Talk:Běijīng

"English"

Horsepuckey.

It's just some people using actual tonal pinyin with running English text. If we aren't as a matter of course adding "English" to every romanized tonal pinyin form, then no "English" doesn't belong here either. — LlywelynII 11:19, 17 April 2023 (UTC)

@LlywelynII This is a really cool discussion. (@J3133 added these cites and I tweaked them a little.) I really don't know if this is part of English or not, but I tend to think that "some people using actual tonal pinyin with running English text" = English at some point, in a descriptivist worldview. Maybe proscribed. Maybe "wrong". Maybe needs to be classified in a special way. But I'm open-minded to the possibility that people are using the tonal spelling in English as English. But again, I see your point LlywelynII. But I can see J3133's point as well.
The word 'Běijīng' is not being put in parentheses in any of these cites. These cites (see Citations:Běijīng) for Běijīng are a difference in kind from a citation like the following, where the words in parentheses are not really meant as an English word:*

1994 July, Robert Storey, “South-West Taiwan”, in Taiwan - A Travel Survival Kit‎^[1], 3rd edition, Lonely Planet, →ISBN, →OCLC, →OL, page 241:

In the suburb of Tsoying (zuǒyíng) are two magnificent temples within a 10-minute walk of each other. Both are on the shore of a lake. The Spring Autumn Temple (chūn qiū gé) has a unique design and includes two pagodas that extend into the lake.

--Geographyinitiative (talk) 11:34, 17 April 2023 (UTC) (Modified)

@Geographyinitiative, LlywelynII: Since this is controversial, it cannot be removed without a RfD as LlywelynII did. J3133 (talk) 11:41, 17 April 2023 (UTC)

But it isn't controversial.

It's just ridiculous. Geographyinitiative would be fine with including ”English" alongside every pinyin entry because s/he doesn't care and loves learning about China.

This is just gatekeeping/ownership, given that you took the time to get some cites. I can also get cites of random words being used with tones, but none of the admins actually wants to spam "English" repetitions of the tonal pinyin entries. There's absolutely no point. — LlywelynII 12:11, 17 April 2023 (UTC)

@LlywelynII It's not gatekeeping to stop you edit warring over blanking the entry. I'm giving you a 24 hour ban, as your behaviour over this is outrageous. Theknightwho (talk) 16:41, 17 April 2023 (UTC)

@Geographyinitiative They aren't using it as English. They're using it as Chinese in the running text. Those tones don't have any meaning in English. They only exist in pinyin, which Wiktionary chooses to consider part of Chinese. We aren't going to spam every language in the world that uses a Latin alphabet for pinyin. We just need the one entry, which we already have. — LlywelynII 12:15, 17 April 2023 (UTC)

I agree here tbh, there doesn't seem to be any real reason to have an English section in this entry. Acolyte of Ice (talk) 12:20, 17 April 2023 (UTC)

@Acolyte of Ice, J3133, LlywelynII Hey, I am 100% ambivalent about this entry. I didn't make this sense, and didnt get the cites. (But I did check them.) lol! But let me ask you all: do you think these three cites (at Citations:Běijīng) prove a translingual sense for Běijīng? Or maybe do they prove the Mandarin sense already on this page? Or are they unable to prove a sense for anything? I think there is some kind of linguistic phenomena. So where do these cites go? I really don't know, I'm seriously open minded on this. --Geographyinitiative (talk) 12:29, 17 April 2023 (UTC)

RFD discussion: April 2023–April 2024

The following information has failed Wiktionary's deletion process (permalink).

It should not be re-entered without careful consideration.

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Běijīng

Rfd-sense-- @Acolyte of Ice, J3133, LlywelynII At Talk:Běijīng, LlywelynII is really opposed to this term being an English language word. I personally am ambivalent-- J3133 made this English language sense and added three good cites (see Citations:Běijīng). Acolyte of Ice was against keeping it. I'm just not sure what to think!! I don't know if this is English or not. I'd love to see the smart people take a look at this one. --Geographyinitiative (talk) 12:43, 17 April 2023 (UTC) (Modified)

Delete: I don't think the word with diacriticals would be used in ordinary English text. — Sgconlaw (talk) 13:08, 17 April 2023 (UTC)

@Sgconlaw Thanks for your input! That makes 100% sense, and I really agree. I get it! But what about these three cites (Citations:Běijīng) that J3133 found?? Do they prove the Mandarin pinyin sense? Do they prove some Translingual sense? What is that linguistic phenonmenon in those cites, and how does Wiktionary deal with it? Thanks! --Geographyinitiative (talk) 13:16, 17 April 2023 (UTC)

