Talk:Chinese characters/Archive 5

Structure section
The Structure section describes conventions codified during the imperial period, and thus does not apply to earlier characters. I would suggest putting the History section first. Kanguole 09:08, 25 October 2023 (UTC)
 * Kanguole, I agree, I'll look at it later if you don't feel like making the change now — Remsense  聊  09:12, 25 October 2023 (UTC)

images
@Kanguole would you like me to change the pictogram evolution images while i'm at it? and also, if anyone else has suggestions for media to add to the article, i'm happy to take a crack at it! Remsense 聊  21:07, 24 October 2023 (UTC)
 * The pictures on the left don't look very encyclopedic, and probably aren't necessary anyway. Also, the zigzag arrangement doesn't convey any meaning, does it? Kanguole 09:10, 25 October 2023 (UTC)
 * Kanguole, good points! I figured keeping as much as possible in optimization at first was the move, but yeah. I assume the zigzag is as much to save horizontal space without crowding if it means anything, but I'll take a crack at spiffying the trio up further. — Remsense  聊  09:12, 25 October 2023 (UTC)
 * do you think the 象 example suffices now? i'm trying to find better sources to possibly replace 日 and 山 with Remsense  聊  11:54, 12 November 2023 (UTC)
 * The elephant was the worst, and is certainly much better now. Kanguole 12:21, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

Wiki Education assignment: Linguistics in the Digital Age
— Assignment last updated by Fedfed2 (talk) 00:54, 9 December 2023 (UTC)

Radical positions
There are many possible ways to form compounds and position the radicals. Showing them is not very informative. Vacosea (talk) 23:54, 5 November 2023 (UTC)
 * I've been trying to come up with ideas for additional graphics I could create for this article/related articles lately. Do you think it would be good to have concrete examples of compounds for each position, instead of just the abstract positions themselves? Remsense  聊  23:59, 5 November 2023 (UTC)
 * I'm not against that, in addition to the one animation under compound ideographs, but considering how many different combinations there are, do you think it would be that more informative compared to writing "many positions or combinations are possible"? Regarding the diagrams I removed, why were they under the phono-semantic compounds section specifically? Vacosea (talk) 00:18, 6 November 2023 (UTC)
 * Vacosea, I think having one 'enclosure-style' example and perhaps one or two others max would be sufficient. As for its exact placement, I couldn't really tell you—it reflects the article how I found it before I really started digging into it and I haven't happened to apply too much thought to it yet in lieu of everything else.Now that you mention it, I share your skepticism for the placement—it's a bit crowded near the top of the article for one thing. Maybe it would do well in the 'structure' section instead. Remsense  聊  00:22, 6 November 2023 (UTC)
 * Yes the examples you mentioned in the structure section would be an improvement. The top of the article already explains the components in text and with an animation. Vacosea (talk) 00:58, 6 November 2023 (UTC)
 * The one thing about the animation is that information should never rely on it, since people may view an article in situations where the animation can't play, so I do want the other graphics I do to be static. Remsense  聊  13:50, 6 November 2023 (UTC)
 * Maybe the structure section can be adjusted and placed before the classification schemes. It would then be able to provide some basic background knowledge first. Vacosea (talk) 14:58, 6 November 2023 (UTC)
 * I originally put it there, but Kangoule suggested that it should be placed further down. Since the aspects of the system are so interconnected, I'm not sure either way is better, but there's still some content I need to shuffle from one section to the other (namely, "Standards" ↔ "Other Languages", "History" ↔ "Styles", etc.) Remsense  聊  15:01, 6 November 2023 (UTC)

