can be, in total, described as "ideograms". Unregistered editor 114, the OP of this thread, was right to call out the article's use of this term, which has been present since 2003.

Remsense is correct that Xu Shen's two thousand year old theory is also wrong, but it's not the one that sparked this thread. I agree that the conversation isn't wobbly. We're trying to determine how to clarify an attribute of a subset that doesn't apply to the full set, but the fact that you find it wobbly is a pretty strong indication that the topic area specialists here aren't doing the best job explaining the matter clearly, or that the vocabulary is too technical for the general reader, so it's very helpful feedback. Folly Mox (talk) 00:53, 15 November 2023 (UTC)

Agreed. I spent a lot of time hammering at the prose in the "Classification" section, and I hope it reads better than it did when I started, but I'm sure there's still improvements to better structure the material. Remsense聊 01:02, 15 November 2023 (UTC)

GA push

So, I decided I really want to get this article good article status. I'm not asking anything in particular, I'm just publicly jotting down outstanding things that need to get done before I can submit it for peer review. If you have any suggestions or guidance, let me know!

• Sourcing issues
  • Esp. regarding anything with computers or encoding, though the latter should be easily, especially since I'm so Unicode-brained.
• Style issues
  • So, of course I've been mucking around with templates and such a lot, but I worry that my current model of "put the aspect of the character that is being discussed first" might be confusing to people who are completely green to the subject.
• Coverage issues
  • Honestly, I think the headers we have now are pretty comprehensive? Some of them (e.g. the calligraphy section) might need considerable expansion, and some of them might still need to be shuffled or merged.
  • Some of the material, esp that specifically concerning vernacular Chinese, might be wandering off topic, but it's so tricky, because this topic is so interwoven and Chinese is such a digloss.
• Illustration issues
  • This seems the most fun for me, I really like working on tables, SVG, etc. any suggestions or wishlist items for such, please tell me!

— Remsense聊 13:23, 29 October 2023 (UTC)

I want to fill out the article with a section on modern input, to accompany handwriting, block printing, and calligraphy, and I think that will put a bow on the article's scope. — Remsense聊 23:30, 29 October 2023 (UTC)

I started on a citation repair task here, but once I got to the first subheading I felt compelled to comment here instead.

Why give pride of place and explain in detail Xu Shen's problematic schema? It's led to a lot of misunderstandings and is based on a corpus that did not include OBI. I don't have an issue including it in the article, but it's been the genesis of many academic disagreements, like the Creel–Boodberg slapfight I brought up last month at RD/L.

As far as I'm aware, Qiu 2000 (Chinese Writing, transl. Mattos and Norman) doesn't have any major substantial critics, and should probably form the basis of the first subsection dealing with classification, the one said in wikivoice without specific attribution. Remsense, I don't know if you have access to this work (and I'm not sure TWL does either), but I can email you a pdf if you have Wikipedia email enabled and don't have access otherwise. Folly Mox (talk) 16:36, 4 November 2023 (UTC)

I do indeed have a copy of Qiu 2000 and have found it very worthwhile, plus all the rest of the sources in the works cited I've attempted to source so far, which are the majority! If you still want to send me a PDF, I wouldn't mind, since it might be a higher quality than the one I have. thank you so much for your consideration! Remsense聊 16:40, 4 November 2023 (UTC)

My apologies: it's clear after reading farther into the article that you do have a copy of this text. I own the physical book, so I don't feel bad about downloading a license non-compliant scan. The one I have on hand is 26.9 MB, no OCR, dual-page scan with the pages angled slightly from the book being splayed out upon the scanner. If that sounds better than yours, I uh just realised it's too hefty to attach to an email, but it might be the same file. I found it in about zero minutes of googling. Folly Mox (talk) 20:27, 4 November 2023 (UTC)

Folly Mox, You needn't send it to me in that case, that's comparable to the quality I've got :) Remsense聊 20:39, 4 November 2023 (UTC)

re: edit, yeah i think 'artificial' was a bit strong in hindsight, i meant basically to equate it to the way Latin is artificial, = 'literary' → 'literary (extinct in vernacular use)' Remsense聊 17:23, 4 November 2023 (UTC)

Remsense, please accept my apologies if any of my edit summaries yesterday felt unkind. I get real sassy in edit summaries sometimes and I would like you to know that I appreciate your efforts here. Folly Mox (talk) 19:41, 5 November 2023 (UTC)

no, not at all! goodness, i was just thinking about how i really appreciate how helpful they are for someone who's getting some crucial experience citation wrangling, et al. Remsense聊 19:43, 5 November 2023 (UTC)

A few discrete bullet points regarding clarity, usefulness, and maybe WP:FANCRUFT

I have been thinking about the consensus that article can be improved to give readers as good a handle on the concepts as quickly as possible. A few discrete thoughts, hopefully coherent:

• I am genuinely still unsure which concepts to explain in what order, especially in the opening chunk of the article (i.e. the lede and Classification section)
• this article is supposed to be about characters, not writing systems. Of course, the boundary between the two is to some degree arbitrary, but it is helpful. do we have the correct amount of content about written Chinese to adequately serve the purposes of this article, or should it be pared down?

Citations

• I have tried to either secure citations for the statements in this article, or remove nebulous, OR-sounding statements when my attempts have failed—though I am aware that I do not have total mastery of tracking down Chinese-language sources so I feel bad, but these statements are mostly of ancillary, marginal value. There are 8–10 citation needed tags left in the article that I'm having trouble with, and I would appreciate some help on them if anybody is so inclined.
• Are the citations for example lexemes I'm providing sufficient? I plan to hit the article with the archiver bot to make sure the links don't rot, but I understand scans of the 汉语大字典 aren't the easiest sources to make use of for the actual userbase of this article.

Remsense聊 14:04, 15 November 2023 (UTC)

The Classification section tries to do two things at once: present the traditional liùshū classification and explain the initial development of the script. I'd suggest focussing on the first (which seems a useful to start the article), say calling it "Development" and maybe organizing it around the three principles of Chen Mengjia/Qiu Xigui as stages of development of the script: "semantograms", phonetic loans and phono-semantic compounds. Along the way, this would mention five of Xu Shen's classes, and one would just need to note that he mentioned (only in the postface) a sixth class whose meaning no-one understands and which most modern scholars reject. (The contemporary scheme at the end of the section looks a bit shallow.)

As for the examples, instead of citing the characters, it would be more inline with WP:V to cite the examples, i.e. someone (e.g. Qiu) presenting these as examples of the thing you're saying they're examples of. Kanguole 22:47, 15 November 2023 (UTC)

I think your structure proposal is good for me to write towards, I'll get on that.

And yes, I have tried only to cite dictionaries that in turn state that the characters have the property they are being used to exemplify, but it would be easier and less fraught to revert some examples to those in the other sources, certainly. Remsense聊 23:04, 15 November 2023 (UTC)

Sometimes dictionaries can be a bit traditional, when modern scholarship has moved on. For example, they might follow Xu Shen in treating 信 as a semantic compound, when many now consider it a phono-semantic compound with phonetic 人. Kanguole 23:17, 15 November 2023 (UTC)

Certainly. I'll take a look over where I've provided divergent examples and re-vet them. Remsense聊 23:42, 15 November 2023 (UTC)

Could be cool

Did yall know there's a Journal of Chinese Writing Systems, and that link gives us access via the Wikipedia Library? I just found out and thought of you two. Folly Mox (talk) 11:13, 28 November 2023 (UTC)

Ooooh!

Personal excitement aside, I've been thinking about assembling a ccentral annotated bibliography for Chinese-language-related sources, and possibly even a mainspace one à la Bibliography of fly fishing—surely there's enough provenance on the topic, though I didn't even know this subtype of article existed before a few days ago. Remsense留 11:15, 28 November 2023 (UTC)

For some reason, I only allow myself to actually commence certain things once I tell someone I've been thinking about them. Remsense留 11:34, 28 November 2023 (UTC)

I used to keep a centralised citation repository somewhere on my old laptop so I could copypaste sources easily into new articles, back when I actually wrote / rewrote articles with some regularity, which I think might have been like 2013? Now I just hunt for articles where I feel like I've cited a source before, which is uh less efficient.

Well, today I learned some articles on Wikipedia are bibliographies. I'm of the opinion that a § "Bibliography:" namespace is probably a better long term solution, and ideally, eventually, meta:WikiCite/Shared Citations, but bibliographies would be super helpful for editors and probably maybe readers too. If it's something that building into a mainspace article doesn't seem realistic about, it could always be placed in Wikipedia:WikiProject Example/Bibliographical resources or something.

As a personal note, I sometimes do the same thing (needing to say I'll do a thing before I start the thing), but in my case it's because I can't hold myself accountable for anything ever Folly Mox (talk) 12:35, 28 November 2023 (UTC)

A friend of mine, who is an editor-in-chief of an SCI engineering journal, told me that his journal got over 3,000 submissions last year, among which 800 were finally published. And I immediately got to know why they are so much richer than many journal on languages. Ctxz2323 (talk) 13:04, 28 November 2023 (UTC)

Yes, it's a Journal from Shanghai. But have not tried the Wikipedia Library yet.

Many thanks for the information and reminder.

There used to be a journal called Writing Systems from Oxford. Ctxz2323 (talk) 12:48, 28 November 2023 (UTC)

Standards, non-Chinese languages, Variant characters sections need reappraisal and possibly reshuffling

The balancing act of this article is giving fair coverage to the use of characters in the various writing systems—and I'm not sure the sections above adequately do so without cruft or undigested trivia.
It's the chunk of the article I'm least sure about, even though I'm still working on rewriting the earliest part to be less conflationary between Xu Shen and modern understanding, at least all the material there should probably be there in some form, thoughts? Remsense留 20:04, 6 December 2023 (UTC)

Regarding the opening, I am attempting to adequately compose it on Draft:Chinese characters, but I am really struggling with elegance and concision here. Remsense留 18:09, 7 December 2023 (UTC)

Okay, it's not fully in place yet, but I think I dashed out the best order for the sections, bold existing essentially as is:

1. Development – explains emergence of true writing from proto-writing, logography from ideography, signs, loangraphs and rebus
2. Classification – introduces compound characters, modern concepts, reduced explanation of Xu Shen after a survey of modern understandings
3. History – Archeological and anthropological history from oracle bones through to regular script, but additionally touching on spread to non-China
4. Structure – explains the process of stroke and component order
5. Methods – handwriting, printing, and use with computers
6. Words – finally, morphology and compounding in Chinese, Japanese etc.
7. Adaptation – Use specific to Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Zhuang, etc. etc.
8. Variants?
9. Standards?
10. Indexing? Number of Characters?

