Posted under General
shii said:
If you like China so much, go start Zhǐxiāng.com where you can use all the pinyin you like. But this site is for Japanese art primarily.
I'm Taiwanese, hon; China can do what it likes as long as it leaves us alone. Danbooru is an /English-language/ website dedicated to a certain style of art, not a Japanese website dedicated to Japanese art.
shii said:
...a certain style of art developed in Japan, which was later copied into Korea, Taiwan, America, and so forth.
Your point being...? Because my point still stands. Not a Japanese website dedicated to Japanese art; it's an English-language website dedicated to a certain style of art. Japanese is not the point.
Specifically, it's a style of art usually called 漫画/畫, which is "manga" in Japanese, "manhwa" in Korean and "manhua" in Chinese. But the word we use is the Japanese "manga", because Korea and China simply imported the Japanese characters and changed the pronunciation to match their own orthography. Similarly, we should use Japanese orthography to pronounce the words found in overwhelmingly Japanese art. If you prefer another country's orthography you should set up your own tagging system that uses that orthography primarily.
shii said:
Specifically, it's a style of art usually called 漫画/畫, which is "manga" in Japanese, "manhwa" in Korean and "manhua" in Chinese. But the word we use is the Japanese "manga", because Korea and China simply imported the Japanese characters and changed the pronunciation to match their own orthography. Similarly, we should use Japanese orthography to pronounce the words found in overwhelmingly Japanese art. If you prefer another country's orthography you should set up your own tagging system that uses that orthography primarily.
You are missing the point. We are romanising Chinese words using systems developed for the romanisation of Chinese words. If you are under the impression that such a system is being imposed on Japanese words, you are wrong.
Also, I don't know about Korean, but "manhua" doesn't refer to the Japanese style of art popularised by animanga; it simply means "cartoons".
I agree it would be wise to have a consistent method for romanizing Chinese names, which apparently is decided to be Hanyu Pinyin. But whether it should be applied to all names which are "supposed" to be Chinese? I don't agree. We're already inconsistent on the matter thanks to all of the Rot3K permutations. I'm pretty sure everyone who knows the source material will agree that all of their names are "supposed" to be Chinese. But we don't actually use them in that fashion, and admittedly part of this is due to convenience to avoid extremely cumbersome qualifiers. Let's look at some examples from this thread.
I'm assuming (since I haven't seen the source show), that tianzi is used as a tag because in the actual show, it is actually pronounced in that fashion? As in, they speak Chinese rather than Japanese? So this is an example where we do use the Chinese romanization because that's the only one that makes sense. A more familiar example to me is Hong Meiling, which also fits the "Her name is actually Chinese and rendered as such".
Syaoran/Shaoran/Xiaolang, on the other hand, was converted into Japanese. As much as Xiaolang is accurate to his name were it in Chinese, the fact is he was given a Japanese name, not a Chinese one. He might be from Hong Kong, but his name is not.
Koakuma said:
I'm assuming (since I haven't seen the source show), that tianzi is used as a tag because in the actual show, it is actually pronounced in that fashion? As in, they speak Chinese rather than Japanese? So this is an example where we do use the Chinese romanization because that's the only one that makes sense. A more familiar example to me is Hong Meiling, which also fits the "Her name is actually Chinese and rendered as such".
Tianzi speaks Chinese as much as any other foreigner speaks a foreign language in Code Geass, which is to say she doesn't. Her name however is pronounced more or less as it's spelled. Her partner Li Xingke however would be more along the lines of Shinku if we were going for direct Japanese-romaji transliteration. post #267135 actually parodies this fact. Li Xingke is tag we've used in Pinyin for some time now.
Koakuma said:
Syaoran/Shaoran/Xiaolang, on the other hand, was converted into Japanese. As much as Xiaolang is accurate to his name were it in Chinese, the fact is he was given a Japanese name, not a Chinese one. He might be from Hong Kong, but his name is not.
Do you have any evidence to back that up? For one thing, it doesn't make a lot of sense to set up a character as native Chinese / Hong Kongese and give them a domestic name. For another Syaoran/Shaoran/Xiaolang (小狼) doesn't even show up in the ENAMDICT Japanese name dictionary.
Koakuma said:
Syaoran/Shaoran/Xiaolang, on the other hand, was converted into Japanese. As much as Xiaolang is accurate to his name were it in Chinese, the fact is he was given a Japanese name, not a Chinese one. He might be from Hong Kong, but his name is not.
He wasn't given a Japanese name, rather a Chinese name given a Japanese pronunication. It's similar to calling John Smith "Jon Sumisu".
Shinjidude said:
Do you have any evidence to back that up? For one thing, it doesn't make a lot of sense to set up a character as native Chinese / Hong Kongese and give them a domestic name. For another Syaoran/Shaoran/Xiaolang (小狼) doesn't even show up in the ENAMDICT Japanese name dictionary.
It doesn't mean you can't read the individual characters in Japanese, which is what Koakuma was getting at, I think. Though reading 狼 as ラン is rather unusual.
Also, looking into it, if we were to say "hey lets use the Japanese reading for his name's (h/k)anji, the best we would come up with is the ON reading of "Shourou" which is obviously wrong.
EDIT:
葉月 beat me to my own rebuttal of myself. I guess saying it is obviously wrong is saying kanji can't have atypical readings which itself is wrong. But "ran" isn't one of 狼's listed readings.
I don't mean he has a Japanese name as in it is literally from Japan. But I mean that it is read/spoken as if it were one. This is partly why I brought up the Rot3K situation, "Sousou" isn't so much a Japanese name as it is what "Cao Cao" would be in Japanese. Likewise with Xiaolang.
Considering that unlike some other situations, Syaoran is actually fairly close to Xiaolang as far as turning into Japanese, I could technically understand converting it into Xiaolang, especially if that ラン reading is really unorthodox. I just feel that we shouldn't march around to convert all names which are Japanese versions of Chinese names into Chinese simply because they are "supposed" to be Chinese as a rule. There are points it can be used (Xingke I guess is on the border of this, since even if it is closer to Shinku in pronunciation I think it's understood within the source that they're explicitly after Xingke), but I feel it is unwise to make it a definitive and immutable law.
Koakuma said:
This is partly why I brought up the Rot3K situation, "Sousou" isn't so much a Japanese name as it is what "Cao Cao" would be in Japanese. Likewise with Xiaolang.
That's actually, a little different, as "Sousou" is drawing from the on'yomi Japanese pronunciation rather than a pronunciation of the original Chinese. If it were the same type thing then his name would be pronounced "Shourou" rather than "Shaoran".
Recycled historical characters / characters from classic epics are a problem in and of itself. I believe we had one instance before where we distinguished between the Japanised version incorporated in a show and the original Chinese name reserved for the character as such. I can't recall what it was, though.
We settled on using the Chinese names for the Dynasty Warriors versions of the characters (which make up the perponderance of the "real" versions of the characters here), the full Japanese name + Japanese Style name for the Ikkitousen versions (since thats how they are referred to predominantly in that series) and Japanese name only for the Koihime Musou versions. We've yet to encounter a major problem with this system, so long as we don't get a fourth series involved in a major way.
Example:
