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The article notes that this is one of two systems that use latin letters to signify tones. I believe it is one of three, since Lin Yutang's "Simplified National Romanization System" is very clearly distinct from this despite being its precursor. I suggest updating the article to note that there are three and adding the reference to Lin Yutang's system from the page on his dictionary. — Preceding
unsigned comment added by
173.38.220.56 (
talk)
10:16, 26 September 2022 (UTC)
Yes, it's definitely 化 (-ization), not 話 (speech). It's given in this form in both the DeFrancis ABC Dictionary and Hann-Ing Tsyrdean / Hàn-Yīng Cídiǎn.
Ndsg16:31, 21 December 2006 (UTC)
More examples needed
Hello. I'm the author of the Short Course to which there's an external link at the end of this useful article. A couple of suggestions:
More examples of GR syllables, with Pinyin versions for comparison, would be useful throughout the article.
The section entitled Cosmetic changes is pretty baffling as it stands. The feature it describes is actually fairly simple, & would be brought out clearly with a few examples, such as yee, yeu and wuh.
No response yet, so I'm going ahead with a fairly thorough edit of this page, mainly in the Segmental Features and Tonal Rules sections. I'll also be adding some bibliographic references.
My intention is to generally make the presentation crisper. It's a useful article as it stands, but I think it's unclear in places.
Ndsg11:15, 3 January 2007 (UTC)
Progress report
The changes I propose to make consist of:
Additions
Revisions
So far, apart from a couple of minor edits and rewordings, I've added a section on Abbreviations commonly used in GR and a Bibliography.
Future additions will include Texts in GR and GR in Language Learning.
I'm also planning to rewrite some of the Segmental Features and Tonal Rules sections to make them simpler and clearer. I'm sure you'll let me know if you think I've been too drastic!
Ndsg12:10, 8 January 2007 (UTC)
I've now added the material on Texts and Language Learning (which also involved moving the existing part of the latter further down the page, after the description of spelling etc).
First draft of Segmental Features is now complete, so the only important change to come is the Tonal Rules.
Most of the editing & additions I intend to make are now completed. I've replaced the Bibliography with footnotes & References. There is no longer a Cosmetic Changes section, but some elements of it are incorporated in the Tonal rules.
I was getting a bit tired of seeing those question-marks at the top of this page, so I've now given the GR article an initial quality & importance assessment for WikiProject Writing systems. I've also flagged the article "as needing an independent reassessment or validation of its current rating".
Ndsg15:42, 12 January 2007 (UTC)
Re-ordering of sections
My initial reaction to Ikiroid's moving various sections to a super-section Description is quite positive. I think it does make the article clearer. I'll have a closer look tomorrow & give a more detailed response then.
Ndsg23:39, 14 January 2007 (UTC)
The "GR in language learning" section now includes a reference to a study apparently showing that GR was no better than Pinyin in teaching tones to students. I hope this reinforces the NPOV of the article.
NigelG (or Ndsg) |
Talk18:26, 21 January 2007 (UTC)
Recent additions
Sortable tables comparing GR & Pinyin spelling, including some examples of Chinese province names in the two systems.
An example of actual GR text from Chao's Sayable Chinese.
A speculative final section on GR in the age of the internet.
The article reads quite well, and has improved exponentially. However, I can't give it a rating higher then B, because the next quality level would be "Good article," in which case a formal assessment must be filed at
WP:GAC. For a general idea over what kind of article is B, GA, A, or FA, view
Template:Grading scheme. If I may offer some advice, you should add more inline citations and maybe some diagrams in an image format. The ikiroid (
talk·
desk·
Advise me)19:41, 4 February 2007 (UTC)
Thanks for your kind words & suggestions. At present, having spent some time on this article, I would probably benefit from more specific advice & editing. It's difficult for me to see it with fresh eyes! I hope to get some feedback from the other editors you suggested, one of whom (
User:Ravedave) has said he'll look it over.
Some of the colours have now been replaced with bolding: that's fine. However, I'd like to keep the colours in the tables & text where tones 2, 3 and 4 are being highlighted & need to be distinguished. Is there any objection to this? --
NigelG (or Ndsg) |
Talk10:21, 7 February 2007 (UTC)
Would it be an improvement if these two photos were included? They could be copied from the WP articles on these men (LY first had the idea of tonal spelling & Chao implemented it). --
NigelG (or Ndsg) |
Talk11:15, 9 February 2007 (UTC)
A recent edit added "Language", which is of course quite correct. But GR has traditionally been translated simply as "National Romanization". I have no objection to giving the literal translation with "Language" as well, but I'd prefer not to have it in the opening sentence of the article, on the grounds that it provides too much detail. I don't really think we need Trad & Simplified Chinese & Pinyin either—at least not all crammed into that opening sentence.
