Talk:Written vernacular Chinese/Archive 1

Archive 1

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Along with the popularity of the vernacular language in books are the addition of punctuation : I assume, what is meant is: Wenyan did not use punctuation. Baihua did, which made it popular. Is this correct?

BTW: Did the change to horizontal writing coincide with this change?
Sebastian 18:18, 2005 Feb 28 (UTC)

Classical Chinese traditionally employed no punctuation. I believe punctuation started to be used during the early 20th century for vernacular writing, and reprinting of classical Chinese texts had punctuation retroactively added. I'm not completely sure when the punctuation system was formalized though and have no sources on this unfortunately. It could be during the conventions regarding the adoption of Mandarin as the official spoken language and the adoption of Vernacular Chinese as the offical written language in the 1910s and 20s that it was formalized. Punctuation can be used in vertical writing as well, and the switch to horizontal was not officially done until the creation of the People's Republic of China in the 1950s. -- Umofomia 19:32, 28 Feb 2005 (UTC)

One more thing... Taiwan actually retained use of vertical writing for offical purposes until just recently (see [1]). However, newspapers, novels, and other daily writings continue to be written vertically. People from Hong Kong also traditionally write vertically, although officially it has been horizontal since their return to the PRC in 1997. The use of computers also makes it harder to continue the tradition of vertical writing. -- Umofomia 19:38, 28 Feb 2005 (UTC)

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This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 31 January 2023 and 10 May 2023. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Spet9257, Lda1e7, Andy Niedermeier, Alvin mzm (article contribs).

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Proposed merge of Modern Chinese characters into Written vernacular Chinese

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section. A summary of the conclusions reached follows.

The result of this discussion was not merged. Remsense聊 12:39, 14 November 2023 (UTC)

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The pages seem to be about largely the same area. Remsense (talk) 23:15, 1 October 2023 (UTC)

If you read the two articles carefully, you will see they are not "largely the same". One is about a written language, the other is about the characters to write more than that language. For example, in modern Chinese you can find poems written in classical style, which are not vernacular. Another reason: in modern Chinese textbooks, you can easily find texts in classical Chinese, with classical characters not used in vernacular Chinese, though counted as modern Chinese characters. Ctxz2323 (talk) 10:01, 2 October 2023 (UTC)

There's a lot of prose in each of these articles that is directly copied either from another one of them or would fit very well within another article. I don't want all the novel contribution here to be undervalued!

Here are my thoughts:

• Modern Chinese characters seems to be a bit of a 'hub' article, with parts linking to various others and its scope unfocused, I think the parts of it that are not better suited to be included in pre-existing articles could be condensed.
  • Maybe some parts of Modern Chinese characters could be merged with Chinese word-segmented writing etc. into something like Modern evolution of Written Chinese? Chinese neologisms?
• Chinese character orders, Pinyin alphabetical order, Stroke-based sorting, GB stroke-based order, and YES stroke alphabetical order should probably be merged.
• Chinese whole characters and Chinese character components should be merged into something like Chinese character composition, with a link to Chinese character strokes (maybe merged with CJK strokes).
• Chinese character sounds and Chinese character meanings straddle article topics imo, parts of each should be put into existing articles regarding orthography, phonology, morphology, and semantics.

Remsense聊 19:04, 8 October 2023 (UTC)

The real situation was like this: When I was creating Modern Chinese characters and Chinese character orders, some of the sections became too long (too much content for the space of a section), and naturally branched into a sub-article, leaving a detailed summary in the original article. And there is some repetition of important contents between the section and the sub-article. This way of processing is allowed, or even encouraged, by Wiki. Am I right? Ctxz2323 (talk) 08:06, 13 October 2023 (UTC)

"Chinese character sounds", "Chinese character meanings" and many other titles of article or section came from the chapter titles of established textbooks on Modern Chinese characters. For example, in Professor Su's "现代汉字学纲要" （3rd Edition), you can find the following chapters:

现代汉字的字频与分析，现代汉字的字量，现代汉字的构形法（with subsections: 笔画，部件，整字), 现代汉字的构字法(internal structures)，现代汉字的简化和整理，现代汉字的字量，现代汉字的字音，现代汉字的字义 (in an earlier version)，现代汉字的字序， etc.

Su is a professor of Modern Chinese characters in Peking University (北京大学). Ctxz2323 (talk) 08:44, 13 October 2023 (UTC)

Certainly, they are intersectional subjects that are worth writing textbooks about, but I'm not sure having them as articles on wikipedia per se is the best way to organize its literature on the Chinese language. Linguistics articles on here tend to be divided up a certain way, and people expect to find certain information in certain places, with articles being sums of different literature on a topic. When there is a separate article in this way, it implies a bit of an ontological distinction, that the subject is meaningfully distinct from the parent article, and I'm just not convinced this is so for these articles. Remsense聊 17:06, 13 October 2023 (UTC)

I feel this discussion could benefit from additional perspectives, so I've posted at WT:LING#Ontology of articles on Chinese Characters — BillHPike (talk, contribs) 20:41, 15 October 2023 (UTC)

thank you very much! i should've thought to do so. i ought to take things there more often from now on. Remsense聊 20:46, 15 October 2023 (UTC)

It may be that there is scope for consolidating articles about various kinds of Chinese characters, but they are a completely different topic from the writing styles, Classical Chinese and Written vernacular Chinese. Kanguole 09:59, 16 October 2023 (UTC)

Right, right. So, there's a basic dichotomy between writing system as a whole and the characters within.

Written Chinese → Chinese characters

Written vernacular Chinese → Modern Chinese characters Remsense聊 15:26, 16 October 2023 (UTC)

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.