I *still* don't know what to do with the sections at the end—Standards, Variants, Number of Characters, Indexing—they maddeningly overlap. Maybe one of them needs to mostly go to its own article, probably "Indexing" according to my gut.

thoughts? I think this flows well so far. Remsense留 02:34, 8 December 2023 (UTC)

"Variants" could go under "Structure"? It feels like a subtopic, although it also interfaces with "Adaptation". Apart from that, all I have at the moment is a dim awareness of this work you've been doing, without any time to help. Folly Mox (talk) 13:38, 8 December 2023 (UTC)

You've helped me deeply in my work here/on Red Cliffs already, I know you're busy and your encouragement is felt and appreciated! Yes, that's a fantastic point, Variants is really about both allographs and edge case characters: the former can be merged with structure, the latter can be go elsewhere. Remsense留 13:40, 8 December 2023 (UTC)

It's not totally there, but the reshuffled iteration of this page is mostly in place on Draft:Chinese characters, if anyone wants to tell me how it flows. Remsense留 05:19, 10 December 2023 (UTC)

I've copied over the draft, my apologies for the monolithic edit but I feel this needed to be done rather than my existing pattern of endless iteration: much of what has been excised should be relocated to sub-articles, especially that which primarily pertains to technical standards or just morphology and not the characters themselves. It was previously 12k (!) words, the draft is about 11k, and I think it should be under 10k. Remsense留 10:23, 14 December 2023 (UTC)

Well that's just impractical to review. It's not possible to collaborate when you work that way. Kanguole 12:26, 14 December 2023 (UTC)

I can revert it to the previous revision if you'd like. But it is not really possible to work within the article as structured in a coherent way, because it requires large structural changes, and I have found it impossible to accomplish them through piecemeal iteration without making the article unacceptably lopsided for a time. I hope this is understandable. Remsense留 12:29, 14 December 2023 (UTC)

Would you prefer me to transfer the draft section by section the best I can? If not, I am not sure how to make the changes digestible for others, which I understand is a real problem. Especially since I've been detailing them in here and have gotten guidance and support on them, but how do I now implement them without making huge edits or spending another year dripfeeding them and wasting time tweaking material that ultimately has to go?
If I can be honest, I am frustrated. Remsense留 12:36, 14 December 2023 (UTC)

Transferring changes section by section isn't really an improvement. What is useful is each change having a clear purpose, e.g. introducing language tags throughout an article would be easy enough to review. So would re-ordering sections without changing them. Now that you've bundled a whole series of edits doing different things together, you might as well make your monolithic change.

You're not the only one who's frustrated. But the source of the problem is your habit of doing all this development elsewhere from the live article. Kanguole 13:01, 14 December 2023 (UTC)

I always want the live article to be in a presentable state, because these changes required several weeks, because I'm not the fastest at this. Would it be helpful if you went through the edit history on the draft? If not, I'm willing to trash the draft and reimplement all the changes I've made one by one, I don't want to make your life more difficult. Remsense留 13:05, 14 December 2023 (UTC)

I would say that now we're in this situation, you might as well make your monolithic change and we'll have to live with it. However, it sounds like you still think parallel development is a reasonable way to operate in the future, and that's a worry. Kanguole 13:11, 14 December 2023 (UTC)

No, you're right. I'm going to do this in the best way by you. I'm not happy with the draft either, but now that I know what I'm doing, I'm going to transform the article in a way that you can easily review. Sorry for being difficult. Remsense留 13:13, 14 December 2023 (UTC)

@Kanguole, that's all i'll do for now. was that a more helpful way of doing it for you? Remsense留 13:40, 14 December 2023 (UTC)

I was about to disagree with the statement that logographs are graphemes that correspond to semantic units of a language, but I see it's in the logogram article. Still, I think it would be better to say that logographs denote words or morphemes (which logogram also says). I think of semantics are the relationship between words or morphemes and objects, concepts or actions. Kanguole 14:44, 14 December 2023 (UTC)

the logogram article is pretty awful at the moment, but i agree—just struggling for concision in quickly relating these unfamiliar concepts. Remsense留 14:49, 14 December 2023 (UTC)

Morphology-related material

Kanguole et al., what do you think of a lot of the material in the 'Vocabulary' section that doesn't really appear to be about characters, but rather just about historical Chinese morphology? Should it be moved to another article? Remsense留 22:33, 15 December 2023 (UTC)

It is an odd mix.

• The "Old Chinese" subsection talks about one way that the same character came to denote different (but related) words. Perhaps it could be treated as a special case of a phonetic loan. (Hmm, where did the phonetic loan character bit go?) By the way, we should use a single transcription for Old Chinese. The Baxter-Sagart reconstruction is tempting, because it's recent and there's a complete online list, but it is somewhat speculative – Baxter (1992) is closer to a broad consensus.
• The "Vernacular Chinese" subsection is about compound words, which is more about the language than the script, and I think it's already covered in the various language articles.
• The "Lect-specific variants" subsection is about how the script was adapted to later varieties of Chinese. That would even include Mandarin. In Norman's book, this is treated in section 3.7 "The adaptability of the Chinese script", together with adaptation to non-Chinese languages (though of course the latter are a minor concern for him). If you followed that example, this would go in the Adaptability section.

Kanguole 22:38, 16 December 2023 (UTC)

Certainly—I think I will refocus "Old Chinese", mostly remove "Vernacular Chinese", and resituate "lect-specific" variants as you've recommended. Do you think the present headings are mostly adequate as I'm reworking the Classification section to agree with Qiu's framework? Remsense留 22:50, 16 December 2023 (UTC)

Qiu places his loangraph chapter after phono-semantic compounds, but in the development of the script, loangraphs were earlier, and phono-semantic compounds were created by disambiguating them. This is the order he uses when discussing Chen Menjia's classification and his modification of it (by renaming Chen's "pictographs") on pp. 167–168, and in the overview discussion on pp. 3–10. Kanguole 23:16, 16 December 2023 (UTC)

Kanguole, but overall, you support structuring the section at the highest level after Qiu? Remsense留 00:08, 17 December 2023 (UTC)

Oh sorry, one more thing: I've been strictly adhering to "-graph"s, even when sources or articles use "-gram", because I think using both with no difference in one article may be confusing. Should I rethink this and adhere to the sources? Remsense留 03:17, 17 December 2023 (UTC)

"Native readings" in Korean

@Kanguole: made an edit with the commentary: "Korean: the native word is not a reading of the character, but a translation". The corresponding statement with regard to Japanese is plainly false (Chinese characters, whether "kanji" or not according to E-kanji theory, have typically on (Sino-) and kun (native) readings. So unless the practice in Korean from the beginning of time has been never to use characters with a native reading, this claim is misleading. Imaginatorium (talk) 08:24, 28 December 2023 (UTC)

I've just interpreted it as a nomenclature issue: I'm not sure whether it's called a "reading" in Korean. Remsense留 08:51, 28 December 2023 (UTC)

The point is that this passage is about Korean, not Japanese, and the sentence in the article reflects what the cited source says. Students are learning only one way to read 水, namely su, with meaning mul 'water'. The latter word is always written in hangul. Kanguole 12:49, 28 December 2023 (UTC)

IT section

@Ctxz2323, hey, thank you for writing in this area! one of the last things i was planning on doing for this article was properly writing a section about characters in computing, input methods etc. and putting it into the "methods and styles" section, alongside discussions of calligraphy, ordinary handwriting etc. if you don't mind, i'm probably going to reintegrate your passage as such?
One thing to keep in mind is the article is already very long, so it will likely have to be a bit shorter, but it is a subtopic that deserves a treatment in this article. If you're fine with that, lmk so I don't get in your way while you're editing! cheers Remsense留 05:21, 28 November 2023 (UTC)

Yes, the article is already very long. But Chinese character IT is an important subtopic and will help people see that we are closely following the latest development of language computing at a glance of the table of contents.

So, if you don't mind, I prefer it to remain a first-level section while trying to cut it shorter, much shorter? Ctxz2323 (talk) 09:36, 28 November 2023 (UTC)

How do you feel about its present placement? The higher level is meant to be about the various methods of writing and transmitting text written in Chinese characters, so I feel it fits. Remsense留 09:40, 28 November 2023 (UTC)

Well done!

and thanks. Ctxz2323 (talk) 12:32, 28 November 2023 (UTC)

Doesn't "Computer encoding and interchange" belong in "Use with computers" rather than "Lexicography"? Kanguole 08:58, 13 February 2024 (UTC)

Yes, "Use with computers" is a more appropriate location. Ctxz2323 (talk) 13:50, 13 February 2024 (UTC)

@Kanguole @Ctxz2323 I see it presently like this, please tell me if I'm missing something:

• Methods and styles covers the ways people directly create characters (i.e. printing, handwriting, typing), not necessary which characters they may use or the underlying inventory. Thus, the relevant material covers how people input characters on computers.
• Lexicography covers the ways characters are collated, organized, sorted, etc. An encoding seems more akin to a dictionary or other large character set, to me. I've also put this section next to the related section Standardization, which has additional overlap with history.

All of these categories and themes overlap with each other, and I'm open as always if people think I'm wrong here. Remsense诉 22:28, 13 February 2024 (UTC)

Then perhaps "Use with computers" belongs outside "Methods and styles", which could then just be "Styles". Kanguole 22:40, 13 February 2024 (UTC)

But then I worry about the over-conflation with the overlapping notion of "scripts", which is the anchor of the History section. This is difficult. Remsense诉 22:46, 13 February 2024 (UTC)

OK, next suggestion is to put "Printing" and "Use with computers" in the "History" section and "Calligraphy" in the "Structure" section, and drop "Methods and styles". Kanguole 22:53, 13 February 2024 (UTC)

I think that may be a good idea. I'll see what I can do. Remsense诉 00:16, 14 February 2024 (UTC)

I still prefer Kanguole's original idea: just simply move "Computer encoding and interchange" into "Use with computers". It is more of computer encoding than of Lexicography, just like we may more like to put an article on Unicode in the domain of IT or computers rather than in Dictionaries. Ctxz2323 (talk) 03:44, 14 February 2024 (UTC)

I'll do this for now, then. Remsense诉 06:17, 14 February 2024 (UTC)

Statistical "simplification" analysis due?

I suppose the question isn't just for this article, and I know single papers that say all sorts of things come out, but this paper made me a bit self-conscious about how I've currently written the relevant part of this article and others. Any more wizened analysis from others about its conclusions?

Basically, it rejects the notion that the writing system has more or less steadily simplified visually since the oracle bone form, and instead views seal script as the historical peak of visual complexity. A weak incentive trade-off between visual complexity and distinctiveness is postulated, but traditional regular script is overall both more visually complex and more distinctive according to their model. Of course, when Qiu et al say "simple" they don't just mean the pure graphical sense.

References

Remsense诉 09:22, 10 March 2024 (UTC)

Change the age of the oldest oracle bone?

Hi @Remsense, I think we can change the date for the oldest oracle bone. The 2021 radiocarbon dating of 26 Wu Ding bone samples gives the age of the oldest measured bone to c. 1254-1221 BCE. That's quite a distance from the 1200 BCE given by David Keightley. So I'm asking your opinion on this. Strongman13072007 (talk) 13:43, 17 March 2024 (UTC)

I did see that, and I put it on my mental checklist for this article, I just didn't want it to forget about it technically being unsourced in the article while I was working on other stuff—I agree, I think the radiocarbon cite can be attached to a 1250 BCE start date. Remsense诉 13:46, 17 March 2024 (UTC)

We should not rely on a single research paper (WP:PRIMARY). Note also that date range is stated to be a 68% range for that bone, and they have an even earlier one in Table 4: 1307–1228 for Heji 34240 from the Li type-1 diviner group (usually assigned to the later part of Wu Ding's reign).

