Talk:Wu Zixu

"Wu Zixu" romanization
To answer your claim that "Ng IS HIS SURNAME [sic]", in fact his surname is 伍. "Ng" is merely one of many possible regional romanizations of the name.

In general, Chinese names in wikipedia should have romanization in pinyin, other romanizations (except possibly Wade-Giles) are not needed and usually irrelevant. However there are exceptions; names which have become firmly established in English, eg "Kuomingtang" etc, or names which are specific to one particular locality, eg in the case of Cantonese; names which are specific to Hong Kong or Guangdong.

The names of other Chinese historical figures such as Qin Shi Huang, Zhuangzi or Sima Qian etc only have pinyin and/or Wade-Giles romanizations, why should Wu Zixu be any different? LDHan 16:10, 13 April 2007 (UTC)

員
Hi, I recently changed the pinyin of 員 to yun, but LDHan changed it back to yuan. The character 員 has multiple pronunciations, and the 員 in 伍員 should be pronounced as yún. This is correctly indicated in the Chinese version of this article. Smaller dictionaries might not indicate this pronunciation.

Links to online dictionaries which indicate this pronunciation: http://140.111.34.46/cgi-bin/dict/GetContent.cgi?Database=dict&DocNum=153299&GraphicWord=yes&QueryString=%A5%EE%AD%FB (Taiwan) http://www.zdic.net/zd/zi/ZdicE5Zdic91Zdic98.htm (China)

A quick Google search also indicates that this is the case: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%E4%BC%8D%E5%93%A1+yun&btnG=Google+Search

Although yuan is a common mispronunciation, it is not considered correct. Cgkm 18:26, 3 August 2007 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the correction, perhaps this should be indicated in the article. LDHan 22:05, 3 August 2007 (UTC)


 * Ok, I changed the two occurrences of Yuan to Yun and added a footnote. I hope this works. :) Cgkm 17:53, 4 August 2007 (UTC)

Birthdate
It seems very unlikely that Wu Zixu was born in 526 BC. The Shiji (chapter 14) states that he fled to Wu in 522 BC, after his father and brother were executed by the king of Chu. In his Shiji biography, his father then describes him as a "fiery young man", so he certainly was not 3 or 4 years old. Note also that he helped prince Guang to the throne of Wu in 515BC, and was certainly older than 11 back then...

I don't think the year of his birth is mentioned in ancient texts, but somewhere between 540 and 545 BC is probably close to the truth. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Fcharton (talk • contribs) 21:17, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

WP:ERA
Per this edit, the format for this page was established as. Kindly maintain it consistently pending a new consensus. — Llywelyn II   00:12, 15 December 2016 (UTC)