Talk:on'yomi

Move?

Shouldn't this be moved to on'yomi, consistent with the usual romaji transliteration? Eiríkr Útlendi | Tala við mig 23:40, 29 March 2006 (UTC)

I don't know whether Wiktionary follows the same rules as Wikipedia, but w:Wikipedia:Manual of Style (Japan-related articles)#Romanisation states, "Article titles should omit apostrophes after syllabic n." Rodasmith 03:45, 4 April 2006 (UTC)

After looking over what the w:Wikipedia_talk:Manual of Style (Japan-related articles) page had to say (searching for "apostrophe"), I could find no clear discussion of why apostrophes are to be avoided. There's a lot of talk about why macrons should be used, and the justifications given about distinguishing words, achieving a closer transliteration, and clarifying pronunciation, would seem to also apply to using apostrophes between ん and following vowels. The main point brought up for why not to use the apostrophe essentially comes down to cosmetics -- correct or no, people don't like how it looks -- which strikes me as a weak argument. I can understand that viewpoint somewhat for an encyclopedia focusing on a general English-reading audience, but it seems very inappropriate for a dictionary where part of the point is to show the correct rendering, even more so when it's a bilingual dictionary and as such should be more specific to the conventions of the non-English language. Yet again even more so once you start factoring in words that, without the apostrophe, would have the same rendering in rōmaji: one such instance would be 文案 (ぶんあん, "draft") and 無難 (ぶなん, "safe"), which should be bun'an and bunan, but with the no-apostrophe rule both would be listed under bunan.

Such confusion in a dictionary strikes me as unacceptable. Some homophones are inevitable, but bun'an and bunan aren't even homophones. Beginning studiers of Japanese might not know better, but this is easy enough to allow for by adding a simple line at the top pointing to the other rendering, as we see on Wikipedia at w:Mandoline, for instance. I am strongly in favor of being more specific where possible, and breaking ranks with Wikipedia to use the apostrophe in article titles looks very much like the right thing to do here. But if anyone has a strong argument otherwise, by all means let me know. Cheers, Eiríkr Útlendi | Tala við mig 17:59, 5 April 2006 (UTC)

I also just remarked that the word is listed under an ==English== heading. Does this strike anyone else as odd? Sure, it's used by English speakers, but only in the context of talking about the Japanese language.  ??? Eiríkr Útlendi | Tala við mig 21:31, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

Given the lack of comment, I'm moving the page and creating a redirect from onyomi to on'yomi. Cheers, Eiríkr Útlendi | Tala við mig 00:18, 17 April 2006 (UTC)

Inter-language linking

As noted here, a bot recently removed the :ja: inter-language link. Is there any particular reason for this? I'll add the link back if I don't hear any objections. Cheers, Eiríkr Útlendi | Tala við mig 19:49, 3 April 2006 (UTC)

Well the link was to ja:音読, but wiktionary interwiki links usually have the exact same title so this would be linked to ja:onyomi which doesn't exist. I'm not sure if there's a rule about it, and personally I have no objection if you want to restore it. Kappa 23:25, 3 April 2006 (UTC)

Understood. In this case the en:音読み page, on which the ja:音読み link would then belong, hasn't been written yet. Sounds like that should happen first; I'll see if I can steal the time today to do so.  :) Cheers, Eiríkr Útlendi | Tala við mig 16:35, 6 April 2006 (UTC)

Language?

I really don't think this qualifies as an "English" noun, per se. To reiterate, it's only used by English speakers when talking about the Japanese language.

