Tag Alias: syuka

Aliasing syuka → shuka

Reason: original name given as 朱華.

I guess this would be a good time to knock out Syaoran and Li_Syaoran too?
Unless we're keeping a Y instead of an H for some reason...hmmm

葉月 said:
Aliasing syuka → shuka

Reason: original name given as 朱華.

Shuka is a little simple, though; another tag could come along with the same/similar name. Shukaku is the only thing that comes close at the moment, though. The homepage is taupesyuka, maybe you could do something with that? "taupe_shuka"?

Of course, same thing could be said of the other end of the proposed alias, too. So, either ignore me or do a tag script wipe instead.

Godel said:
I guess this would be a good time to knock out Syaoran and Li_Syaoran too?
Unless we're keeping a Y instead of an H for some reason...hmmm

It wouldn't be the first time we've made a special exception, but I don't know/care about this one.

Do we have official rules for Chinese transliteration yet? I don't know if we'd categorically apply our typical Romanization rules in this case or not.

Yeah, we probably need someone with a little more knowledge of Chinese before we start painting these names with the same brush as Japanese names.

Shinjidude said:
Do we have official rules for Chinese transliteration yet? I don't know if we'd categorically apply our typical Romanization rules in this case or not.

Standard Pinyin would romanise it as Xiaolang.

I'm all for having a good, standard Chinese romanisation scheme. Anyone well-versed in that know how much contention there is between standard Pinyin and all the Chinese dialects? Do the ones with more sounds use something else? What about Taiwan?

葉月 said:
What about Taiwan?

I don't know about other dialects and if they even have enough sway for there to be special systems, but I do know that Taiwan has its own messed-up crazy mix of systems of romanisation, probably partly due to the Bugger Off, PRC, We're Not Associating With You thing. (Speaking as a Taiwanese citizen. I love my country very much, etc.)

(If you're talking about romanising the /Taiwanese language/ though, the one related to Fujianese, that's... still kind of a confusing, multiple-systems-in-use issue.)

I'd just go with Standard/Hanyu Pinyin for Taiwan as well. We technically made it official this year, anyway.

EDIT: I bet Canto has a system, though. Time to consult Mama Wiki.

EDIT2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yale_Romanization#Cantonese
I hope we have a Canto speaker who can also read IPA.

chainedwind said:
(If you're talking about romanising the /Taiwanese language/ though, the one related to Fujianese, that's... still kind of a confusing, multiple-systems-in-use issue.)

I'm not going there until we get characters with names in Taiwanese. Which thankfully hasn't happened yet.

And re: Taiwanese Chinese, good. If there's no strongly standard system and you adopted Pinyin anyway, it makes things just so much easier for us.

Getting back to Li Xiaolang, am I correct in thinking that name is (surprisingly enough) in the correct order? That is Li is his family name, and Xiao Lang are given names? Except that, uh, I just realised, technically Xiao Lang is two names, right? So should we tag him as li_xiaolang or li_xiao_lang?

葉月 said:
Getting back to Li Xiaolang, am I correct in thinking that name is (surprisingly enough) in the correct order? That is Li is his family name, and Xiao Lang are given names? Except that, uh, I just realised, technically Xiao Lang is two names, right? So should we tag him as li_xiaolang or li_xiao_lang?

Ehh... it's two separate characters, but I've never thought of them as two separate names; there's just surname and name (xing + ming). Wiki confirms -- given name is one word regardless of whether it has one or two characters.

chainedwind said:
Ehh... it's two separate characters, but I've never thought of them as two separate names; there's just surname and name (xing + ming).

They're pretty much just like Japanese names in that respect, eh?

Well, Chinese names had this generational name thing, in which the first character is shared amongst all the children in a given generation. Thus all of Xiaolang's siblings would be named Xiaosomething. Seen this way, it's three names:

1. Family name: Li
2. Generational name: Xiao
3. Given name: Lang

But, this custom is not totally universal and it has morphed over time. And it's a Chinese name of Japanese fabrication anyway, so who knows. But especially for names of historical figures recycled in fictional work, who do have actual Chinese-Chinese names, it'd be good to work out some quidelines.

I can help out with Chinese-related things as well. IMO, I agree with chained in that it would be more prudent to just stick with standard Chinese as far as using Pinyin, as the myriad of dialects in China all have words that sound different. And then there's Taiwanese and Kejia-nese (I don't even know how to say that in English heh)... so many to deal with.

As for the generational name thing:

For three-character names, sometimes the generational name is the 3rd character and not the 2nd, but you've got the basic idea. My family (I'm Chinese) is still pretty traditional so I've got the standard last_name/gen_name/given_name going for mine, but many families do away with it completely. Some families may also consult professional oracles/shamans/<religious position> for auspicious names as well, so it's really a hodgepodge of everything nowadays.

As far as what style to use, generally the Pinyin system combines the two names after the family name if it's a three character name, with notable exceptions such as Chiang Kai-shek or Sun Yat-sen bowing out to the Wade-Giles format (ugh) because of familiarity.

But yeah, anyway, if you were to convert "li_syaoran" to proper pinyin format, it would become "li_xiaolang".

Aha, good to know. So it's settled then: Chinese names go by Pinyin in the x_yz format. I'll make a separate thread to stick cleanup requests there. (Edit: forum #28786)

Just to make sure about characters I know have Chinese names: hong_meiling, lei_fang and wang_liu_mei are all proper Pinyin, right? Though the last one should be normalised to wang_liumei, which would be consistent with the katakanised name ワン・リューミン.

朱華 should read "Zhuhua" if you gonna follow the official Pinyin system.
I barely see Mainland Chinese artists' works post on Danbooru, pic that tagged with "Chinese" were mostly from Hongkong or Taiwan. Just beware that sometimes the Cantonese "pinyin"(Mostly used in Hongkong) could be confusing. Pronunciation of a Chinese character could be vary, depends on which part of the country you are from. Mainly it's a problem regarding to the accent. For example "Dr.吴", in official Pinyin system it will be "Wu", in the Cantonese "pinyin" sys it will be "Ng".

BarefeetChaser said:
朱華 should read "Zhuhua" if you gonna follow the official Pinyin system.

You're getting confused. The artist is Japanese, it just drifted towards the Chinese romanisation discussion.

葉月 said:
Thus all of Xiaolang's siblings would be named Xiaosomething.

It's not really the case for any of Xiaolang's sisters actually, though. First character in given name is all different for them.

Supposedly the generational name thing holds only for male children, though it's not an unbreakable rule.

葉月 said:
Supposedly the generational name thing holds only for male children, though it's not an unbreakable rule.

Not even a rule so much, any more. And sometimes parents do it for the girls too -- nowadays, at least with my circle of acquaintances and family friends, it's more like how English speakers might give their kids names starting with the same letter. Decorative. My father only knows one line of his family's poem, for example, and /his/ father knows a little more of it, and I only know my father's generation's character.

This is madness! We should use Japanese pronunciations of all kanji. I don't want to have to learn modern Mandarin just to look up someone's name.