Talk:자장면

@User:Hippietrail. Mate this paragraph is off the track:

酢醬麵 (dated hanja spelling, common in older Korean dictionaries)
炸醬麵 (usual hanja spelling in current Korean dictionaries)

자장면 is not a Sino-Korean word and disobeys Sino-Korean correspondence rules, and no hanja should be assigned as equivalent to the Hangeul spelling. The Sino-Korean equivalent of 炸醬麵 is 작장면. The only connection which should be mentioned in the entry should be in 'etymology'. Wyang (talk) 05:42, 11 February 2014 (UTC)

@User:Wyang: We're not a prescriptive dictionary. We document the languages as they exist. These spellings have appeared in printed dictionaries and have many thousands of uses on the Internet. Orthographies are invented and pass between languages in all kinds of interesting ways. Our policy is to include all spellings of all words in all languages that have at least three solid documented usages. I would agree that three is a stupidly low number but otherwise I agree that we should include all obsolete, regional, dated, historic spellings, etc. We don't judge whether "color" or "colour" is "correct", and where we do we put it in a "Usage notes" section. Sometimes some of it also belongs in the etymology section or on the talk page.

I've now tracked down five variants of this, all with many thousands of hits:

• 炸酱面 - 820,000 results
• 炸醬麵 - 586,000 results
• 酢醬麵 - 326,000 results
• 醡醬麵 - 238,000 results
• 炸醤麺 - 183,000 results

The interesting this for us is to document where they are or were used, in which cultures, to what extent, etc., not to declare some as incorrect and remove them from the dictionary.

Feel free to bring up a discussion on the beer parlour. — hippietrail (talk) 07:46, 11 February 2014 (UTC)

@Hippietrail I think you misunderstood what I meant. These Chinese character forms are the etymological origin of this Korean word, but they are not alternative forms, since this is not a Sino-Korean word and they are not the equivalent hanja forms for this Hangeul-script word. It is fine to put Chinese-character forms in etymology, but they should not be regarded as "alternative forms". Wyang (talk) 07:49, 11 February 2014 (UTC)

Actually "alternative forms" is a very fuzzy section. It used to be called "alternative spellings". I personally wish it had a better name, but it's not easy to come up with a succinct term that fits nicely in a heading and captures all the possibilities.

Basically alt. forms encompass all spellings, even when they have different proununciations. This is readily accepted in languages with nonphonetic spelling like English, but there can be some untuition based resistance to it with languages with phonetic spelling. But actually it's perfectly natural. Languages existed before they gained writin systems and abound with variation. Look at English aluminum vs aluminium. They are "the same word" but they are both spelled differently and pronounced differently. They absolutely should be in each other's "alternative forms" sections.

The same applies here. There may be multiple ways to pronounce the name of this dish in Korean. There seem to be multiple ways to pronounce it in Chinese too, differing just by tone. In languages not everything maps perfectly one to one. This is an example.

The solution is to treat the "alternative forms" and "inflection lines" somewhat independently. The inflection line should map a particular hangul spelling to a particular hangul spelling. But the alt. forms section should also include those that differ. For some languages here there are even more wildly different forms that get put into the alt. forms section. — hippietrail (talk) 09:30, 12 February 2014 (UTC)

@Hippietrail

• Koreanologists categorise Korean vocabulary into three classes - native words (고유어), Sino-Korean words (한자어), and foreign loanwords (외래어), in analogy to how Japanese scholars sort their vocabulary. Dictionaries agree with each other on how a word is categorised, almost with no confusion (for example, please compare the three words for "milk": native 젖, Sino-Korean 우유 and foreign loanword 밀크, especially the '형태분석' (morphological analysis) field on those pages).
• Yes, there are different ways of pronouncing this Korean dish in Korean: either jajangmyeon, or jjajangmyeon, and the latter pronunciation predominates. Thus it is expected that jajangmyeon has jjajangmyeon as an alternative form, and vice versa. Both jajangmyeon and jjajangmyeon are classified as foreign loanwords (외래어), in that they are recent loans from Chinese and they violate regular Sino-Korean correspondences expected in Sino-Korean words. There are orthographical rules for writing foreign loanwords (ko:외래어 표기법, the rules for writing recent non-Sino-Korean Chinese loans are here) and there was a long-standing debate about what the correct way of writing this word was. Major dictionaries, following the National Institute of the Korean Language, were reluctant to recognise jjajangmyeon as a valid alternative form of jajangmyeon, since jjajangmyeon does not follow orthographical rules for loanwords. Jjajangmyeon was, as a result, either unlisted by dictionaries or given the definition of "Misspelling of jajangmyeon ('자장면'의 잘못 표기)".
  • Opponents to the strict prescriptive regulations of the National Institute of the Korean Language (ko:한글 맞춤법) argued that it is unreasonable to classify jjajangmyeon as a misspelling, since that is how most people would normally pronounce it, (possibly as a result of contamination by 짜다 (jjada, “salty”) and 짬뽕 (jjamppong, “Chinese-style spicy noodle soup”)). In addition, they also argued that jajangmyeon itself is not a faithful orthographical rendition of Chinese zhajiangmian anyway, since the fully orthographic word would be jajangmyen, and jajangmyeon was already partially "nativised" in that it uses the Korean word 면 (myeon, “myeon”), not 몐 (myen, “myen”). And jjajangmyeon, which represents a form which has undergone further nativisation, should not be regarded as erroneous.
  • In 2011, in an amendment of their Korean Standard Dictionary, the National Institute of the Korean Language finally recognised jjajangmyeon as a valid alternative form of jajangmyeon, along with 38 others [1][2].
• Getting back to the topic, all above was to show that jajangmyeon and jjajangmyeon are unanimously considered "foreign loanwords" in Korean, not Sino-Korean. They should be treated like other foreign loanwords, like 빵 (ppang, “bread”), 밀크 (milkeu, “milk”) or 댄스 (daenseu, “dance”), and should not list foreign-language forms as alternative forms. The Chinese-character forms only describe the etymological origin of the Korean words; they are not used to denote the Korean word, just as the Koreans don't write "milk" where 밀크 (milkeu) should be used, and the entry 밀크 (milkeu) should not list "milk" as an alternative form. The alternative ways of writing zhajiangmian belong there, not on this page. Wyang (talk) 23:24, 12 February 2014 (UTC)