"Ideographs"
The top section correctly notes that Chinese characters are not "ideographs", but then the rest of the article continues to use terms like "ideograph", "ideogram", etc. In some cases, that might be inevitable (e.g., if the official Unicode terms is "CJK Unified Ideographs", there probably isn't much to be done about that), but the casual usage elsewhere should be made consistent. 114.43.194.196 (talk) 06:45, 14 November 2023 (UTC)
 * The article only uses those terms in the phrases "simple ideogram" and "compound ideograph", two ways that characters were constructed. The idea is that characters are not ideographs, but some of them are ideographic in origin. Kanguole 08:27, 14 November 2023 (UTC)
 * overall, there is a difficult distinction to manage between the characters themselves and higher concepts of a 'writing system', the boundary between the two is often unclear and is somewhat different according to various authors in the literature. there are definitely ideographs in a literal sense (i.e. characters whose forms are just made of idea-based components), but the system itself is flatly not ideographic.
 * In general, this article should be about the characters, and Written Chinese should be about the writing system, but of course to try to fully divide the two would be an artificial, counterproductive, confusing exercise, but I do want to present that distinction as well as I can. Remsense  聊  12:10, 14 November 2023 (UTC)
 * Outside "CJK Unified ideographs", the term is used mostly in the discussion of 會意字, translated in the article as "compound ideographs". We can do better than that. Mattos and Norman (translating Qiu Xigui) suggest "syssemantograms" (we could also just call them "compound logograms"). Since this is a subsection rather than an article title, WP:COMMONNAME doesn't apply, so we are free to use a lesser-known term that does not conflate a discredited theory as "compound ideographs" does. We should still mention it (and be sure to anchor the section heading if renaming would break any incoming links), but we're not stuck with it. Unless we want to redefine "ideograph" for our purposes as 會意字, it is probably being misused here. Folly Mox (talk) 13:39, 14 November 2023 (UTC)
 * Yeah! I think that's a really good idea. I would like to avoid jargon as much as possible in an article that requires a fair amount, so I'm not sure about 'syssemantographs' in particular, but. Remsense  聊  13:42, 14 November 2023 (UTC)
 * If we wish to expunge all mentions of ideographs/ideograms, we need alternative translations of both 指事字 zhǐshìzì and 會意字 huìyìzì. The translations of Qiu Xigui (via Mattos and Norman), "diectic graphs" and "syssemantographs", are hardly more informative than just using the Chinese terms. How about the approximate translations "indicative characters" and "semantic compounds", each of which is used by some authors? Kanguole 17:47, 14 November 2023 (UTC)
 * I think 'indicative characters' or simply 'indicatives' are fairly viable, natural terms. Remsense  聊  17:59, 14 November 2023 (UTC)

Quote: "there are definitely ideographs in a literal sense (i.e. characters whose forms are just made of idea-based components), but the system itself is flatly not ideographic." I really do not understand what distinction you are trying to make. Can you give examples? I think much of this discussion is wobbly; it is unlikely to lead to an article which ordinary readers will understand easier. (Not to mention ludicrous coinages like "sysswhateveritwas") And what is the "discredited theory"? Imaginatorium (talk) 17:41, 14 November 2023 (UTC)
 * Certain Chinese characters are ideographs—"idea-drawings"—where their graphical forms derive wholly from the ideas they represent, as opposed to their pronunciations, or some other source.
 * Writing systems that use Chinese characters do not—and cannot—primarily function by "interpreting" these ideographs. When you read a text written in Chinese or Japanese, you are not receiving a sequence of pure, abstract ideas, and then assembling them in your head. All of the characters are ultimately associated with syllables in a spoken language, and that is the way they must be read. Some of these individual characters can be ideographs—moreover, the presence of ideographs within the lexicon is fairly important to it. Nonetheless, the characters' association with spoken syllables is still necessary to read a given text.
 * Using an example in the article: 明 is an ideograph for our purposes: it means 'bright', because it represents the shared idea of the 'sun' and 'moon': there is ostensibly nothing about the character that tells you it is pronounced 'míng' in Standard Chinese (etc.) If you don't know this pronunciation, you will not successfully read a text using this character. Thus, the writing system is not ideographic, even though it has ideographs within it.
 * Regarding your final points, I would ask that you be a little less flippant: 'syssemantograms' is a technical term used in some of the relevant literature referenced to write this article, it has a precise meaning—though I don't think its use within this article intended for a general audience would be ideal. But it was a worthwhile suggestion. The discussion is not wobbly, it is simply a bit abstract and complex.The "discredited theory" is Xu Shen's sixfold categorization as presented in the Shuowen Jiezi, as is profiled in the first section of the article. I'm conflicted as to whether it is given too much space in the article, since it is such an important model—but more flexible, apt models better explaining how characters work have emerged in recent decades. Xu's system remained rather prominent as different scholars presented different iterations of it throughout Chinese history. Remsense  聊  17:56, 14 November 2023 (UTC)
 * User:Imaginatorium, when I said "discredited theory", I meant the idea that Chinese characters can be, in total, described as "ideograms". Unregistered editor 114, the OP of this thread, was right to call out the article's use of this term, which has been present since 2003.Remsense is correct that Xu Shen's two thousand year old theory is also wrong, but it's not the one that sparked this thread. I agree that the conversation isn't wobbly. We're trying to determine how to clarify an attribute of a subset that doesn't apply to the full set, but the fact that you find it wobbly is a pretty strong indication that the topic area specialists here aren't doing the best job explaining the matter clearly, or that the vocabulary is too technical for the general reader, so it's very helpful feedback. Folly Mox (talk) 00:53, 15 November 2023 (UTC)
 * Agreed. I spent a lot of time hammering at the prose in the "Classification" section, and I hope it reads better than it did when I started, but I'm sure there's still improvements to better structure the material. Remsense  聊  01:02, 15 November 2023 (UTC)

GA push
So, I decided I really want to get this article good article status. I'm not asking anything in particular, I'm just publicly jotting down outstanding things that need to get done before I can submit it for peer review. If you have any suggestions or guidance, let me know!  Sourcing issues  Esp. regarding anything with computers or encoding, though the latter should be easily, especially since I'm so Unicode-brained.   Style issues  So, of course I've been mucking around with templates and such a lot, but I worry that my current model of "put the aspect of the character that is being discussed first" might be confusing to people who are completely green to the subject. </ul> </li> <li>Coverage issues <ul> <li style="margin-left:2em">Honestly, I think the headers we have now are pretty comprehensive? Some of them (e.g. the calligraphy section) might need considerable expansion, and some of them might still need to be shuffled or merged.</li> <li style="margin-left:2em">Some of the material, esp that specifically concerning vernacular Chinese, might be wandering off topic, but it's so tricky, because this topic is so interwoven and Chinese is such a digloss.</li> </ul> </li> <li>Illustration issues <ul> <li style="margin-left:2em">This seems the most fun for me, I really like working on tables, SVG, etc. any suggestions or wishlist items for such, please tell me!</li> </ul> </li> </ul><span id="Remsense:1698585829855:TalkFTTCLNChinese_characters" class="FTTCmt"> — Remsense  聊  13:23, 29 October 2023 (UTC)
 * I want to fill out the article with a section on modern input, to accompany handwriting, block printing, and calligraphy, and I think that will put a bow on the article's scope.<span id="Remsense:1698622226577:TalkFTTCLNChinese_characters" class="FTTCmt"> — Remsense  聊  23:30, 29 October 2023 (UTC)
 * I started on a citation repair task here, but once I got to the first subheading I felt compelled to comment here instead.Why give pride of place and explain in detail Xu Shen's problematic schema? It's led to a lot of misunderstandings and is based on a corpus that did not include OBI. I don't have an issue including it in the article, but it's been the genesis of many academic disagreements, like the Creel–Boodberg slapfight I brought up last month at RD/L.As far as I'm aware, Qiu 2000 (Chinese Writing, transl. Mattos and Norman) doesn't have any major substantial critics, and should probably form the basis of the first subsection dealing with classification, the one said in wikivoice without specific attribution., I don't know if you have access to this work (and I'm not sure TWL does either), but I can email you a pdf if you have Wikipedia email enabled and don't have access otherwise. Folly Mox (talk) 16:36, 4 November 2023 (UTC)
 * I do indeed have a copy of Qiu 2000 and have found it very worthwhile, plus all the rest of the sources in the works cited I've attempted to source so far, which are the majority! If you still want to send me a PDF, I wouldn't mind, since it might be a higher quality than the one I have. thank you so much for your consideration! Remsense  聊  16:40, 4 November 2023 (UTC)
 * My apologies: it's clear after reading farther into the article that you do have a copy of this text. I own the physical book, so I don't feel bad about downloading a license non-compliant scan. The one I have on hand is 26.9 MB, no OCR, dual-page scan with the pages angled slightly from the book being splayed out upon the scanner. If that sounds better than yours, I uh just realised it's too hefty to attach to an email, but it might be the same file. I found it in about zero minutes of googling. Folly Mox (talk) 20:27, 4 November 2023 (UTC)
 * Folly Mox, You needn't send it to me in that case, that's comparable to the quality I've got :)<span id="Remsense:1699130399558:TalkFTTCLNChinese_characters" class="FTTCmt"> Remsense  聊  20:39, 4 November 2023 (UTC)
