User:Ndsg/Sandbox/Archive 1

GA assessment template
Just to experiment:

Available arguments are aye, nay, wtf, and ???, none or other argument gives undecided mark.

results in:

What is a good article?
A good article has the following attributes.

1. It is well written. In this respect:
 * (a) the prose is comprehensible, the grammar is correct, and the structure is clear at first reading.
 * (b) the structure is logical, introducing the topic and then grouping together its coverage of related aspects; where appropriate, it contains a succinct lead section summarising the topic, and the remaining text is organised into a system of hierarchical sections (particularly for longer articles);
 * (c) It does not seriously violate the standards in Wikipedia Manual of style. (In particular, sections to go by include the Article lead guideline, Article layout guideline, Jargon guideline, Words to avoid using guideline, How to write about Fiction guideline, and List incorporation)
 * (d) necessary technical terms or jargon are briefly explained in the article itself, or an active link is provided.

2. It is factually accurate and verifiable. In this respect:
 * (a) it provides references to any and all sources used for its material;
 * (b) the citation of its sources is essential, and while the use of inline citations is not mandatory, it is highly desirable, in particular for longer articles. Unambiguous citations of reliable sources are necessary for any material that is challenged or likely to be challenged. Articles whose topics fall under the guideline on scientific citations should adhere to the guideline.
 * (c) sources should be selected in accordance with the guidelines for reliable sources;
 * (d) it contains no elements of original research.

3. It is broad in its coverage. In this respect :
 * (a) it addresses all major aspects of the topic (this requirement is slightly weaker than the "comprehensiveness" required by WP:FAC, and allows shorter articles and broad overviews of large topics to be listed);
 * (b) it stays focused on the main topic without going into unnecessary details (no non-notable trivia).

4. It follows the neutral point of view policy. In this respect:
 * (a) viewpoints are represented fairly and without bias;
 * (b) all significant points of view are fairly presented, but not asserted, particularly where there are or have been conflicting views on the topic.

5. It is stable, i.e. it does not change significantly from day to day and is not the subject of ongoing edit wars. This does not apply to vandalism and protection or semi-protection as a result of vandalism, or proposals to split/merge the article content.

6. It contains images, where possible, to illustrate the topic. In this respect:
 * (a) the images are tagged and have succinct and descriptive captions;
 * (b) a lack of images does not in itself prevent an article from achieving Good Article status.
 * (c) any non-free images have a fair use rationale.

Revised GR lead section
Gwoyeu Romatzyh (literally "National [Language] Romanization"), (GR), is a system for writing Mandarin Chinese in the Latin alphabet. The system was conceived by Y.R. Chao and developed by a group of linguists including Chao and Lin Yutang from 1925 to 1926. GR was the official romanization system in the Republic of China from 1928 until 1949, and was used to indicate pronunciations in dictionaries of the National (Mandarin-based) Language. Its proponents hoped one day to establish it as a writing system for a reformed Chinese script. But despite support from a small number of trained linguists in China and overseas, GR met with public indifference and even hostility due to its complexity. Another obstacle preventing its widespread adoption was the fact that it was too narrowly based on the Peking dialect, in a period lacking a strong centralized government to enforce its use.

Mandarin Chinese has four tones, which must be indicated to clarify the meaning of each syllable (omitting the tones has been likened to writing English without vowels). GR is unique among romanization systems in indicating the tone of a syllable by its spelling. Other systems indicate the tones either with accents (for example Pinyin: āi, ái, ǎi and ài) or numbers at the end of the syllable (Wade-Giles: ai1, ai2, etc.). GR spells the same four tones ai, air, ae and ay. These spellings, which follow specific rules, indicate the tones while retaining the pronunciation of the syllable ai. A further innovation of GR, later adopted by Pinyin, was to use contrasting unvoiced/voiced pairs of consonants to represent aspirated and unaspirated sounds in Chinese. For example b and p represent IPA [p] and [pʰ] (p and p' in Wade). Another feature of GR surviving in Pinyin was to write words (usually of two syllables) as units: eg Gwoyeu rather than the Wade Kuo2-yü3.