@User:Wyang: Everything you say that I already knew was correct. Everything you say that I didn't already know is fascinating and just the kind of information that should be included in our Etymology and Usage notes sections.

Up until you draw the conclusion of how to use the English-Wiktionary-specific section Alternative forms. This is our own section and we use it in the same way across all our languages as much as possible. What academies or print dictionaries etc have to say does not guide how we use this section. We put all "forms" (which is a loose term, and perhaps unfortunately a bit too loose in some ways in Wiktionary jargon) into this section regardless of spelling differences, pronunciation differences, what other sources have to say. Basically if two "words" are etymologically "the same word", they need to be linked and this is the place to link them. Two words with the same meaning but different etymologies go into the Synonyms section. Information linking specifically/exactly orthogonal forms to one another go in the inflection line and/or certain language-specific sections/infoboxes. I'll try to find the page where we describe how the Alternative forms section is to be used. — hippietrail (talk) 09:39, 13 February 2014 (UTC)

• Please see: Forms and spellings / Alternative forms. — hippietrail (talk) 09:42, 13 February 2014 (UTC)

@Hippietrail I agree that two words which are etymologically "the same word" should be linked; thus jajangmyeon and jjajangmyeon should be linked via "Alternative forms". There should be no link in Alternative forms, however, for 밀크 (milkeu, “milk”) and milk, or for 자장면 (jajangmyeon, “jajangmyeon”) and 炸醬麵 (zhajiangmian), because the former is a borrowing from the latter, and the two words are therefore etymologically not "the same word". I wouldn't oppose linking 작장면 (jakjangmyeon, “jakjangmyeon”) and 炸醬麵 (zhajiangmian) via Alternative forms, since the former is the proper Sino-Korean form of the latter, and the two words are etymologically "the same word", just written in different scripts. But not for 자장면 (jajangmyeon, “jajangmyeon”) and 炸醬麵 (zhajiangmian), as the former has undergone nativisation to make it differ from the latter. Wyang (talk) 11:30, 13 February 2014 (UTC)

@Wyang Sorry for the delay. It seems we might agree after all. Of the five spellings I found, not all are used in any single language as far as I can tell, so there shouldn't be any "Alternative forms" section that gets them all. But each Korean entry should get all of the versions actually used in Korean, each Chinese entry should get all of the forms actually used in Chinese. The one place that all the forms should appear is with the {{also}} template at the top of each page. Well that should have all the Han character versions but not the hangul, kana, or transliteration versions. Well if somebody makes pinyin entries the pinyin entries that differ only by tone should also go into each others' {{also}} section.

— hippietrail (talk) 06:08, 16 February 2014 (UTC)

@Hippietrail I meant this Hangul entry should not have hanja as alternative forms. The Chinese-character forms are not used to write the word, but rather to denote the etymological origin of this oeraeeo. Wyang (talk) 23:39, 16 February 2014 (UTC)

Can you back up this hypothesis? Something like the front matter of a Korean dictionary expounding that they do this, etc? We know that basically Chinese character forms are no longer used to write this or any Korean word. But we also aim to document every other stage of languages' histories. — hippietrail (talk) 03:26, 17 February 2014 (UTC)

@Hippietrail For example, Daum dictionary, please try searching for native Korean words, Sino-Korean words, and foreign loanwords. Wyang (talk) 05:18, 17 February 2014 (UTC)