 * re: edit, yeah i think 'artificial' was a bit strong in hindsight, i meant basically to equate it to the way Latin is artificial, = 'literary' → 'literary (extinct in vernacular use)' Remsense  聊  17:23, 4 November 2023 (UTC)
 * , please accept my apologies if any of my edit summaries yesterday felt unkind. I get real sassy in edit summaries sometimes and I would like you to know that I appreciate your efforts here. Folly Mox (talk) 19:41, 5 November 2023 (UTC)
 * no, not at all! goodness, i was just thinking about how i really appreciate how helpful they are for someone who's getting some crucial experience citation wrangling, et al. Remsense  聊  19:43, 5 November 2023 (UTC)
 *  A few discrete bullet points regarding clarity, usefulness, and maybe WP:FANCRUFT
 * I have been thinking about the consensus that article can be improved to give readers as good a handle on the concepts as quickly as possible. A few discrete thoughts, hopefully coherent:
 * I am genuinely still unsure which concepts to explain in what order, especially in the opening chunk of the article (i.e. the lede and Classification section)
 * this article supposed to be about characters, not writing systems. Of course, the boundary between the two is to some degree arbitrary, but it is helpful. do we have the correct amount of content about written Chinese to adequately serve the purposes of this article, or should it be pared down?
 * Citations
 * I have tried to either secure citations for the statements in this article, or remove nebulous, OR-sounding statements when my attempts have failed—though I am aware that I do not have total mastery of tracking down Chinese-language sources so I feel bad, but these statements are mostly of ancillary, marginal value. There are 8–10 citation needed tags left in the article that I'm having trouble with, and I would appreciate some help on them if anybody is so inclined.
 * Are the citations for example lexemes I'm providing sufficient? I plan to hit the article with the archiver bot to make sure the links don't rot, but I understand scans of the 汉语大字典 aren't the easiest sources to make use of for the actual userbase of this article.
 * Remsense 聊  14:04, 15 November 2023 (UTC)
 * The Classification section tries to do two things at once: present the traditional liùshū classification and explain the initial development of the script. I'd suggest focussing on the first (which seems a useful to start the article), say calling it "Development" and maybe organizing it around the three principles of Chen Mengjia/Qiu Xigui as stages of development of the script: "semantograms", phonetic loans and phono-semantic compounds. Along the way, this would mention five of Xu Shen's classes, and one would just need to note that he mentioned (only in the postface) a sixth class whose meaning no-one understands and which most modern scholars reject. (The contemporary scheme at the end of the section looks a bit shallow.)
 * As for the examples, instead of citing the characters, it would be more inline with WP:V to cite the examples, i.e. someone (e.g. Qiu) presenting these as examples of the thing you're saying they're examples of. Kanguole 22:47, 15 November 2023 (UTC)
 * I think your structure proposal is good for me to write towards, I'll get on that.
 * And yes, I have tried only to cite dictionaries that in turn state that the characters have the property they are being used to exemplify, but it would be easier and less fraught to revert some examples to those in the other sources, certainly. Remsense  聊  23:04, 15 November 2023 (UTC)
 * Sometimes dictionaries can be a bit traditional, when modern scholarship has moved on. For example, they might follow Xu Shen in treating 信 as a semantic compound, when many now consider it a phono-semantic compound with phonetic 人. Kanguole 23:17, 15 November 2023 (UTC)
 * Certainly. I'll take a look over where I've provided divergent examples and re-vet them. Remsense  聊  23:42, 15 November 2023 (UTC)