You are bound to find some uses of pinyin diacriticals in English language text, but I don't think this should be taken as an indication that the use of such diacriticals are the norm in English texts. It could just be code-switching, or sometimes texts aimed at people learning Mandarin Chinese will include such diacriticals. I recall, for example, that the print version of the South China Morning Post used to do this—when referring to something with a Chinese name such as a person or a place, it would give the name in Chinese characters and add the pinyin transcription with diacriticals. But this is far from the usual case. — Sgconlaw (talk) 13:30, 17 April 2023 (UTC)

Keep (change from Neutral above): In this diff from March, I explored the three good cites that J3133 had used to make this sense. Today, I found three more cites which I added directly to Citations:Běijīng. I think that Sgconlaw has missed the point- these cites don't document the "common" version of Beijing- they document an alternative form that occurs in specialized literaure indpendent from the presence of any Chinese characters or parentheses. So I have changed my mind personally to believe that yes, this is a (as J3133 says) "rare" alternative form of Beijing. The fact that English does not use the diacritics for anything doesn't change that in my mind. Those six cites at Citations:Beijing show a linguistic phenomenon that I think is beyond 'Translingual' and beyond 'Mandarin'. So I agree with J3133's original creation of this sense in this diff. I would never have made that edit, but now that I have confirmed J3133's three cites and I have found three more myself, I think there's some "there" there. If you all decide against this, I totally understand! (I have no further comment to make on this issue; please vote as you will below.) --Geographyinitiative (talk) 14:03, 17 April 2023 (UTC)

I would just comment that this may mean creating an English entry for many, many pinyin transliterations with diacriticals. — Sgconlaw (talk) 14:47, 17 April 2023 (UTC)

Delete: Pronunciation-wise, the version with diacritics suggests to me that it should be pronounced as if it were pinyin (with tones and phonemes not found in English and what not), which is different from the usual pronunciation of the English word Beijing without the diacritics. Also agree with Sgconlaw that this would result in many, many English entries for pinyin transliterations – I know this is rather of a slippery slope argument and perhaps these entries may never be created and cited, but it is obvious that this will be done very soon if someone (e.g. Geographyinitiative) puts in their effort. Wpi31 (talk) 18:11, 17 April 2023 (UTC)

Comment: in some print Bibles (and maybe still today online) you can see ample diacritics on transcribed Hebrew names, and I think possibly Greek names. These are an aid to pronunciation, and may also provide a one-to-one transliteration from the original language. Does anyone know what this is called? Its possible I havent seen it lately because it's mostly used with children's Bibles. In any case, I think we could all agree that there is no need to create an entry for, e.g. Nĕbücḥadnĕzzär even if it appears spelled that way in three different Bibles or other religious texts. On that rationale I'd be leaning towards deletion, however I'm not sure it's actually the same thing. Putting tone diacritics on the name Běijīng isnt likely to change anyone's pronunciation of it in English ... since they represent tones, it wouldnt be English anymore if someone did pronounce them. Also, Im not too worried about the prospect of more diacriticked entries like this. Creating properly cited pages is a lot of work, and it will only get harder if we move on toi less common placenames. —Soap— 19:47, 17 April 2023 (UTC)

Delete. I would view this as code-switching. — SURJECTION ^{/ T / C / L /} 19:55, 17 April 2023 (UTC)

Delete: this should be considered a direct rendering of Mandarin. It might also be worth noting that at least two citations are explicit about the non-English nature of their use of diacriticked text (i.e. what they record is not the nativised English pronunciation such as /beɪˈ(d)ʒɪŋ/, but instead Mandarin proper), so they in particular might not be good cites after all:

People's Peking Man p.xvii: "Rendering Chinese: [...] Where Romanization of Chinese is necessary, I use the pīnyīn system, complete with tone marks. Tones are essential to the Chinese language, and readers who hope to discuss this subject in Chinese will benefit from knowledge of the correct pronunciation."

Similarly, The Shortest History of China p.8: "Chinese is a tonal language—the contoured pitch at which words are spoken is integral to the meaning. When using Pinyin, I add diacritics to indicate the four tones of Putonghua in the first instance a word appears, as well as in the index, where you’ll also find the Chinese characters for individuals’ names." 蒼鳥 _{fawk. tell me if i did anything wrong.} 12:39, 18 April 2023 (UTC)

I vote delete per the aforementioned reasons pretty much. Acolyte of Ice (talk) 13:13, 18 April 2023 (UTC)

Comment. Note that we voted (maybe it was just in RFD) to remove Sanskrit entries that were written in the Latin alphabet with diacritics, rather than include them as either English or Sanskrit entries. It was a while ago, and I'm too lazy to hunt it down, but I would think this should follow that precedent. Andrew Sheedy (talk) 03:44, 20 April 2023 (UTC)

@Andrew Sheedy We include pinyin entries under Mandarin, and I don't think anyone's proposing that we remove that. Theknightwho (talk) 10:39, 20 April 2023 (UTC)

I do, below. I'm sure others have as well. — LlywelynII 07:32, 22 April 2023 (UTC)

Keep. The cites mentioned are in English, without an explicit intent to help the reader understand Chinese. I have a feeling that there are very few citations like these in English for other Chinese place names. CitationsFreak: Accessed 2023/01/01 (talk) 02:26, 22 April 2023 (UTC)

@CitationsFreak You would be wrong. The sources are explicitly (outside the quote) using pinyin to help the user with Chinese, as pointed out at length in the posts above yours. The tone marks have no possible meaning in the English language, except as a transliteration system of Mandarin (not English) pronunciation and the sources acknowledge that. They're just supporting using Mandarin to speak Chinese names, instead of using English.

