Talk:Baihua

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Need help[edit]

@Benlisquare: Hi! Since you basically created this dab page (albeit seven years ago!), I thought I'd ask for your help. Off and on, I work on the project Wikipedia:Disambiguation pages with links; we try to fix links in articles that point to DAB pages instead of the article they mean to. I'm usually pretty good at figuring out which article (if there is one) is meant in each case, but this dab page has me stumped.

The main problem is that none of the three articles listed here mention the word baihua in their texts. I do see báihuà in the lead sentence of Written vernacular Chinese, but no version of it (in the Latin alphabet, anyway) in the other two articles. My WikiInstincts tell me that Written vernacular Chinese is the main topic, and I would normally make this page a redirect to that, and add hatnotes for the other two. But I know pretty much zilch about languages, and I have no idea why the other two are listed here. Can you explain? — Gorthian (talk) 03:34, 19 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@Gorthian: Baihua isn't an English word, strictly speaking, which is probably why it doesn't appear in standard Latin letters in any of the pages. Baihua is the Chinese word for Written vernacular Chinese (and this should be the WP:PRIMARYTOPIC). In Pe̍h-ōe-jī (which is a Hokkien word), the "Pe̍h" (白) is pronounced "Bai" in Mandarin, and the "ōe" (話) is pronounced "hua" in Mandarin; hence, the disambiguation is there for the fact that "Pe̍h-ōe-jī" (白話字) in Hokkien can be pronounced as "Baihua zi" in Mandarin; this is shown in the Pe̍h-ōe-jī#Name section when you expand the "Transcriptions" section of the language box template. As for Bai language, in Chinese it is supposed called "Bai yu" (白語), however some people mistakenly interchange the words "yu" (語) and "hua" (話) (which both mean "language" under different contexts, loosely speaking). That one is listed there just in case someone is looking for Bai language, but doesn't know what it's supposed to be called. --benlisquare_T•C•E 05:18, 19 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for your thorough explanation, Benlisquare. After some consideration, and given that this is the English-language encyclopedia, I think it would be best to turn this page into a redirect to Written vernacular Chinese, with a hatnote there about the Bai language article. Since Pe̍h-ōe-jī can only be confused with Baihua by Mandarin speakers, I don't think that article belongs either here or in a hatnote. If you think this makes sense, I'll go ahead and make the changes. — Gorthian (talk) 21:50, 19 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose. This page should be linked to the Chinese Wikipedia zh:白話 page, which is a disambiguation page. In fact, the ambiguous term "Baihua" should never be used. We ought to use a more accurate term instead. -- Yejianfei (talk) 13:57, 13 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]