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Category talk:Korean chengyu

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Latest comment: 5 months ago by Theknightwho in topic RFM discussion: October–December 2023

RFM discussion: October–December 2023

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Latest comment: 5 months ago9 comments7 people in discussion

The following discussion has been moved from Wiktionary:Requests for moves, mergers and splits (permalink).

This discussion is no longer live and is left here as an archive. Please do not modify this conversation, but feel free to discuss its conclusions.

Specific Proposals:

  1. Move Category:Korean chengyu to either:
    1. Category:Korean four-character idioms or
    2. Category:Korean hanja idioms
  2. Similarly move the subcategories of Category:Chengyu by language to their language-appropriate or English-glossed titles

Rationale: Currently all subcategories of Category:Chengyu by language use the word "chengyu" even though this is a strictly Chinese term for these idioms that have been absorbed into various Asian languages from Classical Chinese. However, many of these languages have a completely different term to refer to these idioms. For example, in Korean the word for this category of idioms is typically 사자성어 (四字成語, sajaseong'eo, “four-character idiom”). Thus, someone looking for the Korean four-character idioms is not going to search for the Chinese term, which makes the category unfindable. I presume the same for other affected languages.

1a: For Korean specifically, my preference is to move Category:Korean chengyu to Category:Korean four-character idioms (gloss of 사자성어 (四字成語, sajaseong'eo)), in line with the standard Korean term and also most common way to speak about these Korean phrases in English and thus the most findable variant. I acknowledge, however, that this is not perfectly precise, since it does not reference the shared etymology and because there is a small number of such phrases that are not actually four characters.

1b: Less preferred but not unpalatable is the option to move Category:Korean chengyu to Category:Korean hanja idioms (gloss of 한자성어 (漢字成語, hanjaseong'eo), where hanja refers to sinographs in Korean). This acknowledges the Sino etymology and accommodates the non-four-character members; it is also what the Korean Wiktionary uses. However, this is less standard—사자성어 (四字成語, sajaseong'eo, “four-character idiom”) appears in the Standard Korean Dictionary, whereas 한자성어 (漢字成語, hanjaseong'eo, “hanja idiom”) does not.

1c: A third option that I do not propose but do acknowledge is using the transliteration of Category:Korean sajaseong'eo or Category:Korean hanjaseong'eo. This would be inconsistent with other subcategories in Category:Korean language that are specifically in English, not transliterated Korean.

2: For other languages, I am much less qualified to propose specific new categories. There is a list of translations on the page for chengyu, but I find that the Korean offerings are not consistent with standard usage, so I would want other languages verified before adopting them.

Koanium (talk) 17:29, 18 October 2023 (UTC)Reply

Support moving of all of the chengyu categories, including Chinese, to Category:LANG four-character idioms. – wpi (talk) 14:37, 19 October 2023 (UTC)Reply
@Wpi @Koanium Support renaming to 'four-character idioms'. Benwing2 (talk) 05:55, 1 November 2023 (UTC)Reply
I'm just seeing this now, and I think there might be some idioms that are considered 成語 but not four characters. I wonder if those would just have to be not considered chengyu then. — justin(r)leung { (t...) | c=› } 13:50, 1 November 2023 (UTC)Reply
Special:Search/incategory:"Chinese four-character idioms" intitle:/...../ -hastemplate:zh-see
—Fish bowl (talk) 21:03, 1 November 2023 (UTC)Reply
Personally I think "four-character idioms" need only be prototypically four-character in length; compare English blackboard, which isn't always black. Benwing2 (talk) 09:06, 2 November 2023 (UTC)Reply


@Theknightwho Were you aware of this discussion when you unmoved e.g. Category:Cantonese four-character idioms back to Category:Cantonese chengyu? Was there another discussion I haven't seen? — excarnateSojourner (ta·co) 17:49, 10 August 2024 (UTC)Reply

@ExcarnateSojourner There were a few discussions on Discord about the "Han characters" and "four-character idioms" categories, since the consensus for unifying their names had never been very strong in the first place (e.g. see the discussions at Category talk:Chinese hanzi, where CodeCat/Rua tried to force the move on everyone else, and it was only later moved due to duplication/technical considerations). The primary motivation for moving them in the first place was to incorporate them into the category tree, which meant there had to be standardised, language-neutral names for them, so that they could all be grouped under Category:Han characters by language or Category:Four-character idioms by language.
However, I recently modified the category tree to allow aliases on a per-language or per-family basis, which meant the original justification no longer applies, so it's now possible to have Category:Chinese hanzi, Category:Japanese kanji, Category:Korean hanja, Category:Chinese chengyu, Category:Japanese yojijukugo etc. Note that they still get categorised under the correct "by language" category, despite the names being different.
I didn't move Category:Korean four-character idioms, though, because I saw from the discussion above that the consensus was pretty strong for that name specifically, irrespective of any technical concerns. Theknightwho (talk) 18:15, 10 August 2024 (UTC)Reply
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