Ken-ichi Takashima gives a date of 1230. The Xia–Shang–Zhou Chronology Project dated Wu Ding's reign at 1250–1192, though the first oracle bones may have been produced some time after the start of his reign. Kanguole 14:34, 17 March 2024 (UTC)

Agreed—also I do not think the citation should've been swapped out, but appended to Keightly, perhaps with an explanation in the footnote. Remsense诉 14:36, 17 March 2024 (UTC)

The last stumbling block: 方言字

The final unsourced statements—and the final major point contravening the GA criteria, I think—regard dialectal characters, and I've really been at a loss tracking down adequate sources for what's there, or to rewrite the section adequately from. I would very much appreciate peoples' help if they happen to know anything about how characters are used and created in the particular context of representing fangyan—obviously it's variations on a theme, but I want it to be well-attested. I think I'm otherwise just about ready to submit for peer review or GAN—for real, this time! Remsense诉 17:24, 17 March 2024 (UTC)

@Alsosaid1987 this may be a bit of a stretch given you added many of these statements back in 2019, but do by any chance have any leads as to how I could source them? Remsense诉 14:15, 26 March 2024 (UTC)

Are you referring to the examples of dialectal characters? For most of them, Wiktionary gives the definitions and gives the dialectal usages. For the Shanghainese phrase whose etymological form is 触祭, the online authoritative Wu dictionary published by the Wu Language Association https://wu-chinese.com/minidict cites the Suzhou pingtan script 白蛇传, while the "billboard" form 戳鸡, I was able to find at http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/ShanghaiMP3/SVocab.html. Unfortunately, I have not been able to find print sources for these examples.Alsosaid1987 (talk) 00:27, 30 March 2024 (UTC)

Specifically, I really would like sources for the characters being used in legal proceedings, etc. I've taken those out of the article for now, but I would like to put them back in if I can source them. Remsense诉 00:30, 30 March 2024 (UTC)

GA Review

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

---

This review is transcluded from Talk:Chinese characters/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

Nominator: Remsense (talk · contribs) 18:14, 28 March 2024 (UTC)

@Kanguole, while Kusma is elsewhere, do you happen to have any critique or comments about the article in its present state? I know I've asked this question of you a lot, but you always have something insightful to say, so! Remsense诉 10:19, 6 April 2024 (UTC)

I'm looking ahead, and I think the Old Chinese section that explains character evolution vis a vis Old Chinese morphology (i.e. the qusheng and transitivity prefix) is a dramatic jump in technicality from the rest of the article, and I'm not sure how I could simplify it for an article with this broad a scope. I want to keep something that's roughly this informative though, any thoughts @Kanguole? Remsense诉 21:02, 9 April 2024 (UTC)

I think this is a special case of phonetic loans: the same character was used to write another word with a similar pronunciation, and subsequent sound change separated them. This can be seen with phono-semantic compounds too, e.g. 張 'stretch'/長 'long' (Baxter p324).

Some nits:

• Is that a stray quote next to drjwen?
• 去聲 (qùshēng) is the name of the MC departing tone; *-s is a proposed source of it.
• The residual morphology of OC is usually said to be derivational rather than inflectional.
• The usual notation for sound change (e.g. in the cited Baxter 1992) is > rather than →.
• The last two examples of voiced initials don't show clear distinctions. If you had something in the level tone (like 張/長, you would end up with different initials and different tones in the modern forms.

Kanguole 23:03, 9 April 2024 (UTC)

In any case, there's more than enough material Kusma has deliberated on here for me to source from in future improvements to the article/the future FAC run. Remsense诉 09:32, 21 May 2024 (UTC)

Reviewer: Kusma (talk · contribs) 07:13, 1 April 2024 (UTC)

Will take this on. I do know a few things about Chinese characters, but am looking forward to reading this in detail and learning more. —Kusma (talk) 07:13, 1 April 2024 (UTC)

Oh, thank you so much! I thought I may be waiting a bit for a review, it's a big vital article with a broad scope. Very excited to hear your feedback. Remsense诉 11:28, 1 April 2024 (UTC)

It is probably going to take me some time, so you may need to wait a little for a complete review. —Kusma (talk) 13:11, 1 April 2024 (UTC)

Oh, please take your time! Remsense诉 13:21, 1 April 2024 (UTC)

I will, and I will comment on everything I come across that I find worth mentioning. Not everything will need addressing in order to satisfy the GA criteria, and I may also be wrong about things, so please do let me know when you disagree with me. —Kusma (talk) 14:29, 1 April 2024 (UTC)

Yeah! Really, doing a few reviews first was a really good choice—I'm much more comfortable on the nominator side than I may have otherwise been. Do you mind if I reply to your bullet points below inline, or is that too much of a headache? Remsense诉 14:39, 1 April 2024 (UTC)

Inline is fine unless we are editing at the same time. —Kusma (talk) 16:07, 1 April 2024 (UTC)

I don't know whether I'll have much editing time until Thursday (and I had another stalled GA review coming back). So I will indeed take my time. If you are trying to give names in characters for everyone (a goal I support, but general consensus might be slightly different): Chan Sin-Wai is 陳善偉. —Kusma (talk) 07:04, 2 April 2024 (UTC)

Thank you! I think it is generally necessary to give the characters for people who write their names with characters—my litmus test has generally been to include characters when they are printed in the book or immediately visible upon a google search for the person, but extra inclusion certainly can't hurt.

And no problem at all! As you may have seen, I keep finding things to polish and tweak—I hope that's alright with you, I can gladly refrain if it complicates the review process. I'm honestly just stoked that the review has been taken up so quickly by someone I'm going to learn a lot from—so please take all the time you need, I mean it. I'll be here. Remsense诉 08:19, 2 April 2024 (UTC)

I am going to take some time, especially as I want to engage with the sources. My own personal library has two that you don't use, the classic Chinese Characters by Léon Wieger (most of the book is a dictionary sorted by phonetic component, something I have not seen anywhere else) and the modern Chinese Characters by Han Jiantang. Reading all this will be fun, but won't be quick. Thank you for your patience. —Kusma (talk) 10:13, 7 April 2024 (UTC)

I am over the moon that you're affording me so much effort. I hope in kind you don't mind that I tinker with the article some (I have a graphical addition in mind but theoretically it shouldn't be disruptive to the flow of analysis)! I will also find those books and add them to my collection, thank you! Remsense诉 10:25, 7 April 2024 (UTC)

Section by section content and prose review

Lead

• Lead: will discuss later

Development

• Development: four independent inventions of writing in human history probably better to say "at least" as it is not always known what else was independent? [1]
• It is probably possible to explain the timing of the four different inventions without using BP for the Maya, which looks out of place with the BCE notation for the other three.
• Not sure about some of the italics here (compare MOS:ITALIC). proto-writing doesn't need emphasis imo, and is not really WP:WAW.
• What is the difference between "development" and "early history"?
• 大鹿 could be linked to Wiktionary like character examples later are
• 假借: better to incorporate the pinyin (with tones) into the template like you do for Chinese words later in the text

Second pass

• I am still wondering whether this (relatively short and fairly general) section shouldn't be closer to the "neolithic" part of the history where the concrete application of the abstract proto-writing theory to Chinese is discussed. But I can shut up about this.
• Is the word "rebus" used by Qiu? On a quick scan I couldn't see it, and the link rebus only offers "Some linguists believe that the Chinese developed their writing system according to the rebus principle". This may need an improved citation.
• Other concerns have been addressed.

Classification

• Classification: again, over-italicised in my view. "writing systems" and "morphosyllabic" have little reason for italics.
• You do not mention the traditional zh:六書 system, but then cite the 漢語大字典 which often goes back to the 說文 for its character information.
• Structural analysis: this may of course be justified, but it seems a lot of space is given to Qiu's view, even if it differs only little from the "straightforward structural classification scheme" presented earlier.
• Pictographs: While relatively few in number, most of the earliest characters originated as pictographs relatively few in number in the last 2000 years? Early on, they were apparently the majority, so relatively many in number?
• Example lexeme A: 日 links to the 漢語大字典 page for 月.
• Would it make sense to mention that these are 象形 in
• Is there some deeper reason why some characters are linked and others are not?
• Over time, this process sometimes creates excess ambiguity between different senses of a character, which is then usually resolved by adding additional components to create new characters used for specific senses. This can result in new pictographs, but usually results in other character types. this makes me itch to say that modern Chinese resolves this ambiguity not by new characters, but by multi-syllable words; not sure if that is an appropriate comment here

More later! —Kusma (talk) 14:28, 1 April 2024 (UTC)

• four independent inventions; BP: these are taken directly from Handel, but I can happily adjust the date format to favor internal consistency.
• What is the difference between "development" and "early history"? I think I attempted to organize the "development" section to explain how proto-writing became a writing system while explicating what that means, while the "history" section is meant to cover the evolution of a fully mature writing system.
• do not mention the traditional zh:六書 system [yet] This is a bit of a pickle for me, I'll have to think about it a bit more. In short, I did not think 六書 is incompatible with or requires explication vis a vis with modern analysis before it is explicitly discussed. In such cases, the 說文 analysis is considered accurate to the best of my knowledge
• Qiu's view: I attribute a lot of statements to Qiu in the first half that I probably don't need to, though in this specific case I do. That said, Qiu's analyses in the Development section etc. are basically the industry golden standard and reflect broad scholarly consensus; Qiu 1988 is basically the definitive monograph for Chinese palaeography (which makes it infuriating that they haven't reprinted the 2000 translation.) Will think about this a bit more.
• Early on, they were apparently the majority? Great catch! Simply, there weren't very many characters in the proto-writing system—it's impossible to hold thousands of ideographs in your head without starting to encode spoken language. I will explicate this.
• Is there some deeper reason why some characters are linked and others are not? Inertia! I am not sure what should and should not be linked, but I definitely lean on "don't link without a specific reason", and removed a ton of wiktionary linking from this article as I was working on it.
• excess ambiguity: The ambiguity that creates new character forms is graphical (or lexicographical) in nature—I do see how this can be conflated with the also-mentioned ambiguity that creates compound words, which is phonetic in nature, and therefore went largely unreflected in the written language until the advent of the vernacular movement to supplant Literary Chinese. Good catch, will explicate this also.
• Y All other bullet points I agree with and have applied the most straightforward changes for.

Remsense诉 15:13, 1 April 2024 (UTC)

• Compound ideographs: you use 日 ('Sun') but ⼈ 'MAN'; is there some obvious reason to use two different formats? Also, {{kxr}} seems to create a huge amount of whitespace behind it when viewed in Safari, making it look awkward (not a problem in Chrome).
• There seems to be no citation for 休.
• I am not certain that the 漢語大字典 is the best possible source for character etymologies, given that it often just reprints the 說文解字. I will revisit this point when talking about sources.
• I see no information in the 漢語大字典 that 砼 is a compound ideograph, or even how it is composed; all the dictionary says is that it means 混凝土, concrete.

More later! —Kusma (talk) 10:07, 7 April 2024 (UTC)

• Oh wow, I'm curious why that is! Will investigate. For now, I've tried to use smallcaps with single quotes specifically for radicals, and single quotes for the glosses of lexemes per usual.
• And yes, I've been thinking about how to cite lexemes also. Of course, there are other dictionaries that I'm prepared to swap out if we don't think the 漢語大字典 is fit for purpose here—but I would consider that it is, given that concerns the latter are not strictly about individual classifications per se. It's odd!
• oh, dangit! I accidentally did an OR here—specifically, I went to a chat room where a bunch of Taiwanese lexicographers were hanging out and begged them in my sloppy Chinese to give me a better example of a modern sessemantograph than 鉑 'platinum', which had been the previous example and simply was obviously not one 砼 tóng is at the very least also arguably a phono-semantic compound with phonetic 工 gōng. Perhaps these further examples can simply be cut if they are too nettlesome.