Could be cool
Did yall know there's a Journal of Chinese Writing Systems, and that link gives us access via the Wikipedia Library? I just found out and thought of you two. Folly Mox (talk) 11:13, 28 November 2023 (UTC)
 * Ooooh!


 * Personal excitement aside, I've been thinking about assembling a ccentral annotated bibliography for Chinese-language-related sources, and possibly even a mainspace one à la Bibliography of fly fishing—surely there's enough provenance on the topic, though I didn't even know this subtype of article existed before a few days ago. Remsense  留  11:15, 28 November 2023 (UTC)
 * For some reason, I only allow myself to actually commence certain things once I tell someone I've been thinking about them.<span id="Remsense:1701171254641:TalkFTTCLNChinese_characters" class="FTTCmt"> Remsense  留  11:34, 28 November 2023 (UTC)
 * I used to keep a centralised citation repository somewhere on my old laptop so I could copypaste sources easily into new articles, back when I actually wrote / rewrote articles with some regularity, which I think might have been like 2013? Now I just hunt for articles where I feel like I've cited a source before, which is uh less efficient.Well, today I learned some articles on Wikipedia are bibliographies. I'm of the opinion that a is probably a better long term solution, and ideally, eventually, meta:WikiCite/Shared Citations, but bibliographies would be super helpful for editors and probably maybe readers too. If it's something that building into a mainspace article doesn't seem realistic about, it could always be placed in WikiProject Example/Bibliographical resources or something.As a personal note, I sometimes do the same thing (needing to say I'll do a thing before I start the thing), but in my case it's because I can't hold myself accountable for anything ever Folly Mox (talk) 12:35, 28 November 2023 (UTC)
 * A friend of mine, who is an editor-in-chief of an SCI engineering journal, told me that his journal got over 3,000 submissions last year, among which 800 were finally published. And I immediately got to know why they are so much richer than many journal on languages. Ctxz2323 (talk) 13:04, 28 November 2023 (UTC)
 * Yes, it's a Journal from Shanghai. But have not tried the Wikipedia Library yet.
 * Many thanks for the information and reminder.
 * There used to be a journal called Writing Systems from Oxford. Ctxz2323 (talk) 12:48, 28 November 2023 (UTC)

Standards, non-Chinese languages, Variant characters sections need reappraisal and possibly reshuffling
The balancing act of this article is giving fair coverage to the use of characters in the various writing systems—and I'm not sure the sections above adequately do so without cruft or undigested trivia.<br style="margin-bottom:0.5em"/>It's the chunk of the article I'm least sure about, even though I'm still working on rewriting the earliest part to be less conflationary between Xu Shen and modern understanding, at least all the material there should probably be there in some form, thoughts?<span id="Remsense:1701893045507:TalkFTTCLNChinese_characters" class="FTTCmt"> Remsense  留  20:04, 6 December 2023 (UTC)
 * Regarding the opening, I am attempting to adequately compose it on Draft:Chinese characters, but I am really struggling with elegance and concision here. Remsense  留  18:09, 7 December 2023 (UTC)
 * Okay, it's not fully in place yet, but I think I dashed out the best order for the sections, bold existing essentially as is:
 * Development – explains emergence of true writing from proto-writing, logography from ideography, signs, loangraphs and rebus
 * Classification – introduces compound characters, modern concepts, reduced explanation of Xu Shen after a survey of modern understandings
 * History – Archeological and anthropological history from oracle bones through to regular script, but additionally touching on spread to non-China
 * Structure – explains the process of stroke and component order
 * Methods – handwriting, printing, and use with computers
 * Words – finally, morphology and compounding in Chinese, Japanese etc.
 * Adaptation – Use specific to Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Zhuang, etc. etc.
 * Variants?
 * Standards?
 * Indexing? Number of Characters?
 * I *still* don't know what to do with the sections at the end—Standards, Variants, Number of Characters, Indexing—they maddeningly overlap. Maybe one of them needs to mostly go to its own article, probably "Indexing" according to my gut.