More importantly, it will be possible for editors to create thousands or tens of thousands of these on the basis of random apparances of pinyin in English running text. It doesn't seem particularly helpful to do so, especially when you realize similar code switching happens in dozens of other languages and we'll need #French #German #Italian etc. entries for tonal Beijing. It's a waste of everyone's time and a misguided sense of formatting.

Alternatively, all pinyin entries need to be moved from "Chinese" to "Translingual", which is both more accurate and solves the problem coming and going. This is exactly the situation with using plants' Latin names in running text. — LlywelynII 07:28, 22 April 2023 (UTC)

If we don't count the Peking Man and Shortest History cites, there are still four cites that, as far as I know, use this spelling without helping the reader to pronounce this capital. CitationsFreak: Accessed 2023/01/01 (talk) 07:47, 22 April 2023 (UTC)

All pinyin entries are (or should be) under the Mandarin L2 label, which is honestly the most accurate. If we move them to translingual then anything that could be "codeswitching" could be under it, which wouldn't really make as much sense. AG202 (talk) 14:58, 22 April 2023 (UTC)

Nope, if we're counting this as 'English', then it is translingual. Otherwise, you end up spamming every major Chinese city and every language with sinologists with pinyin "citations" in the running text of some speakers. — LlywelynII 11:26, 26 April 2023 (UTC)

Note that I personally did not count this as English and specifically said that it should be under the Mandarin header. AG202 (talk) 13:16, 26 April 2023 (UTC)

No. I will not be happy if pinyin from Mandarin as spoken in mainland China were to be promoted against other varieties of Chinese. Daniel.z.tg (talk) 02:01, 29 April 2023 (UTC)

Keep per Geographyinitiative and CitationsFreak. Binarystep (talk) 13:00, 22 April 2023 (UTC)

@Binarystep Fair enough for GeoIni but CF's points were demonstrably wrong, as detailed by others within this thread. These mostly are sources that are going out of their way to use Mandarin pronunciation (/code switching) within English. They don't repeat that at every usage, but it is mentioned and is their rationale. There's no other possible meaning of the tones, other than marking the Mandarin pronunciation; it's like treating macroned Latin as optional English because English also has some Latin phrases. Beijing is English. The form listed here is just Chinese in English running text. Et al. is a kind of English. Et ālia isn't. — LlywelynII 11:28, 26 April 2023 (UTC)

Without commenting on whether this really is English, I would remind you that the mere fact that there's no good reason to do something in English doesn't mean that English speakers don't do it anyway. Chuck Entz (talk) 15:11, 26 April 2023 (UTC)

Delete. A foreign word or a rare misspelling of an English word. Vox Sciurorum (talk) 11:27, 26 April 2023 (UTC)

Delete This is the same as writing an English sentence that includes a italicized Latin word. Furthermore the pinyin is already under the Chinese heading below. Readers will recognize the tone marks as being from Mandarin and will know that it's a some kind of romanization of a Mandarin word which causes them to look at the corresponding Mandarin entry. Since having a separate English entry does not further improve readers' understanding, this entry should be deleted. Daniel.z.tg (talk) 03:40, 27 April 2023 (UTC)

Delete. Per my comment on the talk page I see no real value in keeping the English section of the entry. Acolyte of Ice (talk) 13:31, 27 April 2023 (UTC)

@Acolyte of Ice: You have already voted. J3133 (talk) 13:35, 27 April 2023 (UTC)

Oh, my bad...it's been so many days I forgot lol. Acolyte of Ice (talk) 14:01, 27 April 2023 (UTC)

Keep. Smaller settlements might be attested only with diacritics, even languages if mostly known by specialists, or should have diacritic forms as lemma forms. Fay Freak (talk) 11:57, 22 December 2023 (UTC)

Delete per Vox and others. This, that and the other (talk) 02:39, 5 February 2024 (UTC)

Sense deleted. bd2412 T 03:46, 15 April 2024 (UTC)

Shānxi [2] --Geographyinitiative (talk) 23:47, 15 April 2024 (UTC)

• @Geographyinitiative: I think these need to be taken on a case-by-case basis, so a separate nomination would be needed. bd2412 T 16:53, 16 April 2024 (UTC)