Even should we grant it English status, shouldn't the bulk of the entry be under the Japanese heading? Eiríkr Útlendi | Tala við mig 05:53, 19 April 2006 (UTC)

That dreaded "rōmaji" heading

Does this mean that on'yomi is not a noun in Japanese? The way the page is laid out would seem to suggest this -- it's a noun in English, but it's a "rōmaji" in Japanese. Those unfamiliar with the language will probably (and logically) assume that "rōmaji" is some sort of Japanese grammatical term. If we insist that some "rōmaji" label belongs on the page, let's at least make sure the term is properly tagged as a noun first -- its "rōmaji"-ness is less important than its part of speech. Cheers, Eiríkr Útlendi | Tala við mig 05:58, 19 April 2006 (UTC)

PS -- Sorry if I sound snarky, I don't mean to be, I'm just quite tired and my emotional radar is a little weak at the mo'. Cheers, Eiríkr Útlendi | Tala við mig 05:58, 19 April 2006 (UTC)

The entry page had no Japanese section, so I added one. The closest thing to a policy is at WT:AJ#Romaji entries, which recommends that romaji entries be very brief to reduce redundancy. To that end, they have a single POS section, "Romaji", which links to the main entry or entries. I followed that guideline, but would be happy to see the guideline changed. Based on this discussion and my recent edits to へ and に (using the included へ/compare に sub-page), I have a new thought on how to format the multiple transliterations of Japanese words. Basically, we would create a sub-page under the main entry and include that sub-page in each of the transliterations. I hesitate to propose that, though, because I don't know whether it would help or further complicate the discussion. Rodasmith 17:30, 19 April 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for explaining, Rodasmith. Thanks too for the link -- the WT:AJ page is big enough I lose track of things.  :(

Now that I've had some sleep :), your point makes sense, and to that end (simple rōmaji entries), I've added a "more at" addendum to point to the J entry that has the main meaning explication.

I too have spent some serious time thinking through the problem of Japanese renderings and Wiktionary. As best I can work it through, the best structure for an EJ dictionary would be to have romaji lookups redirect to the kana pages, with the kana pages providing either the full entry (as for へ, for instance) or serving either as disambig pages for the various relevant kanji pages (such as for 詰める and 抓る, which would both be listed on つめる), or simply as big pages where all words with that kana spelling would be defined (less ideal given how big and confusing some pages would become). Cases where multiple kanji are used for the same word, as with 駄弁 and 駄辯, would be resolved by simply having both kanji in the entry, listed perhaps as alternate "spellings", as it were, with redirects where needed.

But what I envision makes such liberal use of redirects that the only way to cleanly implement it (that I can think of) would require a different namespace to avoid collisions, like the collision at esa, for instance.

Or, perhaps to alleviate the issue somewhat, we could make all rōmaji entries simple stubs, with a quick-and-dirty translation / definition, and saying "see XXXX for full entry"? That still doesn't solve the problem of whether to put the main J entry under the kana or kanji headword*, but it's a start.

* Despite my on'yomi / kun'yomi classification attempt, the more I get into it, the more I find that the issue is quite complicated by 重箱読み (じゅうばこよみ, jūbakoyomi), 湯桶読み (ゆとうよみ, yutōyomi), and 百姓読み (ひゃくしょうよみ, hyakushōyomi) words. 重箱読み have the on'yomi on the first character and the kun'yomi on the second, 湯桶読み words are the other way around, and 百姓読み are a grab-bag of originally mistaken readings that became common enough that they were accepted. This is what leads me more and more to thinking that a separate namespace with redirects is the only way this would work very well within the technical confines of a wiki milieu. But I don't think that's going to happen anytime soon, given the direction Wiktionary has taken of having all languages lumped together for each target tongue (i.e., the different language namespaces, en.wikt... fr.wikt... etc., containing all foreign languages together on the same entry pages).

...

But, to cut back to the start of this, my original issue is that the "rōmaji", "hiragana", and "kanji" subheadings add no real information to the page, and introduce confusion. These are not parts of speech, but simply how the word is rendered, which is much less substantial information than whether a word is a noun or verb, especially given that most words are spoken. Anyone interested enough in Japanese to start looking into how it is written will learn all about rōmaji, hiragana, and kanji in their own due time. Anyone who already knows enough to understand roughly what these three are does not need these headings to tell them anything. That's my actual beef here. Does that make better sense? I should probably take this up over at WT:AJ if I can find the time later today... Cheers, Eiríkr Útlendi | Tala við mig 19:28, 19 April 2006 (UTC)