 * thoughts? I think this flows well so far. Remsense  留  02:34, 8 December 2023 (UTC)
 * "Variants" could go under "Structure"? It feels like a subtopic, although it also interfaces with "Adaptation". Apart from that, all I have at the moment is a dim awareness of this work you've been doing, without any time to help. Folly Mox (talk) 13:38, 8 December 2023 (UTC)
 * You've helped me deeply in my work here/on Red Cliffs already, I know you're busy and your encouragement is felt and appreciated! Yes, that's a fantastic point, Variants is really about both allographs and edge case characters: the former can be merged with structure, the latter can be go elsewhere. Remsense  留  13:40, 8 December 2023 (UTC)
 * It's not totally there, but the reshuffled iteration of this page is mostly in place on Draft:Chinese characters, if anyone wants to tell me how it flows. Remsense  留  05:19, 10 December 2023 (UTC)
 * I've copied over the draft, my apologies for the monolithic edit but I feel this needed to be done rather than my existing pattern of endless iteration: much of what has been excised should be relocated to sub-articles, especially that which primarily pertains to technical standards or just morphology and not the characters themselves. It was previously 12k (!) words, the draft is about 11k, and I think it should be under 10k.<span id="Remsense:1702549394424:TalkFTTCLNChinese_characters" class="FTTCmt"> Remsense  留  10:23, 14 December 2023 (UTC)
 * Well that's just impractical to review. It's not possible to collaborate when you work that way. Kanguole 12:26, 14 December 2023 (UTC)
 * I can revert it to the previous revision if you'd like. But it is not really possible to work within the article as structured in a coherent way, because it requires large structural changes, and I have found it impossible to accomplish them through piecemeal iteration without making the article unacceptably lopsided for a time. I hope this is understandable. Remsense  留  12:29, 14 December 2023 (UTC)
 * Would you prefer me to transfer the draft section by section the best I can? If not, I am not sure how to make the changes digestible for others, which I understand is a real problem. Especially since I've been detailing them in here and have gotten guidance and support on them, but how do I now implement them without making huge edits or spending another year dripfeeding them and wasting time tweaking material that ultimately has to go?<br style="margin-bottom:0.5em"/>If I can be honest, I am frustrated. Remsense  留  12:36, 14 December 2023 (UTC)
 * Transferring changes section by section isn't really an improvement. What is useful is each change having a clear purpose, e.g. introducing language tags throughout an article would be easy enough to review. So would re-ordering sections without changing them. Now that you've bundled a whole series of edits doing different things together, you might as well make your monolithic change.
 * You're not the only one who's frustrated. But the source of the problem is your habit of doing all this development elsewhere from the live article. Kanguole 13:01, 14 December 2023 (UTC)
 * I always want the live article to be in a presentable state, because these changes required several weeks, because I'm not the fastest at this. Would it be helpful if you went through the edit history on the draft? If not, I'm willing to trash the draft and reimplement all the changes I've made one by one, I don't want to make your life more difficult. Remsense  留  13:05, 14 December 2023 (UTC)
 * I would say that now we're in this situation, you might as well make your monolithic change and we'll have to live with it. However, it sounds like you still think parallel development is a reasonable way to operate in the future, and that's a worry. Kanguole 13:11, 14 December 2023 (UTC)
 * No, you're right. I'm going to do this in the best way by you. I'm not happy with the draft either, but now that I know what I'm doing, I'm going to transform the article in a way that you can easily review. Sorry for being difficult. Remsense  留  13:13, 14 December 2023 (UTC)
 * @Kanguole, that's all i'll do for now. was that a more helpful way of doing it for you? Remsense  留  13:40, 14 December 2023 (UTC)
 * I was about to disagree with the statement that logographs are graphemes that correspond to semantic units of a language, but I see it's in the logogram article. Still, I think it would be better to say that logographs denote words or morphemes (which logogram also says). I think of semantics are the relationship between words or morphemes and objects, concepts or actions. Kanguole 14:44, 14 December 2023 (UTC)
 * the logogram article is pretty awful at the moment, but i agree—just struggling for concision in quickly relating these unfamiliar concepts. Remsense  留  14:49, 14 December 2023 (UTC)

Morphology-related material
Kanguole et al., what do you think of a lot of the material in the 'Vocabulary' section that doesn't really appear to be about characters, but rather just about historical Chinese morphology? Should it be moved to another article? Remsense 留  22:33, 15 December 2023 (UTC)
 * It is an odd mix.
 * The "Old Chinese" subsection talks about one way that the same character came to denote different (but related) words. Perhaps it could be treated as a special case of a phonetic loan. (Hmm, where did the phonetic loan character bit go?) By the way, we should use a single transcription for Old Chinese. The Baxter-Sagart reconstruction is tempting, because it's recent and there's a complete online list, but it is somewhat speculative – Baxter (1992) is closer to a broad consensus.
 * The "Vernacular Chinese" subsection is about compound words, which is more about the language than the script, and I think it's already covered in the various language articles.
 * The "Lect-specific variants" subsection is about how the script was adapted to later varieties of Chinese. That would even include Mandarin. In Norman's book, this is treated in section 3.7 "The adaptability of the Chinese script", together with adaptation to non-Chinese languages (though of course the latter are a minor concern for him). If you followed that example, this would go in the Adaptability section.
 * Kanguole 22:38, 16 December 2023 (UTC)
 * Certainly—I think I will refocus "Old Chinese", mostly remove "Vernacular Chinese", and resituate "lect-specific" variants as you've recommended. Do you think the present headings are mostly adequate as I'm reworking the Classification section to agree with Qiu's framework? Remsense  留  22:50, 16 December 2023 (UTC)
 * Qiu places his loangraph chapter after phono-semantic compounds, but in the development of the script, loangraphs were earlier, and phono-semantic compounds were created by disambiguating them. This is the order he uses when discussing Chen Menjia's classification and his modification of it (by renaming Chen's "pictographs") on pp. 167–168, and in the overview discussion on pp. 3–10. Kanguole 23:16, 16 December 2023 (UTC)
 * Kanguole, but overall, you support structuring the section at the highest level after Qiu?<span id="Remsense:1702771730226:TalkFTTCLNChinese_characters" class="FTTCmt"> Remsense  留  00:08, 17 December 2023 (UTC)
 * Oh sorry, one more thing: I've been strictly adhering to "-graph"s, even when sources or articles use "-gram", because I think using both with no difference in one article may be confusing. Should I rethink this and adhere to the sources? Remsense  留  03:17, 17 December 2023 (UTC)