Will fix these shortly, wanted to organize my thoughts. Remsense诉 10:18, 7 April 2024 (UTC)

鉑 is an interesting case, I wonder if there are sources stating whether it is supposed to be syssemantographic gold+white or phonosemantic 金+bo (while 白 is only rarely bo, it is often bo in compounds). The choice of 白 for the sound component may have been inspired by the meaning... —Kusma (talk) 20:04, 8 April 2024 (UTC)

As mentioned in the article, the line between phono-semantic and ideographic compounds can be fuzzy. I recalled after looking that 砼 was specifically invented by a Chinese architect and professor named Cai Fangyin in 1953 (which explains why it's not in any Taiwanese dictionaries) but it is also easily described as a phono-semantic compound of 石 and 仝 tóng. Remsense诉 20:32, 8 April 2024 (UTC)

I'm now also very curious about platinum. When did knowledge of that metal reach China? The usual informal word is 白金, but Wiktionary tells me that that was coined in Japanese by the chemist Udagawa Yōan in 1834. If knowledge of Pt reached China that late, then it seems plausible that the use of 鉑 to mean Pt (instead of its old meaning "thin sheet of gold") was a new invention from those who coined the Chinese names of the elements, with a character being chosen to make it meaningfully appropriate. That would make it something like 氫 qīng for hydrogen, where the character and reading were both coinages, and the chosen phonetic was meant to give meaning instead of to match the pronunciation in the major European languages; the difference would be that 鉑 was repurposing an old character with its old reading (not unheard of, some of the characters like 鈰 for cerium are actually in names of the House of Zhu) and 氫 was an entirely new coinage. (I'm particularly fond of 氕 piē, 氘 dāo and 氚 chuān for the hydrogen isotopes, which follow the same sort of thinking behind H itself.) Needless to say, if this speculation is correct, it's not a good example. :)

P.S. on reading Wright's Translating Science, I now feel it was a gloriously wasted opportunity not to translate osmium as ⾦惡. Double sharp (talk) 17:14, 14 April 2024 (UTC)

• Phono-semantic compounds: "For a modern reader, the resulting drift is such that the phonetic component no longer provides any hint as to each character's pronunciation." this is specific to 也; maybe add some comment that clarifies that modern readers get lots of hints from most other characters?
• Table: is the OC column in IPA? What are C and A? Can you link to some IPA help page?
• Loangraphs: Some loangraphs may represent words that have never been written another way—this is often the case with abstract grammatical particles such as 之 and 其—but this is not always so this is a bit redundantly written. Also, what does "words that have never been written another way" really mean? 之 is often written の in Taiwanese Mandarin handwriting ...
• 可口可樂: well, both 可口 and 可樂 are actual words on their own, so this is a bit questionable as an example in my view. Neither Coca-Cola nor Romania are mentioned in the source.
• (random anecdote): my favourite transcription of a Western company into Chinese is actually 大众 for VW, with the 众 looking like the VW logo :)
• Traditional Shuowen Jiezi classification: liùshū (六書; 六书; 'six writings') here you have pinyin-traditional-simplified; Romania and Coca-Cola were simplified-traditional-pinyin. Worth making consistent?
• Are there examples for characters mis-classified by the 說文解字?
• while this number would be reduced substantially in future dictionaries, the underlying concept would remain ubiquitous. try to avoid going too far WP:INTOTHEWOULDS.

More later, as usual :) —Kusma (talk) 21:11, 8 April 2024 (UTC)

Second pass

• There are a few uncited sentences in the "pictographs" subsubsection. ("their forms have become regularised and simplified after centuries of iteration", "individualised components may form part of a compound pictograph", "the same 'mouth' component depicts the lip of a vessel in the modern form of the pictograph 畐"
• Compound ideographs: do you need to say "canonical" twice?
• Link kokuji.
• I still do not know how to interpret the "/*lAjʔ/" given for 也 in Old Chinese. What does the A stand for?
  • After checking Baxter-Sagart 2014, I think you should cite that book explicitly for the table (也 is on p. 269). On p. 321, I found the information that "our *A is not a seventh vowel: it is an explicitly ad hoc notation to flag some unsolved problems." I understand that the table is there to strengthen the point that sounds were different in the past, so some sound components make no sense, but overall I think it is a bit of a distraction; I would drop the table, perhaps in favour of an example where we know more.
• Generally much improved.

History

• History: the broad trend towards simplification is probably scholarly consensus and can probably be stated in wikivoice instead of attributing to Qiu? You could still mention Qiu and cite his words.
• Neolithic writing: aren't there some people (including Qiu) who claim that the Dawenkou culture's signs may be connected to Jiaguwen, compare e.g. zh:大汶口陶文?
• Oracle bone script: I just fell into a slight rabbit hole of trying to read up on earliest jiaguwen. Now I'm wondering whether an eclipse in 1173 BCE (see p. 4) ought to be added to Historically significant lunar eclipses... but that's probably nothing we need to discuss here.
• However, it might be interesting to mention Wu Ding?
• village near Anyang in Henan, which was excavated why not link to / mention Yinxu?
• which was excavated by the Academia Sinica more precisely, by Li Ji from their (freshly founded just like the Academia) zh:中央研究院歷史語言研究所 (Institute of History and Philology).
• I think it would be worth to mention the Chinese names of the various scripts.
• Zhou scripts: The traditional notion of an orderly procession of scripts, with each suddenly invented and displacing the one previous, has been conclusively superseded by modern archaeological finds and scholarly research. More often, two or more scripts coexisted in a given area, and scripts evolved gradually. this seems to be rather general, not limited to the Zhou dynasty?
• Examples of these styles were preserved as variants in the Shuowen Jiezi. are these other scripts only in the Shuowen Jiezi, or are there extant samples from the Zhou dynasty?
• Large seal script is only in the See Also on top; shouldn't it be mentioned and discussed in this section?
• Qin unification and small seal script: Isn't this the place to talk about Li Si?
• The coexistence of proto-clerical and seal script runs counter to the traditional belief that only the latter was used by the Qin, with clerical script being suddenly invented during the early Han. does everybody agree with Qiu on this? Even if yes, might be better to either drop the traditional belief or state both what the traditional theory was and then what the modern theory is and why it superseded the traditional one.
• I know that we get some samples later in the article, but I think it would be great to see pictures of oracle bone script/large seal script/small seal script/clerical script closer to where these are discussed.

More later... —Kusma (talk) 22:48, 9 April 2024 (UTC)

This list is especially worthwhile, many points for refinement toward maximum encyclopedic value here, thank you so much! Remsense诉 17:07, 10 April 2024 (UTC)

Do you think for the history section broadly, it might be worthwhile to have a pseudo-infobox/table where the names are listed in order? I've spent a lot of time cutting a lot of non-English text (imperfectly as you've seen) from this article but yes the native names for scripts do seem like necessary inclusions. Remsense诉 18:01, 10 April 2024 (UTC)

I think that could work, definitely worth trying to create a table of scripts with their Chinese names. —Kusma (talk) 12:20, 11 April 2024 (UTC)

We'll cross that bridge when we get to it, but I'll keep this concept in mind for other terminology: MOS:ZH states (rightfully in the realm of style guideline) that linked terms shouldn't also include characters/romanization inline, but there do seem some common-sense exceptions here, since this is such an omnibus article that should reliably stand on its own as such. Remsense诉 12:22, 11 April 2024 (UTC)

We should not write "Mao Zedong (毛泽东)" but we may wish to explain terminology, and the Chinese terminology is potentially important here. For GA, we are free to ignore MOS:ZH but of course at FA level you will need to justify any deviation from the MoS. —Kusma (talk) 14:10, 11 April 2024 (UTC)

it's definitely domain-specific MOS that hasn't really been worked through at the FA level specifically, but yes I agree for script styles, and possibly other terms, let me know if there are others you notice that should have characters attached. Remsense诉 14:23, 11 April 2024 (UTC)

By the way, I've been working through your lists, fixing the obvious or easy ones, and copying the ones I'm less sure about to either work through or possibly discuss further once we've done a complete pass through the article, does this seem like a plan? Remsense诉 15:17, 12 April 2024 (UTC)

I can work with that. I am not actually sure what the best method is, so I am happy to use yours. —Kusma (talk) 16:01, 12 April 2024 (UTC)

• Han clerical script: I don't understand why Libian and Liding are linked as See Also. As their titles are in Chinese, it is unclear what the reader should expect. Shouldn't the libian processes be touched upon here a little?
• its sophistication was comparable to small seal script. what is meant by this "sophistication"?
• I find the treatment of ancient cursive versus cursive (and later semi-cursive) a bit confusing, and considerations of the Jin dynasty make up near half of your Han dynasty section. Maybe treat all cursives in a separate section?
• Neo-clerical: is this a name used only by Qiu?

  Coined by Qiu. Remsense诉 16:00, 17 April 2024 (UTC)

• Regular script: this is missing a statement that regular script is still used today. I also find the section a bit difficult to follow. We have a "simplified, convenient" form that is changed in a way that is "neat, formal". It is unclear how the predecessors were inconvenient or informal or lacking in neatness. I generally don't like this section much.
• Cao Wei calligrapher Zhong Yao: I didn't know that Cao Wei is a state/dynasty without clicking the link; can this be made clearer?
• How did the Wangs develop the script?
• calligraphers such as Wang Wang Xizhi or his son or both?
• In the History section, is it worth mentioning what tools people used to write the different script styles and how the tool choice influenced the script? (I am pretty sure writing on bones or bronze is very different from using a brush and ink).

Structure next! —Kusma (talk) 16:38, 12 April 2024 (UTC)

It may help to merge section History and section Development into "Historical Development" or so. Ctxz2323 (talk) 09:58, 23 May 2024 (UTC)

The reason I haven't done this is I don't want Classification to be buried under the entire History section, but I feel the Development section is what is needed for the Classification section to be afforded its proper context. Remsense诉 09:59, 23 May 2024 (UTC)

Understand.

And many thanks for your great effort for the GA target! Ctxz2323 (talk) 10:10, 23 May 2024 (UTC)

I'm hoping the lessons I've learned will make improving all the other articles on the subject much easier for me and those around me. :)! Thank you for the work you've done as well. Remsense诉 10:11, 23 May 2024 (UTC)

Second pass

• "Broadest trend is simplification" is still attributed instead of wikivoice
• Neolithic: attribute the quote to Qiu
• Oracle bone script: the source has "several dozen" instead of "up to 40"; is there an independent source for the number or is this just an attempt to avoid WP:CLOP?
• Zhou scripts: "traditional notion of an orderly procession of scripts" is still here, although my comment has a strikethrough above. I am wondering whether this would be best moved into the introduction of the History section.

Structure

• rectilinear units of uniform width. nowadays they are square, and they have been nearly square (even when writing top to bottom) for a long time, although the image of the "printed Song publication" has 義 much taller than 之. In the next sentence, you say within the square.
• Not sure whether it is worth mentioning how standardised stroke counts are (so they are used for all kinds of sorting, from dictionaries to bookshops).
• I don't understand how the Eight Principles of Yong exemplify the categorisation of strokes.
• Both the order in which strokes are drawn within a given component, as well as the order components are written in a character is largely fixed. well, but there are several competing standards for stroke order, so this isn't fixed across all of the Sinosphere.
• Variants and allographs: this might benefit from some more examples (usually we don't see as much variety as for 龜). 棋/䃆 (you play Go with stone pieces on a wooden board, so both make sense) and the top-to-bottom versions 棊/碁 belong to my personal favourites, as does 裡/裏. No sources, sorry.

