Talk:Changsha Kingdom

About 番 Fan and 鄱 Po

 * Amazing that you made so much improvement so soon. The history section now reads much better, thanks for your edits!

About the two characters, I was also a bit confused about them when I wrote about that part. The sources I cited actually all use 番 instead of 鄱 -- but none of them included the pronunciation. I'm certain that Fanyang County (番阳县) is the same as Poyang County (the Chinese Wikipedia says that the name was changed during Eastern Han). But I don't know whether Wu Rui's nickname "Fanjun" is also like this, or the "Fan" here just means "foreign". Anyway I assumed the 番's were all alternate form of 鄱, so I used the translteration "Po" for all of them. Hope I got that right. Esiymbro (talk) 11:27, 5 August 2019 (UTC)
 * First, you're very welcome. Thanks for the friendly attitude, and thanks for contributing such interesting and well-researched stuff.


 * Second, per Wiktionary and the Chinese Wikipedia, it seems like it. The character was used for the county by the Qin; it did lead to the pronunciation of the 鄱 character (which is just 番 with a city radical to show the proper sense and pronunciation); and there still is an uncommon surname 番 being pronounced Pó.


 * We're talking about the best modern reading for a very ancient usage... at which point almost none of the characters had their current pronunciation and probably all lacked tones. It'd probably be best to force Wiki to use reconstructed Old Chinese pronunciations for anything this old instead of the modern ones. In any case, the guys who wrote the main books seem to think the old Chinese pronunciation of 番 would've been something pʰaːlish but 鄱 they reconstruct as baːl. Looks like there was a dialectical problem with the Chinese/locals voicing the name that caused the words to develop differently over time. By the Han, it was annoying enough they distinguished the dialectical pronunciation with a distinct character.


 * I think most present-day Chinese just looking at the name would read it "pan" or "fan", but the character really did always represent something closer to the pronunciation later transcribed by 鄱 that they know is "Po". Sucks your sources didn't explicitly say that, though. Maybe some local scholar wrote a history of Poyang County somewhere... — Llywelyn II   11:53, 5 August 2019 (UTC)


 * This is really inevitable as long as we still use modern pronunciation for Old Chinese words. They most likely sounded similar back then but then the language changed way too much. Hopefully someone can come up with an Old Chinese romanization system in the future. That will make writing about these topics in English so much easier.


 * There definitely is some sort of 鄱阳县志 lying in the corner of some local library, though I'm not sure if anyone ever reads those... Esiymbro (talk) 12:17, 5 August 2019 (UTC)

WP:ENGVAR
You used meter instead of metre but cauterise instead of cauterize. I don't know if you care, but since you're here and already put so much work into this page, did you wanna pick whether it's going to end up using UK or US English? Are you more used to one than the other? — Llywelyn II   03:19, 6 August 2019 (UTC)

Translations
Is "cauterisation canon" the translation used by the sources? At least to me, instead of mài jiǔjīng, it looks like the titles should be màijiǔ jīng and mean something like "meridian-&-moxibustion canon". Further, cauterization might figuratively apply to moxibustion if the heat were understood as sealing off the meridians but my understanding is that's the exact opposite of the case: the heat is supposed to relax and open the channels, which is the opposite of cauterizing them. Similarly, "formations of materia vitalis" seems like a very unhelpful way to translate what is simply "Weather Features" or "Atmospheric Phenomena" in the Chinese; even if you wanted to point out the special associations of qi (the description of the content doesn't seem to warrant it), it'd be better to just use qi than bring medieval European pseudoscience into it.

Of course, if that's what the sources used, we don't have much choice until some other scholar publishes work correcting their mistake. — Llywelyn II   03:41, 6 August 2019 (UTC)


 * Yes, its from the source . I know little about TCM so I left it as it is (should have changed the "-isation" to "-ization", though). I just did some search and "Cauterization canon" does seem to be a common way to translate these titles, but it is entirely possible that all of them ultimately came from the same translator.


 * About the qixiang, I though the same. They should just use a simple translation such as "Weather Features". Esiymbro (talk) 04:20, 6 August 2019 (UTC)