"Native readings" in Korean
made an edit with the commentary: "Korean: the native word is not a reading of the character, but a translation". The corresponding statement with regard to Japanese is plainly false (Chinese characters, whether "kanji" or not according to E-kanji theory, have typically on (Sino-) and kun (native) readings. So unless the practice in Korean from the beginning of time has been never to use characters with a native reading, this claim is misleading. Imaginatorium (talk) 08:24, 28 December 2023 (UTC)


 * I've just interpreted it as a nomenclature issue: I'm not sure whether it's called a "reading" in Korean. Remsense  留  08:51, 28 December 2023 (UTC)
 * The point is that this passage is about Korean, not Japanese, and the sentence in the article reflects what the cited source says. Students are learning only one way to read 水, namely su, with meaning mul 'water'. The latter word is always written in hangul. Kanguole 12:49, 28 December 2023 (UTC)

IT section
@Ctxz2323, hey, thank you for writing in this area! one of the last things i was planning on doing for this article was properly writing a section about characters in computing, input methods etc. and putting it into the "methods and styles" section, alongside discussions of calligraphy, ordinary handwriting etc. if you don't mind, i'm probably going to reintegrate your passage as such?<br style="margin-bottom:0.5em"/>One thing to keep in mind is the article is already very long, so it will likely have to be a bit shorter, but it is a subtopic that deserves a treatment in this article. If you're fine with that, lmk so I don't get in your way while you're editing! cheers<span id="Remsense:1701148910982:TalkFTTCLNChinese_characters" class="FTTCmt"> Remsense  留  05:21, 28 November 2023 (UTC)


 * Yes, the article is already very long. But Chinese character IT is an important subtopic and will help people see that we are closely following the latest development of language computing at a glance of the table of contents.
 * So, if you don't mind, I prefer it to remain a first-level section while trying to cut it shorter, much shorter? Ctxz2323 (talk) 09:36, 28 November 2023 (UTC)
 * How do you feel about its present placement? The higher level is meant to be about the various methods of writing and transmitting text written in Chinese characters, so I feel it fits. Remsense  留  09:40, 28 November 2023 (UTC)
 * Well done!
 * and thanks. Ctxz2323 (talk) 12:32, 28 November 2023 (UTC)
 * Doesn't "Computer encoding and interchange" belong in "Use with computers" rather than "Lexicography"? Kanguole 08:58, 13 February 2024 (UTC)
 * Yes, "Use with computers"  is a more appropriate location. Ctxz2323 (talk) 13:50, 13 February 2024 (UTC)
 * @Kanguole @Ctxz2323 I see it presently like this, please tell me if I'm missing something:
 * Methods and styles covers the ways people directly create characters (i.e. printing, handwriting, typing), not necessary which characters they may use or the underlying inventory. Thus, the relevant material covers how people input characters on computers.
 * Lexicography covers the ways characters are collated, organized, sorted, etc. An encoding seems more akin to a dictionary or other large character set, to me. I've also put this section next to the related section Standardization, which has additional overlap with history.
 * All of these categories and themes overlap with each other, and I'm open as always if people think I'm wrong here. Remsense  诉  22:28, 13 February 2024 (UTC)
 * Then perhaps "Use with computers" belongs outside "Methods and styles", which could then just be "Styles". Kanguole 22:40, 13 February 2024 (UTC)
 * But then I worry about the over-conflation with the overlapping notion of "scripts", which is the anchor of the History section. This is difficult. Remsense  诉  22:46, 13 February 2024 (UTC)
 * OK, next suggestion is to put "Printing" and "Use with computers" in the "History" section and "Calligraphy" in the "Structure" section, and drop "Methods and styles". Kanguole 22:53, 13 February 2024 (UTC)
 * I think that may be a good idea. I'll see what I can do. Remsense  诉  00:16, 14 February 2024 (UTC)
 * I still prefer Kanguole's original idea: just simply move "Computer encoding and interchange" into "Use with computers". It is more of computer encoding than of Lexicography, just like we may more like to put an article on Unicode in the domain of IT or computers rather than in Dictionaries. Ctxz2323 (talk) 03:44, 14 February 2024 (UTC)
 * I'll do this for now, then. Remsense  诉  06:17, 14 February 2024 (UTC)