I added "Language" because Gwoyeu (or Pinyin Guoyu) means "national language". If the common usage is simply "National Romanization", feel free to remove the "Language" I added. --
JoshuaChiew12:33, 14 February 2007 (UTC)
I have the following problem: I did a Wikipedia search for "National Romanization" and failed to find this article. I really think the article should be modified so that a search for "National Romanization" finds this article.
Tomtab06:36, 4 June 2007 (UTC)
On second thought, it seems best to me to create a new page titled "National Romanization"
which redirects to this article. If there is no objection (and if no one does it first) I
will go ahead and do that in a week or so. I suppose the term "national romanization" may
legitimately be used in relation to languages other than Chinese, but none of those seem to be as strongly established as the use of the term "National Romanization" referring to GR. Eventually a disambiguation page may be called for.
Tomtab01:18, 5 June 2007 (UTC)
It was me that redirected "National Romanization" here. I would like to encourage you to
be bold; if something is wrong, just go ahead and fix it. If the fixing is not quite right, it can be fixed by somebody else with a better way. --
JoshuaSay "hi" to me!What have I done?13:01, 6 June 2007 (UTC)
Next step?
I think the time may have come to get this up to GA/A/FA if possible, so I've posted requests for peer review, both on
WP:PR & the
WP:China PR page. No response yet ...
On the to-do list:
use the Cite web template to wikify external links
more on history, probably derived from the online chapter of DeFrancis' 1950 book: GR implementation, reactions to it, etc
I have completed a thorough copyedit. Feel free to ask me to clarify any of my changes. I think this article will easily pass GA. FA reviewers generally look for lots of references, I'm not sure this has enough. --
Ideogram01:34, 20 February 2007 (UTC)
I'm extremely grateful to you for doing such a thorough job, which has made the whole article much crisper & easier to read. It's a pleasure to have such an experienced editor improve my work. My only disappointment is that you've got rid of Chao's humorous remark about spoken Chinese being "sayable, even if sometimes unspeakable"! Ah well, I suppose it wasn't very encyclopaedic ...
I would still like to find a photo of
Yuen Ren Chao to add to the article (top right of lead). Unfortunately even the article on Chao doesn't seem to have one. Any suggestions?
It was my pleasure. I found the article very informative and I love to learn about an interesting subject while I work. Unfortunately I wouldn't know anything about how to find a photo of Yuen Ren Chao. When I speak of references I mean citations to sources both in print and on the Web. I'm not sure what you mean by Wiki references but I don't think they qualify.
This seems to be your primary area of expertise but I would encourage you to contribute to Wikipedia in any other area that interests you. I think your greatest strength is your willingness, even eagerness, to work with others. This quality is sadly lacking in many contributors. --
Ideogram09:41, 20 February 2007 (UTC)
During
Copyright examination of content possibly useful for the article,
copyright status seemed to allow Wikipedia inclusion. Discussion can be read below. Note that this is not a final decision. The case could have been misinterpreted.
Wikipedia:Copyright problems takes care of possible copyright violations.
This was found via a search for
Yuen Ren Chao on
google images. When I contacted the webmaster about this photo, he replied:
" I scanned the photo from Chao's wife's book Autobiography of a Chinese Woman (1947). And since my copy of this is signed by both Yang Buwei and Chao himself in both Hanzi and romanization, I scanned in one of his signatures and superimposed it on the photo."
So the book was published 60 years ago, & the photo's a composite! Where does that leave us from the point of view of copyright? If, as seems likely, the book is still in copyright, I wonder how we can get a picture of Chao both for this article (
Gwoyeu Romatzyh) and, just as importantly, for
Yuen Ren Chao itself. --
NigelG (or Ndsg) |
Talk11:12, 21 February 2007 (UTC)
In the example, "一种请看的态度" makes no sense. The GRR seems to suggest the first tone for "qing". Given the context, I suggest that it should be 轻, although 轻看 also sounds awkward and should really be 轻视 (belittling). --
Sumple (
Talk)
11:03, 23 February 2007 (UTC)
Well spotted! My fault entirely (well, I could blame the poor quality of the hanntzyh rendering on my screen). Of course it's chingkann / qīngkàn [sic]. You're probably right about chingshyh / qīngshì—but that's not what it has in the text.
