Talk:Hunan

"Hunan" vs. "Hu'nan"
I noticed that this article was consistently using the unusual spelling "Hu'nan", with an apostrophe in the middle. I have just now edited the article to replace this spelling with the more common "Hunan", without the apostrophe. It looks like there's been some disagreement over the spelling in edit summaries, but I don't see any dedicated discussion over the spelling, so I would like to start one to determine what spelling the article should use (since I also don't want to upset anyone by just unilaterally changing things without consulting anyone).

First, some background: it looks like User:Cfls was the one who inserted the spelling "Hu'nan", back in March. This was then partly undone by User:Nkon21, who replaced some (but not all) of the "Hu'nan"s with "Hunan"s. What I did was basically just catching the rest of the "Hu'nan"s. Cfls, if you have any objection to me changing the spelling, then please let me know here; I don't want to just steamroll over your input. Nkon21, if you have any thoughts on this, then please feel free to chime in as well.

Next, let me explain why I went with "Hunan" as the spelling over "Hu'nan": I could not find a single source that used the spelling "Hu'nan". I googled "Hu'nan" and, besides this page, got only results for the two words "hu" and "nan" separately. (Admittedly, this could just be because Google doesn't distinguish apostrophes, but I tried testing this by searching for "Maan" vs. "Ma'an" and got quite different results, so this doesn't seem to be the case.) On the other hand, loads of good sources use the spelling "Hunan" -- including the government website, which I would consider fairly authoritative.

Please let me know if I missed something. -- 3 kids in a trenchcoat (talk) 01:49, 27 May 2024 (UTC)


 * As someone who speaks Chinese, I have never seen the province spelled as Hu'nan ever. Per Chinese punctuation, In Pinyin, the apostrophe (') is before a syllable starting with a vowel (a, o, or e) in a multiple-syllable word when the syllable does not start the word, which is not the case here. User:Cfls unilaterally changed this without any sort of consensus. ɴᴋᴏɴ21  ❯❯❯  talk  02:57, 27 May 2024 (UTC)