Talk:Chinese honorifics

2009 comment
It is not exactly. 妾：I, your concubine 奴家: I, your wife

A woman can refer herself as 妾 or 奴家 while talking with a man who is not her hursband.--刻意(Kèyì) 18:01, 28 December 2009 (UTC)

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Needs revamp: not in encyclopedic style
This article is written in a style that suits someone who can already read literary Chinese language, though it purports to be English-language prose. The gloss should follow the English explanation and placed in brackets instead of directly embedded in the sentence. – Kaihsu (talk) 19:55, 9 March 2019 (UTC)

And ruby characters should not be used
Ruby characters (e.g. ) should not be used, for a whole host of display and style issues. See this discussion for some of the specific reasons. Instead, as User:Kaihsu noted above, the text should be Romanization with characters in parentheses. —  AjaxSmack 16:01, 20 October 2019 (UTC)
 * I have added a ruby annotation notice in response. However, the sheer volume of honorifics in this article would render romanisation clunky and glaring. Honorifics is also quite a niche topic and I do not agree that this modification would make it any easier to read. Koenfoo (talk) 03:57, 19 June 2020 (UTC)

Like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Chinese_pronouns&type=revision&diff=922215848&oldid=905165243 Kaihsu (talk) 05:14, 24 October 2019 (UTC)
 * Pinging User:Wikilucki on this. —  AjaxSmack 16:02, 20 October 2019 (UTC)

Sources missing
An interesting article, but it doesn’t give any sources (see Verifiability). Looking at the text (and at the editing history), it looks very much like violating No original research. --Babel fish (talk) 19:18, 21 November 2020 (UTC)


 * Since there has been no reaction, I’ve removed the unsourced material. --Babel fish (talk) 11:13, 1 March 2021 (UTC)

No, sorry. You’ve just restored the whole thing as it was. The references you added (Pan/Kádár 2011 and Hui/Meng/Hui 2016) were not the sources used for this article. I’ve removed the whole bulk of original research once again.

I also removed a reference you introduced (Hui/Meng/Hui 2016) after I got a warning message from Wikipedia. I did some research and realised that it actually is from a predatory open-access publisher (see Beall’s List / beallslist.net and/or one of its successors, predatoryjournals.com; for more details on this particular publisher, see Stef Brezgov: A Vanity Scholarly Press from Québec 27 August 2019, and also Tom Spears: 2017 list of 'predatory' science journals published, hundreds claim to be Canadian Ottawa Citizen, 5 January 2017). If you read the paper itself closely, it is very dubious (no actual academic publisher would have accepted it), and the authors are described as a professor and two “BA candidates”.

I noticed that you are a new user. Please read the Wikipedia rules on Verifiability and original research (and—I have a hunch—maybe also those on sockpuppetry—no offense). --Babel fish (talk) 13:11, 23 March 2021 (UTC)


 * As a native Chinese speaker I can vouch that all the content is indeed correct despite claims of original research. Removal of content does a disservice to any individual seeking information on Chinese honorifics in English. Given the difficulty of accessing adequate Chinese language learning material in English online, maintenance of the original article content is warranted.  Zanjieu (talk) 01:06, 4 May 2021 (UTC)


 * I agree that it is disheartening to see 83k characters removed leaving a shell of an article, but user Babel fish is correct.  However, there is a reference source listed at the bottom that can be searched on scholar.google.com to return references.
 * Such as a search for the word "honorific".
 * So we do have one reliable source that just needs to be connected to relevant parts of the removed material 174.86.237.161 (talk) 07:18, 19 August 2021 (UTC)


 * Pan/Kádár 2011 was clearly not the source for this article, and it is not possible to connect all the material in the article to that book.
 * Wikipedia rules on verifiability say:
 * “All content must be verifiable. The burden to demonstrate verifiability lies with the editor who adds or restores material, and it is satisfied by providing an inline citation to a reliable source that directly supports the contribution.”
 * So once again, what were your sources?
 * Please do not restore unsourced material without giving proper citations. --Babel fish (talk) 11:56, 22 December 2021 (UTC)


 * Since there has been no reaction since December 2021, I’ve removed the unsourced material / original research.
 * I agree that it is interesting material, but Wikipedia is the wrong place to get it out, it is not an unmoderated forum or vanity press outlet where you can publish private research. --Babel fish (talk) 11:03, 9 March 2022 (UTC)

The insistence to adhere to sources is bewildering. The article clearly concerns material sensitive to personal use of a language rather than some absolute standard that can be readily verified in a textual source. Please stop demanding peer-reviewed citations for information that can be verified by means of cultural familiarity. Cease vandalizing this article, as the important contents can be easily confirmed. — Preceding unsigned comment added by ØMVR9744 (talk • contribs) 20:41, 13 March 2022 (UTC)