Now that your eagle eyes have spotted this typo, I'll increase the text size & check the rest of the Chinese text. Many thanks indeed for your help. --
NigelG (or Ndsg) |
Talk12:22, 23 February 2007 (UTC)
Oh, I didn't realise how old the text/guy is. It's quite reasonable that the original text uses "轻看", then, given that this guy would have been active in the formative years of vernacular Chinese, many of whose expressions are different to those used today. --
Sumple (
Talk)
22:58, 23 February 2007 (UTC)
Rules of thumb for tones
I've added a one-line rule of thumb for each tone in the
tonal rules section. I think this helps—but please let me know what you think. Maybe an infobox with all 4 rules of thumb would be better? (I'm not sure how to do this.) --
NigelG (or Ndsg) |
Talk16:30, 23 February 2007 (UTC)
In the editing window, the picture has a variety of variables divided by "|" symbols. The one with a number and "px" (i.e. 125px, 250px, 40px) is the resolution of the image. Sometimes it isn't there, in which case you'd add it after one of the variables. For example:
[[Image:Gwoyu.png|thumb|150px|The chinese word for "National Language" written in Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Pinyin, and at the bottom in Gwoyeu Romatzyh.]]
Simply change the numbers. I'll do it this time. Also, I agree with you that the picture should be in a more prominent location, so I've taken the liberty of moving it. Feel free to change the image's size if you don't like what I've formatted. The ikiroid (
talk·
desk·
Advise me)22:07, 23 February 2007 (UTC)
Actually what you really should do is leave the image size unspecified. Users can specify their preferred thumbnail image size in their preferences; when you specify a size explicitly it breaks this. I'll make the change; if you don't like it, you can revert. --
Ideogram22:41, 23 February 2007 (UTC)
Thanks, 'gram, for explaining all this. I still think it's too big (twice the size of the Lin photo!). The noise/signal (or ink/data) ratio just seems too large: it's not really telling us that much, is it? I'll experiment a bit. --
NigelG (or Ndsg) |
Talk22:55, 23 February 2007 (UTC)
It doesn't appear that way in my browser. Go to
[1], click on the "Files" tab, and make sure you have the right settings. --
Ideogram23:27, 23 February 2007 (UTC)
Do what you want. I'm not particularly married to anything about the picture, although it does help describe the topic, especially for Internet Explorer readers who can't see chinese symbols or roman diacritics in the article. The ikiroid (
talk·
desk·
Advise me)23:10, 23 February 2007 (UTC)
I think it's possible that the height of the image is to blame. The specification in preferences specifies the width. You might try editing the picture by moving the romanized text to the right of the Chinese characters so that it is wider than it is tall. --
Ideogram23:34, 23 February 2007 (UTC)
No hack necessary: I think you identified the source of the problem when you suggested my Prefs. The main problem is probably the ludicrously outdated resolution of my screen ...
Following comments from
User:Ravedave, I've rearranged the article to bring sections of more general interest towards the top. I think this makes sense, since not everyone will want to get involved in the minutiae of the tonal spelling—whereas a general description of texts in GR may be of wider interest.
I've made a start on further wikification by using the Cite Web template on Web links.
The intro should be a summary, currently it is completly info not found elsewhere
There needs to be a better discussion of when the system entered usage, when it fell out of use and where it is used today twards the top of the article, perhaps in the history section.
"GR was the official romanization system in the Republic of China (ROC) until 1949." - When did it become official?
language learning should probably go twards the top of the article
I have only a passing interest in linguistics so I cannot really tell you how good the whole middle section of the article is. I can however say that the article is lacking for non-linguists. All of the non linguistic stuff should be concentrated at the top of the article and worked together.
The Notes & References have now been rationalized. The References contain an alphabetical bibliography, while the previous references (footnotes) are now in a Notes section.
All that remains to be done now is to tighten up the lead section & link it more closely to the rest of the article, ensuring that it is a good summary. --
NigelG (or Ndsg) |
Talk15:14, 1 March 2007 (UTC)
Revised Lead & new Tone sandhi:
I've extensively rewritten the lead, which I hope now summarizes the article.
Also added a short section on Tone Sandhi, as per
Ravedave's suggestion.
I'm not entirely happy with the section title "The word as a unit". Any better suggestions? The section itself must stay, though.
I toyed with "Word formation", but then realized that that describes a different process. For the time being I'm calling the section "Compounds as words". --
NigelG (or Ndsg) |
Talk18:27, 2 March 2007 (UTC)
I've done some work cleaning up the intro. It really needs to be an intro, and not a corpus of really interesting facts ;-) The paragraph about the four tones in the intro still needs some work, its beginning does not flow well from the preceeding paragraph. I'll try to do some more work on it tomorrow (or, according to UTC, later today). I've migrated a good deal of the prose into other sections, feel free to move it around as you like, but let's try to keep the intro at a bit of a smaller size. The ikiroid (
talk·
desk·
Advise me)04:36, 7 March 2007 (UTC)
Thanks for your efforts, which have greatly improved the readability. It's always a help when someone looks at an article with fresh eyes.
