User talk:Soardra

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Thanks for your contributions so far. I took a look and they look good. If I could just offer one bit of advice: This site romanizes long vowels like おう with a macron, for example "Chūō Main Line." In addition there is currently a discussion going on about how to write Romaji entries, so I would suggest focusing on kanji/kana pages for now so that you don't end up wasting your time, as the Romaji entries might get trimmed down a lot. If you have any questions feel free to ask :) --Haplology (talk) 05:32, 16 March 2013 (UTC)

Where is this discussion you mentioned? Also, how I can keep track of article formatting discussions and decisions? --Soardra (talk) 06:19, 3 April 2013 (UTC)

Hi, sorry, I didn't see your reply until now. It's a bit late but the discussion was at the Beer Parlour, and a link to that can be found on the post-discussion vote here: Wiktionary:Votes/pl-2013-03/Japanese Romaji romanization - format and content. The Beer Parlor is the best place to go for formatting discussions. They should theoretically be on the talk page of Wiktionary:About Japanese, but nobody looks at that page so people take their questions or issues to the BP instead. --Haplology (talk) 16:35, 4 April 2013 (UTC)

That's fine, I tend to be a bit late with my own responses. :P Thanks for the info! --Soardra (talk) 21:29, 6 April 2013 (UTC)

Kanji Readings

Hello Soardra --

I just reverted your change to the kun'yomi kanji readings over at 亡. The inclusion of the kanji, and the hyphens, are intended to show where okurigana start. The flat kana + romaji format found on many kanji entries is deficient in that regard, and wrongly suggests that the kanji on its own includes all of the readings.

I've been experimenting with the best way to show okurigana, based in part on what I see in other dictionaries, and in part on what I see at the Japanese Wiktionary. We need some standard way of showing this here too. I've also tried using periods instead of hyphens to indicate the break in the kana spelling; I think those might be visually cleaner. If you prefer a different format to the one now at 亡, please let me know. -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 05:42, 3 April 2013 (UTC)

Ah, I see. I agree that periods look cleaner, as that is what I've done in my personal notes and such. Have you glanced at the formatting changes I've made to 表す? Right now I'm adding all of the compounds to 亡 and sorting them according to how common they are. I'm under the impression that "compounds" in the Japanese sense are words that have multiple kanji, so I was initially confused about the inclusion of 亡くなる in the list. Also, shouldn't naku naru (naku naru) be nakunaru?. --Soardra (talk) 06:07, 3 April 2013 (UTC)

Pardon me for jumping in, but about naku naru: it's difficult to put a "should" on Romanization but I've been adding spaces wherever possible to aid readability, which is the ultimate purpose of having Romanizations in my opinion. As for this case, I always put spaces between words so I would write it naku naru. --Haplology (talk) 07:06, 3 April 2013 (UTC)

• Ditto Haplology's comment -- die might be a single term in English, but the Japanese 亡くなる is really two terms -- 亡く (naku, “notly”, an adverb) + 成る (naru, “to become”). There's some argument about leaving out spaces if a compound of multiple discrete terms is used idiomatically (akin to English whenever), but I generally err on the side of adding spaces for legibility and easier parsing. -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 07:29, 3 April 2013 (UTC)

Japanese Article Structure

I actually just finished giving 表す a substantial reworking -- some of it was adding details, and some of it was fixing entry structure. For the latter, note that conjugation charts go under a Conjugation heading, which should be after the verb definitions, and one level below the Verb heading (i.e. it should have one additional = sign on the left and right).

That entry actually brings up one issue about data structure here -- due to the constraints of the MediaWiki software, we can't have redirects in the same way that dedicated Japanese dictionary software could, and given the looseness of Japanese spelling conventions, we wind up potentially having to put the same content on multiple pages. In this instance, the verb ​arawasu can be spelled many ways. Our rough-and-ready convention has been to put the main entry under the most common spelling, and to have all alternative spellings point users to that entry. Along those lines, I might reorganize the data later, as I think 表わす with the わ might be more common.