Statistical "simplification" analysis due?
I suppose the question isn't just for this article, and I know single papers that say all sorts of things come out, but this paper made me a bit self-conscious about how I've currently written the relevant part of this article and others. Any more wizened analysis from others about its conclusions?

Basically, it rejects the notion that the writing system has more or less steadily simplified since the oracle bone form, and instead views seal script as the historical peak of visual complexity. A weak incentive trade-off between visual complexity and distinctiveness is postulated, but traditional regular script is overall both more visually complex  more distinctive according to their model. Of course, when Qiu et al say "simple" they don't just mean the pure graphical sense. Remsense 诉  09:22, 10 March 2024 (UTC)

Change the age of the oldest oracle bone?
Hi @Remsense, I think we can change the date for the oldest oracle bone. The 2021 radiocarbon dating of 26 Wu Ding bone samples gives the age of the oldest measured bone to c. 1254-1221 BCE. That's quite a distance from the 1200 BCE given by David Keightley. So I'm asking your opinion on this. Strongman13072007 (talk) 13:43, 17 March 2024 (UTC)


 * I did see that, and I put it on my mental checklist for this article, I just didn't want it to forget about it technically being unsourced in the article while I was working on other stuff—I agree, I think the radiocarbon cite can be attached to a 1250 BCE start date. Remsense  诉  13:46, 17 March 2024 (UTC)
 * We should not rely on a single research paper (WP:PRIMARY). Note also that date range is stated to be a 68% range for that bone, and they have an even earlier one in Table 4: 1307–1228 for Heji 34240 from the Li type-1 diviner group (usually assigned to the later part of Wu Ding's reign).
 * Ken-ichi Takashima gives a date of 1230. The Xia–Shang–Zhou Chronology Project dated Wu Ding's reign at 1250–1192, though the first oracle bones may have been produced some time after the start of his reign. Kanguole 14:34, 17 March 2024 (UTC)
 * Agreed—also I do not think the citation should've been swapped out, but appended to Keightly, perhaps with an explanation in the footnote. Remsense  诉  14:36, 17 March 2024 (UTC)

The last stumbling block: 方言字
The final unsourced statements—and the final major point contravening the GA criteria, I think—regard dialectal characters, and I've really been at a loss tracking down adequate sources for what's there, or to rewrite the section adequately from. I would very much appreciate peoples' help if they happen to know anything about how characters are used and created in the particular context of representing fangyan—obviously it's variations on a theme, but I want it to be well-attested. I think I'm otherwise just about ready to submit for peer review or GAN—for real, this time! Remsense 诉  17:24, 17 March 2024 (UTC)


 * @Alsosaid1987 this may be a bit of a stretch given you added many of these statements back in 2019, but do by any chance have any leads as to how I could source them? Remsense  诉  14:15, 26 March 2024 (UTC)


 * Are you referring to the examples of dialectal characters? For most of them, Wiktionary gives the definitions and gives the dialectal usages.  For the Shanghainese phrase whose etymological form is 触祭, the online authoritative Wu dictionary published by the Wu Language Association https://wu-chinese.com/minidict cites the Suzhou pingtan script 白蛇传, while the "billboard" form 戳鸡, I was able to find at http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/ShanghaiMP3/SVocab.html. Unfortunately, I have not been able to find print sources for these examples.Alsosaid1987 (talk) 00:27, 30 March 2024 (UTC)
 * Specifically, I really would like sources for the characters being used in legal proceedings, etc. I've taken those out of the article for now, but I would like to put them back in if I can source them. Remsense  诉  00:30, 30 March 2024 (UTC)