Talk:Gǔ (surname 古)

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Requested move 23 October 2021

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

The result of the move request was: Not moved per consensus. Anyone in the know is free to move the Gŭ surnames to the proper caron form. No such user (talk) 11:47, 2 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

– Disambiguating by providing the surname in Chinese glyphs is not useful for the majority of our readers, as they do not understand Chinese glyphs. It also violates WP:UE which requires us to use English in titles. If a cleaner form of disambiguation is proposed, I have no objection; I believe that the current title is the "wrong" title, rather than my proposed title being the "right" one.

Regarding specific aspects of this proposal, it also fixes a small issue with Gŭ; it should be a caron, not a breve. "Long" does not need disambiguation within Chinese, while "Tan / Qin" does not need disambiguation at all, though it would also seem best to avoid dualling it by changing to Tán (typically used with diacritics).BilledMammal (talk) 06:05, 23 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]

  • Comment: Options are also needed for Xu (surname 徐), Xu (surname 許), Xiang (surname 項), and Xiang (surname); the current titles aren't acceptable per policy, but I am uncertain for their translation. BilledMammal (talk) 06:13, 23 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose The current arrangement is the result of a long and gruelling RFC concluded 7 years ago at Talk:List of surnames romanized Li#RFC regarding multiple Chinese surnames transliterated to the same surname in English that at one point involved Jimbo Wales. I personally do not want to see this issue reopened. The suggested alternatives listed here are unhelpful and reductive and frankly offensive to Chinese speakers. _dk (talk) 07:39, 23 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]
    • Apologies, I was unaware of that previous discussion. However, the current status quo does seem to be in direct opposition to WP:UE, so perhaps it is time to reopen the topic, although I now suspect a RM is the wrong forum for this. Further, if you have a suggestion for an alternative target that will address the objections you raise then I suspect I will have no objections to it. BilledMammal (talk) 07:57, 23 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]
    • If you could, please note any changes you make to your !vote if it has been replied to before you make them. While I am here, five of the proposed moves don't require disambiguation beyond a "surname" or "Chinese surname"; do you also object to those? BilledMammal (talk) 08:38, 23 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Support any change that removes a non-english symbol/glyph/word from the disambiguation. Disambiguation is supposed to help readers know what page they are heading to (from search results) or reading, having part of it not in English makes it completely useless. Gonnym (talk) 09:00, 23 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]
As for some of the specific cases:
Adumbrativus (talk) 09:30, 23 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose the ones with the translations. Article title stability. Seven-year long consensus. Readers who don't know Chinese care neither about the character nor the translation. Ones who know Chinese will find the characters helpful, the translations utterly baffling at best, deeply hurtful at worst. As _dk implied, the degree to which the article titles with the translations would not be WP:NEUTRAL is not even funny.
A suggestion and a correction:
  • Li (surname 李) should just be at Li (surname). 李 is the second-most common surname. The other Li surnames do not even come close. WP:PTOPIC definitely by usage and probably by long-term significance, too.
  • Li (surname 理) is the third tone, not the fourth; it is a homophone of 李. To be fair, picking up Mandarin tones beyond childhood takes effort and time.
Explanations
Neutrality: Translating even common parlance regardless of language is already a demanding task. For Chinese-to-English translations of names especially, there exists big-H History: bad translations have been used to marginalize Chinese diaspora. I have nothing against plums, but that's not his name.
These are millions of real readers' actual names, you know. Not cool.
Article title stability: So. "Translating" (if even possible) surnames is tricky for proficient Mandarin speakers; a last name rare enough can stump even native speakers. That's why you can't translate some of the surnames. There are no translations. Any possible inroad to one is some vestigial feature of archaic Chinese that maybe some (poor, poor) grad student in that subject would recognize, never mind you and me and Wikipedia reader # 3.
Even in modern Mandarin, 利 can also mean "interest" as in "conflict of interest" or even the investment kind. Or lucky, like on the red lucky candy for Lunar New Year's. "you" is never translated as 酈. 厲 can mean "fierce". It can also mean "powerful" or "masterful". This just doesn't help article title stability, at all. Unless you'd like to spend time corralling consensus on bad translations for all these articles? Trust me: you have better ways of spending your time.
Not what comes to anyone's mind: Furthermore, readers do not intuitively think of surnames etymologically, only when prompted. Your last name? Smith? Papadopoulos? Johnson? Takeda? Nguyen? I see no evidence that Chinese is different.

Cheers, Rotideypoc41352 (talk · contribs) 16:55, 23 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]