Anyway, thanks for your work! If you have any questions about the changes to 表す, please let me know. Cheers, -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 07:29, 3 April 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for fleshing 表す out. I know the usual conjuction format that's being used, but what I'm really wondering is, why do we put the conjunction under it's own heading? There is rarely any additional information given for conjunctions other than the table and it just seems really redundant. This was especially confusing when I looked at the Wiktionary general guidelines for declination and conjunction placement. The only reason I see for the heading is for up-top navigation, which I rarely ever use in the first place.

The third bullet in the pronunciation section looks a bit jumbled and hard to read.

Why did you use IPA that is different from what is given in the wikipedia:Help:IPA for Japanese page? Is it incorrect?

Why did you move 著す to "See Also" instead of listing it as a homophone under pronunciation like the general guidelines suggest? Is it just that we don't have a Japanese-specific template for homophones or do you think the term/placement is potentially confusing? --Soardra (talk) 08:27, 3 April 2013 (UTC)

• Re conjugation headings, I think that's partly so it will show up in the TOC, and partly so it will have a link anchor. If I understand things correctly, a lot of the WT infrastructure (in terms of scripts and bots) relies on the presence of various headings and other entry features. Missing bits can cause problems, evidently. Plus, there's some argument for maintaining a certain visual consistency to minimize reader confusion.
• If the pronunciation section you refer to is the pitch accent, yes, that's a bit of a mess at the moment. I'm adding it to entries so the information is there, while working on a proposed change to the template. Thankfully, once the template change is finalized, all the entries that reference it will be automagically changed to match. The relevant discussion is at [[Wiktionary:Grease_pit/2013/March#Japanese_pitch_accent_template_Template:ja-accent-common]].
• Re Wikipedia:Help:IPA for Japanese Oh dear, that looks to be a bit out of date. I had a long-ish discussion a while back with w:User:Kwamikagami about IPA for transcription of Japanese. Let me see... yes, that thread is now at w:User_talk:Kwamikagami/Archive_17#Q_re:_recent_change_to_Japanese_phonology.23Vowels. I've hewn mostly to the outcome of that thread, with the general exception of using [a̠] instead of [ä], in part because these are equivalent, and mainly for visual consistency because most of the other diacritics are below the letters.

Note too the distinction between phonemic transcription (generally looser, often closer to romaji, and contained in /slashes/) and phonetic transcription (intended to be as close to actual pronunciation as possible, and contained in [square brackets]). Since Japanese entries should all already have romaji spellings, phonemic transcription seems less useful, so I've stuck to giving the tighter phonetic transcription.

• Re homophones, all Japanese homophones are already listed (or at any rate should be listed) on the corresponding kana spelling page. I've avoided giving homophones partly for this reason, and partly because some terms have a truly ridiculous number of homophones, such that listing all homophones on each of the pages for all homophonic entries quickly becomes a maintenance nightmare. If you feel that it would be useful to mention homophones on entry pages, we could certainly have a sub-heading that refers the reader to the kana page for the full listing. Do you think that would be helpful?
• Re 著す, I was partly working from my view on homophones, and partly following the lead of the w:Daijirin dictionary, which lists this entry separately from the other arawasu spellings, probably because the meaning of this one spelling is so limited and specific.

I think that hits all of your questions. Let me know if I left anything unclear. -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 05:44, 4 April 2013 (UTC)

Again, thank you for taking the time to explain this all to me. I've posted a reply pertaining to the pitch accent in the Grease pit, if you want to take a look. Hopefully a better template will be decided on! Also, now that I've thought more on the homophones, I can see why it would be best not to explicitly list them. I think the kana listings should be intuitive enough and it reduces the amount of extra code that needs to be put into the pages. --Soardra (talk) 20:25, 6 April 2013 (UTC)

Edit Tools

It occurs to me that I didn't give you any links to lists of IPA symbols to use for transcribing Japanese. I've gathered those together for my own use at User:Eirikr/edittools. Feel free to copy from there. -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 18:05, 4 April 2013 (UTC)

Thanks :D Although I haven't quite figured out how to get it to show up on the edit pages... Never-mind, I figured out what I did wrong. Was linking to a non-existent js instead of Conrad's. What do you use your IPA 子音 section for? And never mind about that too... XD I didn't realize that was consonants. --Soardra (talk) 21:54, 6 April 2013 (UTC)