Second pass

• "many character components became regularised as discrete series of strokes." I would say that nowadays, all characters (with the possible exception of 〇 if you want to count that) are written as a discrete series of strokes, and the same for their components.
• 永 could perhaps use a footnote: these days it has six strokes
• "The order in which the strokes of a component are drawn is also set, but may differ by region." sort of; there are different standards, and different regions (most people call them "countries", except if they believe Taiwan is not a country) nowadays subscribe to different standards. I would probably say "there are several different standards" instead of "may differ by region" if you can source it.
• Layout: I would suggest to mention here that traditional publishing (books, conservative newspapers) in Taiwan and Japan still uses the traditional layout.
• If there is a link to stroke order (with the weird example of 必 having four different versions) in the article, I have missed it. If there isn't, I would suggest to add one.

Methods of writing

• Printing and typefaces: I would either not mention the 字号 or say what it is. Missing traditional 字號.
• "Kai" typefaces at this point it turns out we need to know that regular script is called kaishu.
• Input methods: Predominantly, Chinese characters are input as strings of Latin characters with some notable exceptions like Taiwan, where people usually have bopomofo keyboards and "ji32k7au4a83" is a famously terrible password (我的密碼 typed on a bopomofo keyboard in Latin mode).
• a more unique shorthand this hurts my mathematician brain. either it is unique or not. "less ambiguous"?
• 大学 is missing its traditional friend 大學.
• Encoding and interchange: Text is represented digitally by a series of binary numbers called code points why "series" and not "string" or "sequence"? I don't see what is "binary" about the numbers; Unicode code points are usually written in hexadecimal. Better drop "binary"?
• I'm not sure you need all of this technical detail, but if you have so much detail on different encoding systems, why do you omit Shift JIS?
• As of 2024, Big5 encodes 3053 characters.[92] Citation 92 is from 2008 and it seems unlikely that the author knows what Big5 is like in 2024.

Enough for today. —Kusma (talk) 22:07, 12 April 2024 (UTC)

Thank you so much as always. Remsense诉 23:11, 12 April 2024 (UTC)

Second pass

• Just an aside: only now did I read the article on edomoji and finally understood better why some writing looks Japanese to me even without any kana in it
• Printing and typefaces: should jiu zixing also have characters?
• Input methods: link pinyin on first use
• Encoding and interchange: you should mention that other encoding systems exist (or at least were very widely used pre Unicode).

Vocabulary and adaptation

• Vocabulary and adaptation: this section combines talking about 文言文 with the adoption of Chinese characters for other languages. There is probably a good reason to do so, but it is not very clear from the current writing. It is odd that Vietnam, Korea etc. are discussed in a paragraph that begins with a mention of Literary and colloquial readings.
• Outside China, the notion of special reading systems was extended, what is a "special reading system"?
• maybe explain quickly what brushtalk is? what are face-to-face conversions?
• In Korea, hanja were usually used to write Sino-Korean vocabulary I suppose the point is that they were used only for Sino-Korean vocabulary? Was there a different writing system for other Korean words?
• It isn't really clear how this section is ordered. It is neither chronological nor by area, and some points are revisited more than once.
• If the bit between the "Vocabulary and adaptation" header and the "Old Chinese" subheader is supposed to be an overview/introduction/"lead section" for what follows, it is exceedingly long.
• Old Chinese: I don't quite understand why you have so much content about the "departing tone"; how is that relevant to the characters?
• 説: why not the standard form 說 but this intermediate form closer to 说? (I have no idea why these strokes are different between traditional and simplified, but they are).

  説 was the form used in the source (Baxter 1994). Remsense诉 16:00, 17 April 2024 (UTC)

• Vernacular Chinese varieties: here we have two paragraphs, one talking about 2000 years of history leading to written vernacular Chinese, another about much more recent (I think, no dates are given) adaptations for non-Mandarin varieties.
• Say that 孬 is Cantonese and when it was introduced?

  This seems a variant used across different variants (originally attributed to Northeast Mandarin), so I've opted not to be specific. Remsense诉 16:00, 17 April 2024 (UTC)

• My favourite Cantonese character is 冇 (meaning 沒有). It isn't really a "compound" ideograph, but more a "reduction" one. Do you know how people classify this one?
• semi-official characters I think the MoE is trying to have an official list (which has some choices that I don't like, in particular 袂 instead of , as I learned during the GA review of Taiwanese Mandarin, but it is what it is). What do you mean by "semi-official"?
• Why not give examples of Taiwanese Southern Min Recommended Characters? 睏 is a nice phonosemantic that has 目 as in 睡 (same meaning) and the different sound component 困. (My 台语 is terrible).

  Actually, many of these seem old, including 睏 and 袂. Not sure which are fully new designs.

Next stop: Japanese. —Kusma (talk) 13:25, 14 April 2024 (UTC)

Remsense诉 20:17, 14 April 2024 (UTC)

• Why See also to Kanbun?
• the word meaning "Chinese characters" is rendered as kanji isn't it 漢字 just like in Chinese?
• The 刀 story comes in the middle of the katakana/ateji story.
• Not sure we need so much about kana.
• Korean: Define Hanja.
• As early as the Gojoseon period when was that?

  I wish I knew! I was shocked at how trying to include a parenthetical dating for this opened every single can of worms in the world, hence its conspicuous absence. Not sure what better to do. Remsense诉 16:00, 17 April 2024 (UTC)

• This ambiguity had historically been resolved by also including the associated hanja. While still sometimes used for Sino-Korean vocabulary, it is much rarer for native Korean words to be written using hanja. tense? when is "historically" and when is the now with the native Korean words?
• Examples of listings why "listings"?
• Are "native translation" and "Sino-Korean" like the kun and on reading in Japanese or does it just look like that?

More later. —Kusma (talk) 20:27, 14 April 2024 (UTC)

• South Korea: I am a bit confused about the extent of Hanja use and how it changed in the past 70 years.
• Others support returning to a level of ordinary hanja use previously seen during the 1970s and 1980s so they want the use to increase a bit again?
• Not sure we need two paragraphs on Hanja in South Korea.
• Maybe some examples of Korean use of Hanja would be good (of 15 random pages on kowiki, only one, ko:남병길 had any Hanja content; all just names). But maybe you have too much about Korean already.
• North Korea: the use of all so-called foreign languages, which has been interpreted as including hanja is this a North Korean interpretation or a foreign interpretation?
• Vietnamese: Link chữ Nôm. Why are there two sentences about use of Chinese in Vietnam between the first mention of chữ Nôm and the explanation what it is?
• Similar to Zhuang sawndip hasn't been introduced yet
• Before 1945, the library of the French School of the Far East (EFEO) in Hanoi collected a total of around 20,000 Chinese and Vietnamese epigraphy rubbings from throughout Indochina.[133] The oldest surviving extant manuscript in Vietnamese is a late 15th-century bilingual copy of the Buddhist Sutra of Filial Piety, currently kept by the EFEO. It features Chinese text in larger characters, and an Old Vietnamese translation in smaller characters glossing the text.[134] Every Hán Nôm book in Vietnam after the Phật thuyết is dated between the 17th and the 20th centuries, with most being hand-copied works, and few printed texts. By 1987, the library of the Institute of Hán-Nôm Studies in Hanoi had collected a total of 4,808 Hán Nôm manuscripts is any of this necessary in this article?
• Other languages: scripts based on Chinese characters, but also included many locally created characters why "but"?
• According to surveys, traditional sawndip script has twice as many users as the official Latin script this basically repeats the earlier point still in use despite efforts to encourage the writing of Zhuang with a Latin-based alphabet, better to merge these.
• Nüshu and bopomofo seem to be in the wrong section, they are both phonetic scripts for Chinese.
• Other scripts within China that have adapted some characters but are otherwise distinct what languages are these for?
• Transcription: why is this section only about Mongolian?

Second pass

• "Sinosphere" is explained and linked well after its first use in the article.
• Kin 2021 p. XII (ref. 118 at the moment) has no information about Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese belonging to different language families.
• However, for other varieties this level of completeness has been described by Victor H. Mair (b. 1943) as "almost unthinkable". hm, I think this was written in 1994, well before the Taiwanese Southern Min Recommended Characters. Systematic characters for 方言 are probably only ever going to be created by government agencies of a separatist bent, but there we are. I would suggest to drop the quote (and certainly drop "born 1943" and instead describe who Mair is so we know why we should care if you leave it).
• Should we have Japanese before Korean, opposite of the historical order?
• Japanese: link onyomi and kunyomi?

Special cases

A somewhat odd name for the section, which I will look at next. —Kusma (talk) 20:41, 15 April 2024 (UTC)

• The entire "Contractions and abbreviations" section appears to be sourced to a single blog post. Even if it is by Victor H. Mair, this seems less than ideal. If this one blog post is the only mention of these characters in the literature, it is undue weight to spend two paragraphs on this.
• What does the concept of "ligature" even mean in Chinese? It is not in the source (only in a comment, and Mair seems to be opposed to its use).
• 囍 can also be pronounced xǐ
• There are a few more sources and examples at zh:合文, for example common Lunar New Year things like zh:招財進寶 (成語). Modern readers might even like the Grass Mud Horse :)
• Multi-syllable morphemes: what are the sources for this section?
• 琵琶, incorporating 珡 just the upper half I'd say...
• 儿 for erhua: traditional is 兒.
• Rare and complex characters: Rare or antiquated character variants appear more often in personal or place names more often than where? Any examples? (Biangbiang noodles isn't a personal or place name).
• Being unable to remember how to write 憂鬱症 by hand did make me slightly melancholic at some point.
• 鬱 does have a simplified form, 郁.
• quadruplicated quadrupled? quadruple?

Not convinced this is the best name or place for this content, nor that all of this needs to be here. —Kusma (talk) 21:16, 16 April 2024 (UTC)

Indeed—mind that this article as submitted was following me already having cut several thousand words out of it, the general perspective that the work wasn't done is well-appreciated, as you can see I've trimmed the article still further per your suggestions/thoughts Remsense诉 21:20, 16 April 2024 (UTC)

This seems all gone. I don't know whether some "complexity" subsection somewhere would be a good place to mention complicated characters like 鬱 and some of the 合文? —Kusma (talk) 20:49, 19 May 2024 (UTC)

I'm not convinced, honestly. It seems a bit like trivia and appears almost not at all in the RS. Remsense诉 04:21, 20 May 2024 (UTC)

If there is nothing in the sources, it should not be in the article. Something like statistics of how many strokes typical characters have (and that complex characters are rare, and anything worse than 鑰 is extremely rare) doesn't look impossible to source to me, but it might not be strictly necessary to cover. —Kusma (talk) 20:25, 20 May 2024 (UTC)

Standardisation

• Is the table supposed to be complete? (Macao? Singapore? North Korea??)
• Going from this table into "Received forms" is quite a break in the flow
• I am wondering whether it wouldn't make more sense to put content on "Received" woodblock forms and the history of simplification into the "History" section and to make the section here just about (current) "standards" instead of including the process of standardisation. (There is nothing about standardisation in the TW and HK sections).
• Simplified characters: Fascinating as it is that KMT and CCP has competing romanisation projects, I don't think we need this much detail about Gwoyeu Romatzyh and Latinxua Sinwenz. Awesome as Jaw Yuanrenn is, he might be not on topic here.