See what you think of the intro now: I've compressed it further & changed the order a bit. Does it matter that the history section of the intro comes at the end (whereas it's the first section of the main article)? It just seems to flow better that way. --
NigelG (or Ndsg) |
Talk10:57, 7 March 2007 (UTC)
Now that the photo of Chao is—apparently—OK because it comes under Chinese public domain, I've included it at the top of the lead section. I've taken this opportunity to move various various other images & infoboxes, in an attempt to preserve an appealing visual balance. But I'm by no means an experienced graphic designer, so please improve it if you think it needs it! --
NigelG (or Ndsg) |
Talk23:29, 13 March 2007 (UTC)
I'm excited that you've managed to find a picture of Yuan Ren Chao too (I went ahead and added it to his bio). However, there should be a picture that pertains more to the romanization on top. I don't believe the first image is perfect either, as it exhibits pinyin along with GR. I think I'll make an image showing the four tones along with their hanzi. Is that a good idea? The ikiroid (
talk·
desk·
Advise me)02:31, 14 March 2007 (UTC)
Yes, that would be great. If you use colours for the hanzi & GR, it might be a good idea to keep to the colour-coding I use in the article—I leave that to you.
By "on top", do you mean at the top right of the whole article? I just thought that a photo of a human being would be more appealing—but I can see your point, since the article is supposed to be about GR rather than Chao. --
NigelG (or Ndsg) |
Talk10:34, 14 March 2007 (UTC)
Well, we need a picture that pertains to more than just the history and development section. I'll make the pic with traditional and simplified hanzi on the left and then the GR romanization on the right. What is the order of tones for ma? The ikiroid (
talk·
desk·
Advise me)18:51, 14 March 2007 (UTC)
Your proposed pic sounds fine. The 4 tones for ma are: mha, ma, maa, mah. While this choice of syllable has a long tradition, it's not really such a good one because the use of that -h- in the 1st tone (and the use of the basic form in the 2nd) is restricted to sonorant initials (l-/m-/n-/r-). In fact, good old guo might be better: guo, gwo, guoo, guoh ("wok, country, fruit, pass"). All of these except the first occur in the text of the article.--
NigelG (or Ndsg) |
Talk19:37, 14 March 2007 (UTC)
OK, I took your advice about using guo and used the first character that came up for each tone on my computer as examples. Should I change anything about the pic, or does it suffice as is? The ikiroid (
talk·
desk·
Advise me)23:06, 14 March 2007 (UTC)
Looks very professional. Just a couple of points:
The 3rd tone should highlight both os: ie guoo
The first tone example is rather rare (I think). I suggest you use 鍋 锅 guo ("wok, pan") instead.
I've scaled the image down by changing it to 150px. Is this the best way to do it? It could just be my old screen resolution that's the problem. --
NigelG (or Ndsg) |
Talk23:47, 14 March 2007 (UTC)
Thanks for all your hard work: you mean there's life outside Wikipedia?! The modification to the box caption in Compounds as words is an excellent idea.
Are you sure you don't want to use my tonal colour codes (rather than just red highlighting) in the new Guo image? I presume you thought it would just be too confusing to the reader: is that it? The first-tone guo you chose is apparently a common surname; but I think the wok has greater reader appeal (or is that just because I'm feeling hungry right now?).
I went ahead and changed the characters to what you suggested (I hope). I also fixed the double-o issue. However, I kept it all as one color, because I wanted to show the concept of changing spelling—it is evident here based on the varying hanzi that each word is different. We can save the colours for the parts where you describe the system in detail. By the way, I'm also compromising the image size at 200px; I'm not sure what your screen resolution is, but mine is 1024x768, and it displays 150px quite small, too small for an intro image. The ikiroid (
talk·
desk·
Advise me)03:54, 16 March 2007 (UTC)
That looks splendid: the character font is pleasing, too, BTW. As for the size of the image, I leave that to you, as your screen res is probably nearer the norm than mine. I'd rather not say exactly what mine is, if you don't mind ...
I've been doing a bit of tinkering here and there, but basically I regard my contribution as over now. We need to wait for
Khmer language to be reviewed for GA: I've set the ball rolling there with a few comments on
Talk:Khmer language. Maybe you could chip in too! --
NigelG (or Ndsg) |
Talk11:38, 16 March 2007 (UTC)