User talk:Daltac

/Archive 1

Proposed Tibetan naming conventions

A few months ago, I posted a new proposal for Tibetan naming conventions, i.e. conventions that can be used to determine the most appropriate titles for articles related to the Tibetan region. This came out of discussions about article titles on Talk:Qamdo and Talk:Lhoka (Shannan) Prefecture. I hope that discussions on the proposal's talk page will lead to consensus in favour of making these conventions official, but so far only a few editors have left comments. If you would be interested in taking a look at the proposed naming conventions and giving your opinion, I would definitely appreciate it. Thanks — Nat Krause^{(Talk!·What have I done?)} 22:18, 11 November 2010 (UTC)

Jie phrase: 禿劬當 -> 劬禿當

Dear Daltac, I am a last person to question Chinese transcription and your correction, but I (blindly) copied it from the works of Pulleyblank and Taskin, and I am puzzled, could these imminent experts make an error copying from the official publication (Bo-na, 1958). Could you please explain your understanding of their error? A number of other scholars used that Bo-na transcription in their readings, without corrections or comments. Barefact (talk) 11:23, 6 February 2011 (UTC)

Dear Barefact, 劬禿當 is the word recorded in the Book of Jin. I checked in both the Baina version you cited and the Scripta Sinica version. Pulleyblank 1962 gives the same word. I don't have access to Taskin, but the romanization qüitudan you gave pertains clearly to 劬禿當 (qútūdāng in pinyin). Is there any other scholar who also used 禿劬當? Daltac (talk) 13:38, 6 February 2011 (UTC)

Dear Daltac, thank you very much for your help. I used exactly the same PDF file from IHP, and I must myself have made that booboo when I found that same phrase in UTF form on a Chinese site that I definitely could not read, but should have noticed the transposition when I checked it against Pulleyblank PDF. You made it right, and I am grateful for your vigilance. A little note that may be useful to you: Taskin 1990 is using WG throughout, but even with that, I do not think that his phonetization tried to reproduce the modern WG phonetics, more likely he corrected the modern phonetics to the reconstructed form, or followed reconstructions used by prior researchers, and only converted it to Cyrillic, which I converted back to English form. Thus, using either pinyin or WG would or may distort Taskin's rendition. Barefact (talk) 01:54, 7 February 2011 (UTC)

Thank you for the info on Taskin's romanization. I don't think Taskin's system is of much academic value though, because he apparently used the same notation for -n and -ng, which are very different phonemes in all stages of Chinese. In the article I replaced it with Pulleyblank's reconstruction of Middle Chinese. Please let me know if you have a better suggestion. Also, I couldn't find Shervashidze's book. Could you add the ISBN and the original title if it is not in English? Daltac (talk) 02:41, 7 February 2011 (UTC)

Dear Daltac, in respect to n/ng, Russian publications are very close to [1], -n is depicted as нь (soft -n), and -ng is depicted as -н (hard n); and in my experience all authors are very meticulous about discriminating between the two; but here I come, and because in English the silent ь is dropped (sometimes it is indicated by ['], which may also be misleading), I rendered both of them as -n; the missing -ng is my fault; but since neither Turkic nor Russian have -ng, for Chinese retro transliteration of Turkic it is irrelevant or even may be misleading if -ng is located in the middle of the word: because of its agglutinative structure, a spurrious -g may completely change the meaning of the word, or the whole word. We can be positive that Chinese chronists, picking characters to represent phonetics of the phrase, did not try to specifically express -ng in the foreign language with weird phonetics, if they selected a character with -ng, it is by a pure chance.

I'm not so positive on this. In fact, Bazin reconstructs /-ŋ/ in Jie to correspond to Chinese /-ŋ/. Daltac (talk) 02:38, 27 February 2011 (UTC)

Шервашидзе И. Н. Формы глагола в языке тюркских рунических надписей, Мецниереба, Тбилиси, 1986///Shervashidze I.N. "Verb forms in the language of the Turkic runiform inscriptions", Metsniereba, Tbilisi, 1986. Before ca 2000, Soviet-zone publications did not have ISBN.

Thanks. There were a lot of mistakes in the transcriptions provided in the article. I corrected Ramstedt, Bazin and von Gabain using their original works. The same remains to be done for Shervashidze. Daltac (talk) 02:38, 27 February 2011 (UTC)

I do not think that replacement of Taskin with Pulleyblank was a good idea: Pulleyblank's exercise was a dead end, he did not come to any productive results, while Taskin stood on the shoulders of his predesessors, whose phonetization he used with very productive and corroborating results. I did not dig into A.Dybo work, she also follows the same transliteration and comes to identical reading. Of all transliterations, the mechanical use of B.Kalgren notation by Pulleyblank exercise is the least credible and not concordant with anybody else. If you send me e-mail with your address, I can add come other considerations. Regards, Barefact (talk) 01:22, 10 February 2011 (UTC)

Are you saying that Taskin's cyrillization is based on Modern Mandarin Chinese? Then I don't see how it is preferable to well-known romanization systems such as pinyin. At least pinyin is a direct romanization. A romanization of cyrillization is prone to more inaccuracies. Also, since the phrase was articulated in the 4th century, Middle (or older) Chinese is more appropriate here. Pulleyblank's work is based on his own reconstruction, whose merit is precisely its modification to Karlgren. Although Pulleyblank's conclusion cannot be taken for granted, it "seems to be the most well-founded" (la Vaissière). Daltac (talk) 02:38, 27 February 2011 (UTC)

I am saying that replacement of productive transliteration done by numerous scholars, each one a reliable expert on Middle Chinese, and whose analysis was consistent with the Chinese-recorded original lexicon and grammar, with a totally non-productive mechanical application of B.Kalgren scheme by Pulleyblank is not a good idea.