 * The trouble is that if we changed Wikipedia policy so as to do it the way you suggest, what would we do when one editor comes along and claims that they have "cultural familiarity" and they know that X is the truth, and another editor comes along and claims that they have "cultural familiarity" and they know that Y is the truth? Or what about when just one editor comes along and says that they know something from cultural familiarity, but they are just mistaken? Or lying? All three of those situations happen all the time, very frequently, so it is a real problem. The methods we use are far from perfect, but unfortunately just letting anyone who claims to have personal knowledge do whatever they like would be a far worse method, as you can see if you look at some if the total crap that gets posted on forums and social web sites that do qork more or less along those lines. JBW (talk) 21:16, 13 March 2022 (UTC)


 * Assess the numerical consensus of authentic accounts.
 * One of the editors insisting on removing the information from this page contributes greatly to articles on India and uses a Hindu name yet lacks contributions that use Mandarin. In preventing discriminatory preference, one should also fall short of permitting the same excessive behavior from others behind the guise of shuffling papers.
 * If this is difficult to put into policy, then specific reasons beyond verification should be made as to why 83,942 lines of information are being removed and replacement or at least some source provided to take the place of the edition. ØMVR9744 (talk) 00:17, 15 March 2022 (UTC)

This article has been butchered! I am not a native Chinese speaker and the old version was an extremely valuable reference. Like the many others above, insisting on rigid use of sources makes no sense. Maybe this would make sense in some future time when Chinese reference materials are digitized and placed online; but for now, this page should remain as it was. The support of many native Chinese speakers (above) shows this. Destroying thousands of words in the narrow-minded pursuit of rules designed with English language pages in mind is indeed an act of intellectual vandalism. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2607:FEA8:A4A3:6900:C01D:51EE:5921:B074 (talk) 01:20, 17 April 2022 (UTC)


 * As I said, I agree that it is interesting material, and I still hope at least some of it can be salvaged, giving proper sources. Pan/Kádár 2011 (ISBN 978-1-8470-6275-8) is a very useful book, and if you want to know more about this topic, you’ll find information there, but that volume clearly wasn’t used by Wikilucki who had added the bulk of the material.
 * As far as I’m aware of, other language versions of Wikipedia have very similar rules about verifiability. Chinese speakers obviously had the same principles in mind and have created practically identical rules for the Chinese Wikipedia (Wikipedia:可供查證):
 * 本頁簡而言之：所有内容和引用，都可能被质疑，须带有可靠、公开的来源，以供检验. 可供查证是维基百科內容的门槛，这意味着写入维基百科的内容须要能被读者在可靠来源中得到验证. 维基百科不发表原创研究，其中收录的内容需要有既已发表的材料作为依据和支持，而不能仅由编辑者认定“真实正确”. 编辑者应为条目中的内容及其引用提供可靠来源，否则，这些内容可能被移除.
 * I think the most problematic aspect of the bulk of the unsourced material was that it did not distinguish between modern Chinese and historical forms, actually spanning centuries or even millennia of the history of the Chinese language without distinction. Most sections gave long lists of words that became obsolete a long time ago and today are not even used in very formal writing. I had hoped that Wikilucki would provide sources, so that this and other issues could be fixed.
 * (For what it’s forth, that barb about users with “Hindu names” does not require further debate.) --Babel fish (talk) 12:01, 18 July 2022 (UTC)

Sorry, no. You just ignored this discussion and just put all that unsourced material back in, — so I took it out again. If it isn’t original research, it should be no problem to quote the sources you used. --Babel fish (talk) 17:02, 21 December 2022 (UTC)

One minor comment
Lovely article, really well written, I read it to the end.

That being said, I think the IPA notations of the ancient pronunciations could be moved to the right hand column since it’s not really relevant for a casual reader and on mobile it blocks the view of later columns.

Hope this article stays mostly intact because it’s a gold mine and exactly whAt I was looking for. Well except for that empty section at the very bottom.

70.53.127.15 (talk) 06:22, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

Recent Mass Deletion
Respectfully, Babel Fish deleted >80000 bytes of data. Though this due to there being little to no sourcing or citation in this page, they did not mark all of the information as unreliable either, nor did they actually go look for citations themselves. Deleting suddenly with only as much as a curt comment could possibly confuse those who visit the article and deter others from researching for something that may back those things up. 71.202.190.179 (talk) 06:28, 24 December 2022 (UTC)


 * This deletion did not come out of the blue, there is a history to that. The article—or rather a long list of vocabulary—was first created and vastly expanded by anonymous IPs; later on, Wikilucki and Koenfoo contributed. However, they never provided any sources for what they wrote.
 * On 21 November 2020 (see dicussion above) I asked the authors to provide sources (see WP:V) and check the rules on original research (WP:NOR).
 * Sources were not provided, so on 1 March 2021 I deleted the unsourced original research. It went back and forth a few times. I added a reference work (Pan/Kádár 2011. Please note however that this book was not the source for this article!) At one point, Koenfoo restored all of the unsourced material and promised to add sources, but that never happened, so I removed the unsourced material again.
 * Wikipedia is not a a platform for primary research or personal essays, nor is it a textbook, see WP:What Wikipedia is not. --Babel fish (talk) 10:54, 16 February 2023 (UTC)