  You may be right; I had trouble writing about the simplification without mentioning its tight interwovenness with the alphabetization movements, but surely I can do a bit better. Remsense诉 11:11, 19 April 2024 (UTC)

• Cursive script served as a source for many simplified character forms; others had already been used in print, though usually not in formal works this is mostly redundant with the content in the following section, drop here and mention Cursive later
• The Republic of China, as well as Hong Kong and Macau—still under colonial rule at the time—were not affected by the reforms. and why should they?
• The PRC initiated the first round of character simplifications with two documents published in 1956 and 1965 so did the use of simplified characters start in the 1950s or in the 1960s?
• a total of 8,105 characters, with 3,500 categorised as primary, 3,000 as secondary, and 1,605 as tertiary. what do these categories mean? We seen to move from standardisation of the characters (what are their standard forms and how were they changed?) to the different question of which characters a student is supposed to learn,
• The Chinese Proficiency Test (HSK) covers 2,663 characters and 5,000 words at its highest level, while the Chinese Proficiency Grading Standards for International Chinese Language Education would cover 3,000 characters and 11,092 words at its highest level that is the pre-2021 汉语水平考试, I think the new one is a but different. Also, this isn't about standardisation of characters, but standardisation of the curriculum taught to learners of Chinese as a foreign language.
• Singapore: The first round was published in 1969, and consisted of 498 simplified and 502 traditional characters the first round of simplification consisted of simplified and traditional characters? I don't understand this.
• Generally, is it worth discussing the writing directions and their standardisation (or lack thereof) somewhere?
• Philippines: why do we have a special section for this?
• bopomofo, owing to Taiwanese influence due to a shared Hokkien heritage not in the source. The source doesn't look particularly reliable either.
• North America: why does it get its own section? (Where is Europe? Australia?)

Hope I can get through the last section tomorrow! —Kusma (talk) 22:02, 18 April 2024 (UTC)

I was thinking about education having its own section—what do you think about that? Remsense诉 12:08, 19 April 2024 (UTC)

That might work? "Educational standards", maybe? You could have all the information about educational standards in various countries (like the fact that it is usually standardised when a child should learn a specific character; I own a Taiwanese student dictionary from ca. 1999 and it has stroke order and information like 二上 for "first half of second grade" given with each character) in such a section, and also information about how many characters are required for things like HSK/TOCFL or JLPT that foreigners care about. —Kusma (talk) 12:43, 19 April 2024 (UTC)

Second pass (now "Reform and standardisation")

• I am wondering whether there should be an additional example for "they also sought to reduce the total number of characters in use by merging some forms together". 云/雲 is a return to an ancient form plus a merging (unlike 气/氣, which is just a return to the ancient form). 後 being merged into the (unrelated, IIRC) 后 is a true merging. (I do not like 简体字 much, does it show?) But it is certainly not something that must be done.
• From the second round of simplification you move on to describing the present standard (The Chart of Generally Utilised Characters of Modern Chinese) without warning.
• The Taiwanese Chart of Standard Forms of Common National Characters apparently (according to that article) has been augmented by "18,388 characters in the Chart of Rarely-Used National Characters (罕用國字標準字體表)"; if you can source this properly, it would fit well here.

Lexicography

• What is a "meaning-based order"? Is this about the time before modern encyclopaedias when the world was small enough that people tried to sort the encyclopaedia in some logical way instead of the meaningless alphabetical order we have nowadays? (Western encyclopaedias made this shift around the 16th century).
• Most modern Chinese dictionaries arrange the main character entries alphabetically according to pinyin spelling, while also providing a traditional radical-based index I can't find that in the cited source. From my own experience, the last time I went dictionary shopping (I have to admit that was over 20 years ago), it was difficult to buy pinyin-based dictionaries in Taipei. I think there is also a difference between monolingual and bilingual dictionaries, with monolingual dictionaries more favouring radical/stroke and bilingual ones more favouring pinyin.
• Most dictionaries choose one method to sort characters and actually have indices for other methods.

The following are more personal rants than suggestions to improve the article, so no need to engage too much with the small print.

• The text doesn't emphasise enough what a terrible user-unfriendly system radical+stroke was in practice, back when we had to use paper dictionaries. I remember spending entire days looking up characters. Drawing on my phone in Pleco is about a hundred times faster.
• (That ⻌ and 阝 both have seven strokes in Kangxi does not help).
• In fact, my best paper dictionary (a Far East Chinese English Dictionary from ca. 2000) starts with radical index, table of contents, then the coolest thing of all: a table of hard to find characters sorted by stroke count, telling me things like where to find 恭 even if I don't know that the radical is 心.
• Active vocabulary/total number of characters: might make sense to combine this with the "education" content about number of characters. Maybe you just want a "number of characters" section somewhere?
• Is it worth mentioning the Table of Indexing Chinese Character Components as a modern Simplified alternative to Kangxi that may or may not be a widely used standard?

No further comments here. —Kusma (talk) 20:46, 20 May 2024 (UTC)

See also

• Modern Chinese characters – there is quite a bit of overlap with this article; I am almost wondering if it shouldn't be a subarticle introduced with {{main}}
• Chinese character education – could be a {{main}} in a good section

First read through done (finally). Images, sources, lead still need to be done, and I need to discuss your responses. —Kusma (talk) 16:12, 19 April 2024 (UTC)

I am so grateful for your keen eye and consideration, I can't say it enough—as regards Modern Chinese characters, I actually raised concerns as such when the page was first created, but I realized later it's likely a page I can get around to expanding at some point. Remsense诉 16:17, 19 April 2024 (UTC)

I've also started tinkering with a visual presentation of historical character styles, and I think it's going to look really nice, but I still need to assemble representative examples for some (e.g. clerical script). Remsense诉 19:15, 21 April 2024 (UTC)

I'm looking forward to seeing it! I'll go and review the current image selection for now, and will happily re-review anything you add. —Kusma (talk) 20:41, 21 April 2024 (UTC)

Essentially, instead of baking new SVGs, I'm planning on using most of what individual glyphs we already have on Commons to track the evolution of eight of our friends, inspired by File:Shang Bronze and Oracle Script.png:

visual idea
Oracle bone script Bronze script Small seal script

I think I'd want to do all 8 in a 4×2 grid, but none of the image templates seem to do that as well as a header/footer caption, so I'm still puzzling but think reducing to 5 representative glyphs might be the move for now. Remsense诉 20:56, 21 April 2024 (UTC)

Looks promising! —Kusma (talk) 20:12, 22 April 2024 (UTC)

@Kanguole:, do you happen to know where to find representative scans of clerical forms? I don't need exceedingly good scans, but I'd like to make sure they're consistent. Also, what do you think of the five characters 天犬旅正韋 as a representative set to demonstrate the evolution of script styles at every step between oracle bone and regular script? Remsense诉 10:33, 4 May 2024 (UTC)

Clerical forms: no. It's hard to choose examples. A popular choice, showing radical change from a pictorial origin, is 馬. Kanguole 11:58, 4 May 2024 (UTC)

General comments and GA criteria

Good Article review progress box

Criteria: 1a. prose () 1b. MoS () 2a. ref layout () 2b. cites WP:RS () 2c. no WP:OR () 2d. no WP:CV () 3a. broadness () 3b. focus () 4. neutral () 5. stable () 6a. free or tagged images () 6b. pics relevant () Note: this represents where the article stands relative to the Good Article criteria. Criteria marked are unassessed

Images

• File:Comparative evolution of Cuneiform, Egyptian and Chinese characters.svg - this is cute, but I think it should be attributed in the caption. I assume the Chinese characters were drawn by Maspero or some other Egyptologist? They look rather like beginner's handwriting.
• Structural templates used in compounds, with red marking possible positions for components: is this supposed to be complete? shouldn't there be some source for these? Is something like the 或 in 國 included, or just the 囗?
• File:噹噹茶餐廳2021年7月初的午餐餐牌-tweaked.jpg – not sure if it is worth pointing out, but there are some typical handwriting abbreviations on the board, like the way they write 炒 and in particular writing 反 as shorthand for 飯 (technically wrong, but anyone literate enough to understand this when written correctly should understand the abbreviation).
• File:Chineseprimer3.png – a higher quality scan would be nice, but certainly optional
• File:ROC24 SC1.jpg – source link is dead, but this seems fine. I wonder whether it is worth linking (in caption or in the body) to zh:第一批简体字表

No major complaints here, just minor suggestions for captions. —Kusma (talk) 21:19, 21 April 2024 (UTC)

Second pass on images

• New images are a great addition, and licensing seems fine.
• Without a statistics section, I would suggest to consider removing File:Cumulative Hanzi frequency.svg. Or replacing by something showing how most characters belong to the same two handful of radicals...
• I am not sure the choice of left-aligning File:噹噹茶餐廳2021年7月初的午餐餐牌-tweaked.jpg really works. In standard settings (incognito mode Chrome) there is enough space to move it to the right.

Infoboxes

• Direction: Top-to-bottom is still widely used in Japan and Taiwan, so I do not understand why this is marked "historical".
• Do the Ryukyuan languages need their own mention?
• I don't quite see the point in the massive list of transcriptions. Maybe not all of them are needed?
• At least in Hanyu pinyin, I think it is usually Hànzì with a capital H.
• the "other Mandarin" heading is odd
• "Romanization" should be "Romanisation" in the variety of English used in the body

  Requested edits implementing an WP:ENGVAR parameter for {{Infobox Chinese}} . Remsense诉 11:08, 12 May 2024 (UTC)

• Why do we care about the name in Thai or Khmer, and perhaps the one in Zhuang?

Better. —Kusma (talk) 20:57, 20 May 2024 (UTC)

Source reviewing

Numbering is from Special:PermanentLink/1220112331. Not looking at everything, but at quite a few sources.

• Notes: e,f,g,k are unsourced (even if k is WP:BLUESKY to anyone who reads Chinese). h,i seem unfinished.
• 2: ok
• 4: ok, but is it worth discussing the "Naxi script" that Qiu mentions?
• 6: can't see a discussion of jiajie on p. 11; you probably need to cite a few earlier pages
• 8: can't see "logography" defined on these pages
• 10: ok

More later! —Kusma (talk) 20:54, 22 April 2024 (UTC)

• 11: Handel just mentions 六書 and does not say 說文解字. Are you sure about the page numbers for Yong & Peng?
• 12: ok
• 13: does Qiu call them forms? Maybe I overlooked it but didn't see it
• 14/15 could not find full text, but maybe I didn't try hard enough
• 16: this makes it sound as if this is Qiu's theory, but he clearly says this is Tang Lan's theory (and then says why it is not enough).
• 17: not sure where you see that "most" early characters are 象形

First impression of sources: generally excellent sources, but sometimes not everything you say is in these sources (and sometimes you cite rather long sections of the books). More later (sorry for the slow progress). —Kusma (talk) 21:06, 23 April 2024 (UTC)

• 21: ok
• C: I don't see how the MoE dictionary page for 明白 says how it is " touching on the derived association of 明 with 'illumination'" Could you point me to where the 漢語大字典 explains how 萌 alludes to heliotropic plants?
• 23 "made obscure by subsequent changes in form" I read the source more as referring to subsequent changes in pronunciation.
• D: As discussed earlier, 砼 is not described as a compound ideograph in the source.
• 26: ok
• 27: Qiu p. 154 seems to discuss the difficulty of deciding between 象形 and 指事 and not talk about 形聲 versus 會意
• Footnote d: no sources for this paragraph?
• 33: can't see anything about chemistry on p. 211, and in particular nothing about plutonium.
• 35, 36: both seem to be about syllables and not about transcriptions / connotations; nothing about 可口可樂.

