Talk:Chinese characters

Picking nits for FA prep

Smol thing first: at § Regular script, the first image is captioned A page from a Song-era publication printed using a regular script typeface. I think "typeface" is an inaccuracy here. The term typically applies to moveable type, and although that had been invented by the Song, it wasn't really in use. Song-era publications were printed by carving the whole page into a woodblock, not individual characters. Although the scribes had extremely consistent graphic skills, identical characters were not produced identically. You can tell from the image that the witness depicted was printed in this fashion: the graphical differences are most obvious between the instances of 書 in columns 4, 8, and 9; but even the consecutive 姓 in the first column have subtle differences. Also all the words are the same size and weight, so technically if this were moveable type it would be considered a font rather than a typeface. A page from a Song-era publication printed using regular script would probably suffice.

The less smol thing is that it's not really clear what is the organising principle behind § Primary sources. I can see calling Legge's translations of the Laozi and the Changes primary sources, and the databases for sure are. Some of the Primary sources seem to be Image sources: Maspero, the abovementioned 姓解, and Morrison & Montucci's 1817 Urh-chih-tsze-tëen-se-yin-pe-keáou. And it's not clear why 《常用詞辭典》 and 《客語辭典》 are under § Primary sources while 《古壯字字典》 is listed in the § Works cited subheading.

Anyway Remsense this is really excellent work. I'm pretty positive I could never produce something so well organised using my own brain. If you do take it to FAC, I'd be happy to do source verification to the extent of my access. Best, Folly Mox (talk) 13:23, 27 July 2024 (UTC)

Oh also I've just noticed that in the citation for the Xici, you've got fanti in |script-title=易經 and jianti for |script-chapter=系辞下. Recommend not mixing, but I'm not going to choose for you. 🫶🏽 Folly Mox (talk) 13:33, 27 July 2024 (UTC)

Oh, good catch! Remsense诉 22:07, 27 July 2024 (UTC)

Thank you very much for the careful look! I will be taking into account/addressing points ASAP. Please thank @Kusma a considerable amount, as it would be criminal for me to take all the credit for this—I suppose one could say it's a case study in two minds being better than one! Remsense诉 22:09, 27 July 2024 (UTC)

Oh geez sorry I must not have been paying close enough attention to the revision history! Also I guess there was that entire season I missed. Is it possible to co-nom an FAC? Anyway thanks Kusma, whom I'll not ping in duplicate of the above! Folly Mox (talk) 22:46, 27 July 2024 (UTC)

Re: primary sources—this may seem backwards but it makes a lot of sense to me, I've characterized every source used for a claim "unto itself" (e.g. citing the I Ching for what the I Ching itself says) as primary. Does that make sense? Remsense诉 01:33, 28 July 2024 (UTC)

That does make sense! Sorry I must have missed this a month ago. I have another brief suggestion about § Input methods: for the third paragraph, beginning Contextual constraints, it might be a better example to choose only homophones that are written identically in 簡體 and 繁體, which might make the "context" more clearly lexical rather than script-type, and avoid the construction [three words] are both. Folly Mox (talk) 00:42, 27 August 2024 (UTC)

I think I tried for a bit to find the maximally elegant pair of homopinyinic words for this but failed—did you have an example you liked? Remsense ‥ 论 23:43, 10 September 2024 (UTC)

I tried both when I wrote the previous comment and again just now by inputting arbitrary disyllables into my pinyin keyboard, and I'm not remembering enough of 簡體字 to be certain on what was and wasn't Simplified, with a secondary problem of being unable to differentiate between modern terms and archaicisms 🙃 So, I'll keep trying later when I have more focus and alertness. Folly Mox (talk) 02:37, 11 September 2024 (UTC)

Whitespace

@Remsense: Greetings! I'm writing about the recent revert keeping the &#8196 HTML entity. MOS:MARKUP has a general directive to keep markup simple. Was there a specific reason why U+2004 is preferred over a simple ASCII space? As far as I can tell from the chart on Whitespace character, the widths are pretty indistinguishable. -- Beland (talk) 22:55, 3 February 2025 (UTC)

Mere typesetting concerns. I was going to make sure to replace it with {{pad}} before I went to sleep tonight—thanks for reminding me, I'm going to go ahead and do that now. Remsense ‥ 论 22:59, 3 February 2025 (UTC)

What are the specific typesetting concerns that would override the directive for simplicity? -- Beland (talk) 23:36, 3 February 2025 (UTC)

The default appearance sans brackets used for components is too visually crowded in running text. Remsense ‥ 论 23:38, 3 February 2025 (UTC)

Comparing the two versions, the "pad" version looks in my browser like it actually puts in too much space, wider than a normal ASCII space. If the version with brackets (I assume you mean round parentheses) looks good to you, I think it would be preferable to use that than non-standard whitespace. -- Beland (talk) 00:14, 4 February 2025 (UTC)

This is all due to historically having a more distinct presentation for components, which used small caps and no brackets. Small caps were then objected to, and I guess at this point the distinction is not at all clear between glosses of characters and names of components, so I should just use brackets for both. Remsense ‥ 论 00:20, 4 February 2025 (UTC)

Great; thanks for the fix! -- Beland (talk) 03:12, 4 February 2025 (UTC)

Further reading

@CWH, do you mind if I move Wilkinson 6th ed. to the § Further Reading section? Alternatively, I could just switch all the citations to correspond to the 6th instead of 3rd edition. Remsense ‥ 论 17:43, 25 April 2025 (UTC)

A headache, but you are right to raise the question. I should have left an explanation. I started to get Wilkinson 6th page numbers, but realized that it would take a lot of time and not add much value, since the old edition is still a Reliable Source. But reference notes also have the second function of telling readers where to look if they want to see more on a topic, in this case, the 6th edition.

So it would be great if you want to get the 6th edition page numbers (though Wilkinson is getting ready to issue a "final" edition), but meanwhile the admittedly awkward but useful hack would be to leave the 6th edition reference in its present uncomfortable but useful position.

There are other things on this page to work on, such as style, accuracy, and consistency. Readers don't get much guidance on what to read at their level, since the notes often, correctly, cite specialized, erudite, scholarship that only a few libraries will have. It's not clear why we have the "Primary and media sources" section. Again, does not guide readers.

The helpful thing would be to list the appropriate selected works in "Further reading," but Policy discourages listing an item in both "Works cited" and "Further reading." Thus important works appear in the notes but can't appear there and others are lost in the clutter.

Well, apologies for a long answer to a short question! ch (talk) 21:44, 25 April 2025 (UTC)

I'll leave it as is, thanks for the lore! No, I really appreciate it, actually. Not to be a sycophant, but I've been meaning to ask how you feel about the article in general, given your background. Remsense ‥ 论 21:52, 25 April 2025 (UTC)