Taskin is famous for translation and annotatation of a number of Middle Chinese annals, all his translations are academic editions that underwent scrupulous academic scrutiny, and are highly valued by Sinologists. Neither Taskin's, nor Basin's, nor Ramstedt's, nor Von Gabain's, nor Shervashidze's phonetization is based on Modern Mandarin Chinese, and I do not know if Modern Mandarin Chinese even existed in Late Antique period; instead they are experts on Middle Chinese. Inaccuracies are inherent in any transcriptions, that is why it is a reconstrustion, and not a direct reading, the objective of the scholars is to make a plausible sense, that what the scholars have done, and Taskin summarized their work in his academic publication. Neither Pulleyblank, not any other scholar succeded in reconstructing the phrase in any other language, the only readings are those cited by Taskin, and they all concur on major points, which are not limited to phonetization, but include grammar, agglutination, application of proper suffixes, sourcing of the grammar and agglutination suffixes, etc.

Take 秀支 süčy, for example, not only SU is army in Turkic, but -čy/ji/dji etc. is a suffix of profession, to make a noun from a noun, thus süčy ~ "army man" in Turkic => army commander, general, etc.

Pulleyblank, BTW, eventually recognized the futility of his idea, and did not pursue it, as you well know. Vovin comes up with a funny Turko-Ket language, he is forced to resort to Turkic to make any headway.

As a minimum, you should have retained, with proper references, the form given in Taskin publication, and add Pulleyblank and any other scholar's opinion on a sideline as additional information, if you believe that it is essential for understanding the subject and is beneficial to the readers. Barefact (talk) 05:00, 27 February 2011 (UTC)

Please do not confuse transcription of Chinese with reconstruction of Turkic and other languages. I didn't remove a word from the Turkic reconstructions of Ramstedt, Bazin, von Gabain, and Shervashidze in the Jie people article. The reconstructions of Ramstedt, Bazin, von Gabain that you gave were corrupted and I corrected them using the original papers of Bazin and von Gabain. What I did remove is your transcription of Chinese, süčy tiligan Pugu qüitudan, which you attributed to Taskin. None of the four reconstructions in question has anything to do with your transcription. (All four predate Taskin.) Your transcription is clearly based on a very modern variety of Chinese, and constitutes an anachronism. For example, you transcribed 谷 as gu, but this character actually ends in /-k/ in Middle Chinese. BTW, all four Turkic reconstructions show signs of this /-k/. I disagree with your unsubstantiated claim that the transcription of Pulleyblank is a "mechanical application" of Karlgren. The phonology of Middle Chinese is now rather well-understood and Pulleyblank's system is not very different from other widely-accepted ones such as Baxter's. Daltac (talk) 08:17, 4 March 2011 (UTC)

I was not aware that you also changed (corrected) reconstructions of Ramstedt, Bazin, von Gabain, not that I would disagree with them, I copied them blindly as I did with the other transcriptions, but the correction 禿劬當 -> 劬禿當 is a good example of your courtesy.

I should note that all 5 transcriptions, including Pulleyblank's, are fairly close, and probably are as close to the source as it can ever get, considering a universally recognized fact that written data preserved in the script of foreign languages inevitably reflect phonological modifications. In that light both /-k/ and /-g/ are only indicators that the actual phoneme resembled g or k to a Chinese ear and could be transcribed in the Middle Chinese as, say, k or g, but not m or b. Given that inescapable fact, the original Chinese record must be given a major praise, Chinese annalists deserve to be proud of for their accuracy and honesty.

About "my" transcription, you are giving me too much of a credit, süčy tiligan Pugu qüitudan is Taskin's academic transcription, and if this WP was Russian, I would leave it in Cyrillics. For the subject phonetical matter, Latin or Cyrillic coding is irrelevant, they both transfer the same phonetics, and in that respect can be recorded in any other alphabetical script that has suitable phonetical apparatus to transit from one coding to another, with the same phonetical outcome. Within the range of the unavoidable phonological modifications, which Pulleyblank very romantically called "violence", the context is reconstructable in Turkic even without Chinese word-by-word translations, but the word-by-word translations provide one more corroborating evidence that includes not only the lexicon, but also 3 suffix formants peculiar to the Turkic language. These formants are documented in academical dictionaries, i.e. Kashgari, unbeknown to the ancient Chinese annalists, and grammatically corroborate accuracy of their transcriptions. All of these suffixes are still active, but not necessarily in the same Turkic language.

About Pulleyblank's opinions, once the Enisean, another Tokharian languages, he did not produce anything from his suggestions. No proofs. No results. Switching from Enisean to Tokharian shows the lightheadedness of his opinions, these languages belong to completely different linguistic groups, and one absolutely excludes the other. To cite his opinions as a proof that four emminent scholars, individually and as a group, were wrong, demonstrates the weakness of the opposing argument, if that is the best that can be produced as an argument.

The bottom line: The Turkic reconstruction has phonetics on its side, concurring Middle Chinese reconstructions on its side, concurring lexical material on its side, concurring grammatical material on its side, numerous emminent expertise on its side, numerous concurring reconstructions on its side. Manifestly, none of the opposing protagonists suggested an alternate reconstruction, with or without consenting opinions. And it is no wonder, you can't fake a semantically defined phrase from one language in any unrelated another language. Barefact (talk) 23:58, 4 March 2011 (UTC)

Publicity Department of the Communist Party of China

I haven't seen any response at Talk:Publicity Department of the Communist Party of China #Moved: "Propaganda" -> "Publicity". If there's no objection I'll move the article back.   Will Beback  talk  00:31, 20 September 2011 (UTC)

Naxi pinyin

answered on my page. — kwami (talk) 21:31, 6 February 2012 (UTC)

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