More later! (Sorry, busy days...) —Kusma (talk) 20:52, 25 April 2024 (UTC)

I have been pretty under the weather myself the past week or so and as such haven't been able to be as up-to-date with your suggestions as I've liked, so I appreciate your patience and continued diligence so much, I should be on the upswing now... Remsense诉 19:13, 26 April 2024 (UTC)

Also, you may notice that my solution to many—not all!—discrepancies you mention is just to excise the passage in question. Perhaps this is a bias of mine, but I find many of them are simply unnecessary to the article as weighted, and the pressure to reduce its wordcount some is well-addressed. If I'm cutting out too much, please let me know though. Remsense诉 01:07, 28 April 2024 (UTC)

I guess cutting is overall reasonable (currently the article is still at 9.4k words), but some like "new characters are still being made, for example for newly discovered chemical elements" isn't something I would remove entirely. —Kusma (talk) 05:43, 28 April 2024 (UTC)

Of course. I guess if I've learned anything from this process, it's "rewrite entire sections instead of writing articles backwards and sourcing claims others have made piecemeal". I would like to readd properly sourced color claims as I come across them in the literature, but if I can't do so easily it seems the best option is removal Remsense诉 16:08, 28 April 2024 (UTC)

I agree; generally I prefer to use old text (or Wikipedia articles in other languages) for inspiration only and just write my own text based on the sources I can access. —Kusma (talk) 16:24, 28 April 2024 (UTC)

• 37: fine. I enjoyed reading in Qiu pp. 170–171 that 歹 might be Tibetan in origin.
• 38: the Norman I can access doesn't quite have the right pagination, so I'm not sure about the page range. Is "throughout the Sinosphere" really covered by Norman?
• 41: I'm sure this is somewhere in Qiu, but this seems to be the wrong page range.

  The Chinese second edition is cited, aka our "Qiu 2013". Remsense诉 01:07, 30 April 2024 (UTC)

• 44: ok
• 45/46: I am sure there are better sources than conference proceedings and a blog for this claim.
• 50: the mention of Jiahu and Dadiwan is on p. 30. I can't seem to find the exact quote in Qiu; if this is a paraphrase (and arguably it should be one and/or be attributed to Qiu better) it should not have quotation marks.
• 52: fine

More later (I really need to speed up, but I keep getting distracted). —Kusma (talk) 16:21, 28 April 2024 (UTC)

• 53: give page number
• 54: seems to be p. 108, at least that is the page linked on Google Books
• [53][54][55][56] looks overcited
• 57a: no mention of Yin or of dragon bones or of Li Ji in this source, which only seems to cover the final sentence.
• 58: seems ok
• 59: page number?
• 60: ok

I am wondering if I should add {{fact}} tags to various information not in the citations given (dragon bones, Li Ji, "Oracle bone script is the direct ancestor of later forms of written Chinese"). —Kusma (talk) 20:52, 29 April 2024 (UTC)

• 61: It would probably be easier (and far less likely to break in the future) to split these up into one citation per sentence.
• 62: that's a really long page range
• 64: the source calls it 鳥篆 or 鳥蟲書, not 鳥蟲篆 (and my Chinese input method does not recognise that as a word). The zhwiki article is at zh:鳥蟲書. I can't find in the source where the regional forms used in non-Qin states were preserved as variants in the Shuowen Jiezi, or where 大篆 is discussed.
• 65: couldn't find all of the previous in this source. At least Li Si and 221 BCE are missing.
• 66: looks roughly ok, did not check every word
• 67: Chinese name for "neo-clerical" is not in these pages
• 69: looks ok
• 70: can't find "Sage of Calligraphy" in Qiu; also, Qiu p. 139 has different years of birth and death. If Qiu is wrong about this, you should cite Wang Xizhi from somewhere else, which should not be too hard.
• 71: if you find time, best to split this up by sentence
• 72: could not find, but does it mention the Sui dynasty?

Side remark: somebody should research more about our hero Qiu Xigui so the article can become GA :) —Kusma (talk) 10:18, 6 May 2024 (UTC)

I am with you on Qiu. Remsense诉 12:50, 6 May 2024 (UTC)

Source reviewing 2

Now using Special:PermanentLink/1222699083 so I don't review a weeks old version.

• 79: this should be citable to something in English. For example, pp. 75–76 of the (not super great) Han Jiantang book I mentioned earlier.
• 83: a lot of this seems more about evolution than about variant characters.
• 85: ok
• 86: not all of this is in the source; you say 朙 was "prescribed", the source just says it was "promoted".> "明 became the character's standard form" is true but not in the source. The identification of "Before the Qin" with "During the Eastern Zhou" is slightly OR.

  Does that 明 is listed in the "Modern print" column not count? Whoops, forgot to comma a page. Remsense诉 00:04, 8 May 2024 (UTC)

• 87: looks ok
• 91: only saw snippet view, looks ok but I couldn't find Bi Sheng
• 96: does Li mention bopomofo in this context?

Still only halfway through :( —Kusma (talk) 21:49, 7 May 2024 (UTC)

• 97: page number? I am not sure I fully understand the sentence anyway
• 98: fine. also mentions bopomofo and other methods, generally seems like a good source
• 99: couldn't access, but the example is also in Zhang 2016 p. 423
• 100: not sure I understand the citation. page number?
• 102: ok
• 103: looks ok
• 105: probably fine (wrong edition)
• 107: ok
• 109: no search results for "sinosphere", a word already used earlier in the text, and citing a 700 page book without page numbers looks like whoever cited this just hopes it is in the book somewhere.
• 112: looks ok
• 114: not happy. There is nothing about Vietnam or Japan here, and "Writing also arrived in Korea during the 2nd century BCE and spread throughout the country over the following three centuries" seems too far from clearly specified in the source to be in wikivoice.

Stopping for the night. Hopefully more time over the weekend. —Kusma (talk) 22:22, 9 May 2024 (UTC)

• I've already said I'm never writing an article this way again, but there's still no good reason for that disaster last paragraph other than sloppiness to exist on my watch, ugh. Apologies, and thank you for your patience. Remsense诉 23:42, 9 May 2024 (UTC)

• 115: could not access, but looks like a solid source
• 116: could not access, but looks like a solid source
• 118: ok, but a page number would be nice
• I am ignoring the Old Chinese; it doesn't really come across in this section why we should care about the pronunciation.

  It's puzzled me too, do you think trying to articulate this as a way that characters acquire different meanings would suffice? Remsense诉 23:36, 10 May 2024 (UTC)

  Yes. One or two examples (where the sourcing is best) would suffice for that. We want to talk about the characters here. (And perhaps this is a way to stress that "multiple readings" isn't a Japanese only phenomenon). —Kusma (talk) 13:29, 12 May 2024 (UTC)

  Does the article as presently constituted imply that? Remsense诉 13:37, 12 May 2024 (UTC)

  Not explicitly, but I can imagine a reader could go away thinking characters have a single meaning and reading. —Kusma (talk) 18:36, 12 May 2024 (UTC)

• 125: I am pretty sure not all of this is in the source. 25-30%? accelerating introduction of polysyllabic words into vernacular?
• 126: not sure my pagination is right, but I am having trouble finding the three concepts close to each other
• 127: sort of.
• 128: the source only claims this about Cantonese. the new characters are not "borrowed", are they? How is 冇 "borrowed"?
• E: that dictionary is not a source for the claim "generally phono-semantic compounds, although there are examples of compound ideographs"; also, is this in all dialects?
• F: does the dictionary really say that there are "a body of official characters used to represent" 台語/客家話? Link is broken so I can't check.

Hoping for more time over the weekend. —Kusma (talk) 22:57, 10 May 2024 (UTC)

• 129: looks ok from snippets
• 130, 131: seems ok
• 132: text looks ok but couldn't find examples in snippet view
• 133: looks ok
• 134: do you really need to cite a website in Korean? seems a fairly basic claim and it is in the following source
• 135: ok
• Is there a source for the Hanja examples / is it worth linking them to Wiktionary at least?
• 138: is any of the previous six sentences covered by this source? doesn't look like it
• 139: is this just for the half-sentence? then the previous sentence is uncited, and anyway 139 does not support it.
• 140: "no results found in this book for veritable records". None for "etymology" either, all of the three sentences seem unsourced.

Saving progress... —Kusma (talk) 19:18, 12 May 2024 (UTC)

• 142: this is some unknown reporter writing? seems reliable enough for the claim, but I can only read Korean through machines. Link The Chosun Ilbo?
• 143: is this a copyvio via some long-defunct BBS? not a particularly good looking source, and in Korean
• 144: I do not believe that all three of the statements preceding this citation are on one page.
• 145: are the 13th century and the "newly coined chữ Nôm" really on the same page?
• 146: snippet looks ok
• 147: Coulmas looks ok, but the page range in DeFrancis is a bit long for such a simple statement
• 148: this is a master's thesis, and there are no page numbers. if this is the "survey", it is only acceptable if cited by better WP:RS per WP:SCHOLARSHIP. If this just cites the survey, this is hopeless without a page number. The first three sentences of the paragraph are unsourced?
• 149a: looks ok? did not check for all of the scripts
• 151: where does it say it is a "semi-syllabary"? (also uses the official name zhuyin fuhao instead of the nice nickname bopomofo).

  I have tried to consistently use the WP:COMMONNAME bopomofo across the article. Do you see this as less ideal? I think consistency is most important in any case. Remsense诉 04:36, 14 May 2024 (UTC)

  I remember being one of the people asserting it is the common name at the move discussion. Certainly among language learners, "bopomofo" was the most common way to refer to it. I think it is fine, but I still wonder whether I should have done proper research before participating in that RM. —Kusma (talk) 21:05, 14 May 2024 (UTC)

• 149c: does not mention bopomofo using forms derived from Chinese characters; that seems unsourced.
• 152: Persian/Arabic seem not mentioned. (Also, when was it that Mongolian was written using PErsian/Arabic? These days Cyrillic is pretty popular).
• 153: I fail to see the relevance of this quote and would suggets to cut.

There seem to be several unsourced statements in every paragraph, and I haven't even checked every single citation. In a normal GA review (i.e. one that takes a couple of days to a week) I would probably have failed this about 50 citations ago. As this has turned into some kind of deep-dive peer review, I will keep going and only think about the GA criteria again after I have looked at your many improvements and corrections. Stopping here for the day. —Kusma (talk) 21:11, 13 May 2024 (UTC)

I am doing my absolute best at least not to make this a WP:FIXLOOP for you, as to properly respect all the time you've devoted to this. I am heartened to notice that most of the issues have been with material I haven't myself written, only attempted to cite afterward. I have learned to be much, much more active in stripping out every spurious claim in an article like this (when I started the article was 13k and I nominated thinking I had cut enough out and managed to cite the rest. It was simply not mentally navigable foe me at the time, but I've learned a lot better how to knuckle down and ensure that is the case from this.) Remsense诉 00:14, 14 May 2024 (UTC)

Spurred by this discontent with my own process, I've cut essentially the last material from the article that I didn't personally come across in my own research—thinking piecemeal sourcing was adequate, but this has been shown not to be the case—basically the better chunk of what you had left to review. While the need for some "education" section is more apparent than before, I am still fairly sure that the coverage is broad enough per the GA criteria. Also, the article feels a bit empty to me, like it doesn't really adequately relate the human color of the subject (as reflected in the sources) very well—though that might just be me feeling bad about the quality of my work. There are elements throughout my time with this article that I've cut and would like to reintroduce but haven't encountered the sources to best do so. Sorry again about not having the good sense to do this before. Remsense诉 09:41, 14 May 2024 (UTC)

That was a lot of cutting! Given how hit-and-miss some of the sourcing was, probably a good move. I really should have done the source reviewing and the content reviewing together to better discuss what should and should not be cut. We'll have to do a second pass through the content after this source review. —Kusma (talk) 20:58, 14 May 2024 (UTC)

I have a document with most of the content I've cut from this article since October so that I can grab things for potential readdition. Thank you for your patience as always. Remsense诉 02:35, 15 May 2024 (UTC)

Source reviewing part 3

Now at Special:Permanentlink/1223839594.

• 165: I can't see the "novel readings" in the source. I found it interesting that Qiu mentions government-driven standardisation versus population-driven, fairly ad hoc simplifications.
• 167: ok
• 168: none of this is in Chen 1999 p. 151
• 169: this one isn't at those pages in Chen either
• 170: what is the relevance of Chen 182–186 here? 150–153 is ok. Is the historical stuff in the other sources?
• 171: this seems only about pinyin, can't see Zhou Enlai and script simplification here.
• 173: isn't this pp. 156–157?
• 175: always dangerous to cite an entire paragraph to one ref tag, but most of this seems to be in Chen 1999.
• 176: ok as primary source, secondary in English should also exist
• 177: only references the previous sentence, not the first couple sentences of the paragraph. (Generally, in an article like this, I would suggest to avoid end-of-paragraph citations and use end-of-sentence citations everywhere, to make it easier to spot when an unsourced sentence is added). isn't this in one of your scholarly books?
• 179: looks ok
• 181/182: not the greatest sources the world has ever seen, but seem to work for the moment
• 184: where do the 4808 characters come from? (Incidentally, my favourite counterexample to "no simplified characters in Taiwan" is 台湾啤酒).

Lexicography tomorrow, then I'll go back to content reviewing. —Kusma (talk) 20:58, 14 May 2024 (UTC)

Hopefully today! Yesterday's wikitime was spent unproductively arguing with people who are wrong on the internet. —Kusma (talk) 08:54, 16 May 2024 (UTC)

主有失，皆交爭証諫。 Remsense诉 09:14, 16 May 2024 (UTC)

• 187: I am sure that there are non-Chinese books for this (could not verify, but looks plausible). You could be a bit more precise; "visual form" does not immediately suggest the ordering schemes by stroke count or radical + stroke count that are probably included here.
• 188: the content about 說文解字 is not in these pages.
• 189: no content about Kangxi at this page range? (source looks pretty comprehensive but it is really annoying that they translate titles so you have to learn more words like "EDCC" instead of just "Shuowen").
• 191: only found wrong edition, so could not fully verify.

OK, done with this bit! Next step: Lead section (at first glance, it seems incomplete and not summarising the entire article). —Kusma (talk) 21:12, 16 May 2024 (UTC)

Some more general source comments:

*Baxter 1992 is not cited.

*Cite 118 to "Handel" probably needs to go to "Handel 2019"

*What is the copyright status of the online copy of 漢語大字典 that you use?

Sourcing generally looks much improved! —Kusma (talk) 21:00, 20 May 2024 (UTC)

Lead

• Yeah, I haven't been sure what to emphasize in the fourth paragraph this lead should most definitely have. Totally going to be a thing where a fresh set of eyes will be extremely useful to me. Remsense诉 12:53, 17 May 2024 (UTC)

  Maybe you ought to start from scratch. Certainly classification/structure (types of charcters, strokes, radicals), history (Shang dynasty, Qin unification, regular script), reform are sorely missing; readers probably also expect some comment on how many characters there are, perhaps combined with modern computing info. I am not sure the phoneme-morpheme-ideograph discussion reflects the body, and also that it needs to be there. —Kusma (talk) 21:50, 17 May 2024 (UTC)

  I am not sure I would be able to rewrite it from scratch, if I can be honest. It's very difficult to adequately introduce this topic, and I don't think I have it in me to rebalance everything the article is about without making a bigger mess. I'll at least try the introduction of a fourth paragraph and touching on the points you mention, and we'll go from there. Remsense诉 01:12, 18 May 2024 (UTC)

  I think that touches nearly everything, but I'm not sure how to better balance the paragraphs. What do you think? Remsense诉 05:36, 18 May 2024 (UTC)

  It looks better now; still on the short side. To make it even shorter, I think you can drop the emphasis on only writing system used continuously as this is more a statement about the other inventions of writing. I'll let you know if I think of things I want mentioned. —Kusma (talk) 10:43, 19 May 2024 (UTC)

Final comments

• Who is "Yang Runlu" and why do we care what they say?
• pre-FAC: you need more for "comprehensiveness", and I would strongly suggest to find a good peer reviewer with little to no knowledge of Chinese to read this
• the lead section especially may need close attention before attempting FAC
• Not sure Qiu [47] needs to be a quote

In any case, I think this passes the GA criteria now. Great work! Sorry my review took so long. —Kusma (talk) 17:00, 24 May 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for the good news of GA.

By the way, Yang Runlu is a professor of Beijing Normal University and the author of textbook " Yang Runlu (杨润陆) (2008). 现代汉字学 [Modern Chinese Characters] (in Chinese). Beijing Normal University Press. ISBN 978-7-303-09437-0.". Ctxz2323 (talk) 00:50, 25 May 2024 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Did you know nomination

The following is an archived discussion of the DYK nomination of the article below. Please do not modify this page. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as this nomination's talk page, the article's talk page or Wikipedia talk:Did you know), unless there is consensus to re-open the discussion at this page. No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was: promoted by AirshipJungleman29 talk 20:27, 7 June 2024 (UTC)

(

• Comment or view
• Article history

)

Oracle bone inscription on an ox scapula, 11th century BCE

• ... that according to legend, the invention of Chinese characters (oracle bone pictured) caused grain to rain from the sky and ghosts and demons to wail in frustration? Source: According to one tradition, Chinese characters were invented during the 3rd millennium BCE by Cangjie, a scribe of the legendary Yellow Emperor. Cangjie is said to have invented symbols called 字 (zì) due to his frustration with the limitations of knotting, taking inspiration from his study of the tracks of animals, landscapes, and the stars in the sky. On the day that these first characters were created, grain rained down from the sky; that night, the people heard the wailing of ghosts and demons, lamenting that humans could no longer be cheated.
  • ALT1: ... that the oldest known Chinese characters were recorded on oracle bones (example pictured)? Source: The oldest attested Chinese writing comprises a body of inscriptions produced during the Late Shang period (c. 1250 – 1050 BCE), with the very earliest examples from the reign of Wu Ding dated between 1250 and 1200 BCE.
  • Reviewed:

Improved to Good Article status by Remsense (talk). Number of QPQs required: 0. Nominator has less than 5 past nominations.

Remsense诉 04:25, 30 May 2024 (UTC).

• I really like that first hook. Article is in great shape and eligible (congrats on the GA, btw), and I was able to confirm the story through Google Books keyword searching. QPQ is not needed. Looks like we're good to go. Generalissima (talk) (it/she) 03:05, 2 June 2024 (UTC)

  Oh no, I've just realized that I somehow forgot that images need to be used in the article. I chose this one as the oracle bone image used in the article itself actually already appeared on DYK and I didn't think it'd look that good, so I selected another one we've used from Commons. Is there anything elegant I can do here, do you think? Remsense诉 06:20, 5 June 2024 (UTC)

References

Amazing hook Remsense! ꧁Zanahary꧂ 20:22, 13 June 2024 (UTC)

Be sure to thank TheLonelyPather for both the selection and the general wording! Remsense诉 03:22, 14 June 2024 (UTC)

@TheLonelyPather You're a well-regarded king ꧁Zanahary꧂ 03:34, 14 June 2024 (UTC)

Thanks! 天雨粟 鬼夜哭 Cheers, --The Lonely Pather (talk) 08:48, 14 June 2024 (UTC)

thank you both, it's definitely one of the best DYKs I saw recently! Artem.G (talk) 07:32, 15 June 2024 (UTC)

Number of characters

Should the number of Chinese characters be in this article? — VORTEX³⁴²⁷ (Talk!) 13:07, 15 June 2024 (UTC)

There is not and cannot be a well-defined number as such. Moreover, there are already several points where numbers that answer similar, better-defined questions are given in the article, surely? Remsense诉 14:15, 15 June 2024 (UTC)

Potential source?

TWL's partnership with De Gruyter gives us access to O'Neill, Timothy Michael (2016). Ideography and Chinese Language Theory: A History. Worlds of East Asia, vol. 26. De Gruyter. doi:10.1515/9783110459234. ISBN 9783110459234.

The second half of this source seems like it could be helpful for expanding the section on the traditional 說文解字 classification, and maybe some stuff about the 爾雅. It does talk more about language theory (as foretold by the title) than writing systems, and the book swings wildly into Derrida and Nietzsche at times, but there should be useful information in there, whether for this article or some other one.

Congratulations on the GA and DYK btws! Folly Mox (talk) 21:58, 2 June 2024 (UTC)

Thank you so much Folly, you were a huge help to me, especially in the very early going when I had much less clue what I was doing.

Funny, this was actually one of the first books I read when researching sinograms, and I think that's why I haven't tried to cite it here for some reason. Obviously it's an RS and its claims are not particular to it, in addition to being a book I recommend quite often, so yeah good point! Remsense诉 04:09, 3 June 2024 (UTC)

@Folly Mox, what do you think needs to be added to this article re: 說文解字? My best attempts to be brief in my post-GA additions still have me butting up under 9600 words, and I wonder if I can keep under 10k in getting the article to FAC-ready state. Remsense诉 13:39, 19 June 2024 (UTC)

Remsense, I'm acknowledging having read your question here, and I'll do my best to think about it sometime this weekend when hopefully I will have the brainpower for a brief glimmer of intelligence. Folly Mox (talk) 11:56, 20 June 2024 (UTC)

Yesterday I told a friend that my memory was so wrecked and broken that if someone found it in a free pile they might very well take offence that it wasn't already in the garbage. Sighing, I'll try to have a look at this this weekend, rather than two weekends ago. Old and busted, Folly Mox (talk) 13:09, 5 July 2024 (UTC)

Folly, please don't worry! It means a lot, and you're never anything but the reason I'm an editor here. Remsense诉 13:57, 5 July 2024 (UTC)

Awww thank you 🥰 You've really done a lot of great work for the project, so I'm very honoured to have played a part in bringing you on board!

As to the question here, I think the article does a good job of summarising the important bits about the 說文解字 without getting lost in the details that belong at the main article Shuowen Jiezi. I think the only thing I might add right now would be that the book was the genesis of the 部首 system, which is still how Chinese dictionaries are organised, and often how people disambiguate homonyms in speech. I know this is mentioned already in § Classification (unless this refers to the larger 六書 theory) (and probably also at the main article Chinese character classification, which I have not clicked through to because I have to take my roommate's dog for a walk). Folly Mox (talk) 17:00, 6 July 2024 (UTC)