You make some good points about the issues with the proposed titles, but I am not convinced that the current title is suitable. For the Li's, how about:
By using the Cantonese pronunciation for disambiguation, we should be able to address the issues you raise while complying with WP:UE and providing a useful distinction for our readers who do not read Chinese. BilledMammal (talk) 17:18, 23 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Before moving, the other Li surnames should go through a WP:BEFORE check; any that fail, we should consider redirecting to List of surnames romanized Li after merging any useful, sourced content.
Purely out of curiosity: may I kindly please ask you: how do you imagine the reader of your imagination would try to search for...say, Gǔ (surname 谷)? In the interests of reducing bias, I prefer you type up your answer first before reading mine.
Rotideypoc41352's hypothetical reader searching for Gu
The reader of my mind would search for Gu (surname) and land at Gu (surname). If they're just looking for a Chinese surname Gu, then they don't care which character it is, and that article serves their needs.
If they are looking for a specific Gu surname, even if they don't know Chinese, they'd copy and paste the character in question from Gu Kailai, for example. If they don't know Chinese, they'd guess which character is the last name. They don't have to recognize it, nor do they even have to know how to properly pronounce it. They don't even have to be able to describe it very well while looking at it; that is, they don't even have to be able to tell me "uh, sad eyebrows with a mustache over a square". They just have to copy-paste it from whatever source that set them on this trail of curiosity.
They would not search by Jyutping: either the last name in question is not common in Cantonese-speaking areas, the subject bearing the last name is not Cantonese, or the reader themselves know not Cantonese but English alone or with some other (mutually unintelligible) dialect.
Similarly: how do you imagine a reader who reaches Gǔ (surname 谷) would understand the article to mean, before reading it? What about Gu [insert Jyutping equivalent here]?
Rotideypoc41352's hypothetical reader who reaches the Gu article by chance
In my mind, a reader who reaches Gǔ (surname 谷) would understand the article to be about...a surname.
A reader who reaches Gǔ (Jyutping equivalent here)...they would have no idea what they've stumbled upon until actually reading the article.
Thank you for your time and patience with my curiosity. Cheers, Rotideypoc41352 (talk · contribs) 23:00, 24 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose. When used in words, most of these characters have multiple different meanings – it seems the proposal is to take one of those meanings and use it for disambiguation. This is arbitrary, and it ignores the fact that when used as surnames, these characters are just that: surnames. In the name "李白", "李" doesn't mean "plum", it just means a surname. User:Rotideypoc41352 is right that "Readers who don't know Chinese care neither about the character nor the translation. Ones who know Chinese will find the characters helpful, the translations utterly baffling at best".
If it is essential to disambiguate in a way that doesn't use Chinese text in article titles, I might suggest doing it by tone and radical: e.g. Li (surname 李) → Lǐ (surname with tree radical). Still, I think the current titles are preferable to that. —Mx. Granger (talk · contribs) 17:48, 24 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose we generally shouldn't use Pinyin tone marks in titles, the translations are completely useless, and using Cantonese for disambiguation is equally bad. Perhaps Li (surname 李) should simply be Li (surname), everything else is fine as-is. The best way to disambiguate Chinese characters is to use the actual characters. User:力 (power~enwiki, π, ν) 22:06, 24 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]
    • to avoid confusion, note that my knowledge of Chinese is as a second language, and there is no Li (surname 力). User:力 (power~enwiki, π, ν) 22:11, 24 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]
    • Also, I am aware some of the current titles use pinyin tone diacritics; I don't want to start an argument to remove all of them here and now. I'm not opposed to the technical request to switch from a breve to a caron. User:力 (power~enwiki, π, ν) 22:14, 24 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose any renaming of Chinese surname articles which remove the actual surname, in Chinese, from the article title. Whether or not the majority of our readers understand Chinese is not relevant, as we are not translating or providing etymology for the surnames (consider, in apposition, articles titled Smith (surname, metal fabricator), Jones (surname, hanker), Johnson (surname, John's son) etc). The current disambiguation scheme is the only workable one, and functions equally well for all readers whose devices support unicode display. This proposal belies a deep misunderstanding of how names work, and of the lossiness in transliterating Chinese graphs into Latin letters. Folly Mox (talk) 11:37, 25 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • The only one that I would accept is the move from Long (surname 龍) to Long (Chinese surname). The Chinese characters having the meaning doesn't mean the surname comes from the word. Sometimes the surname comes from another word with similar pronunciation but different radicals. The Chinese characters might also contain various meanings across history. It is impossible to disambiguate using direct translation in modern days to explain everything. I would also like to point out the move "from Tan / Qin (surname 覃) to Tán" is not appropriate at all since Tan (surname) (譚) also has the same pronunciation (Tán). Sun8908 Talk 10:46, 26 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • oppose. I am sympathetic to the issue with the current titles, but the ones suggested are far worse. The literal meaning of a person's name is of academic or historical interest, but not something you consider in day to day use of their name, definitely not a good way to disambiguate the names. In isolation they would just be confusing.--2A00:23C8:4583:9F01:716C:7BA1:5958:CB07 (talk) 08:01, 27 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose a move from ugh to ugghhh. —  AjaxSmack  04:51, 29 October 2021 (UTC)[reply]
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

@No such user: I tried to move this article to the correct diacritic Gǔ (surname 古) but was unable to. Maybe page mover rights are needed for some reason? —Mx. Granger (talk · contribs) 19:40, 2 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Mx. Granger: Not sure what happened, but anyway I moved it now without problems. Is there any other that needs moving? I suppose there's weak consensus to leave Gǔ (surname) alone; I'll add a hatnote to that article pointing here. No such user (talk) 08:20, 3 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks. The others look okay to me. I think it would be reasonable to move Long (surname 龍) to Long (Chinese surname), but not sure if there's consensus for that. —Mx. Granger (talk · contribs) 18:22, 3 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
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