Chao used GR in all his textbooks and scholarly works in linguistics, the most important and influential being his Grammar of Spoken Chinese of 1968. His Sayable Chinese, published in the same year, provided students with extensive reading materials in GR. A small number of other textbooks and dictionaries in GR were published in Hong Kong and overseas over the period 1942-2000.

History


Tonal spelling, Gwoyeu Romatzyh's most distinctive feature, was first proposed by Lin Yutang. The details of the system were developed in 1925-26 by a group of five linguists including Y.R. Chao and Lin, under the auspices of the Preparatory Commission for the Unification of the National Language. In 1928 GR was officially adopted by the government. GR was intended to be used alongside the existing Zhùyīn phonetic symbols: hence the alternative name "Second Pattern of the National Alphabet" (国音字母第二式 / Gwoin Tzyhmuu Dihell Shyh / Guóyīn Zìmǔ Dì'èr Shì). Both systems were used to indicate the revised standard of pronunciation in the new official Vocabulary of National Pronunciation for Everyday Use (国音常用字汇 / Gwoin Charngyonq Tzyhhuey / Guóyīn Chángyòng Zìhuì) of 1932. The designers of GR were more ambitious, intending it to be used as a practical system of writing.

In the 1930s two shortlived attempts were made to teach GR to railway workers and peasants in Hénán and Shāndōng provinces. Support for GR, being confined to a small number of trained linguists and sinologists, "was distinguished more for its quality than its quantity". During this period GR faced increasing hostility because of the complexity of its tonal spelling. One sinologist, Bernhard Karlgren, even criticised GR for being insufficiently rigorous. Ultimately, like the rival system Latinxua Sinwenz, GR failed to gain widespread support. A major reason for this was that "a sufficiently precise and strong language norm had not yet become a reality in China".

In Taiwan GR still survives as a pronunciation aid in monolingual dictionaries. However, even in Taiwan GR has been superseded in daily use by the Yale system or later ROC romanization systems. In 1986 GR was officially replaced in Taiwan by a modified form known as MPS II, which was in turn replaced by Tongyong Pinyin in 2002.

A vestigial use of GR in mainland China can be seen in the official spelling of the first syllable of Shaanxi for Shǎnxī province, to distinguish it from Shānxī province, particularly in foreign-language text where the tone marks are often omitted.

Words as units
By 1922 Chao had determined the essential features of GR. One important principle was that syllables which formed words should be written together. This strikes speakers of European languages as obvious; but in Chinese what Chao calls the "sociological word"—"which a child learns to say, ..., which a writer is paid for so much per thousand" —is the character, which represents a syllable or morpheme, a smaller unit than the "linguistic word". In practice most Chinese words consist of two syllables, and it was Chao's bold innovation to reflect this in GR orthography: contrast the compact spelling Gwoyeu Romatzyh with the hyphenated Wade-Giles form Kuo-yü Jo-ma-tzŭ. This principle, illustrated in the extract below, was later adopted in Pinyin.

Provinces
This table lists some Chinese provinces in both GR and Pinyin. The GR tonal "clues" (described in detail in Tonal rules) are highlighted with different colours for emphasis: colours are not, of course, necessary when writing GR. Note that T1 is the default tone: hence Shinjiang (Xīnjiāng), for example, is spelt using the basic form of both syllables.


 * GR tone key
 * Tone 1 (basic form: unmarked) Tone 2 Tone 3 Tone 4

GR/Pinyin comparison
The differences between GR and Pinyin spelling are summarized in this table, which includes only those initials and finals which differ in the two systems. The list is presented in GR alphabetical order, but can be changed to Pinyin order by clicking the button next to the heading.

GR in the age of the internet
When Y.R. Chao was developing GR in the 1920s, he can hardly have foreseen the future developments that would lead to the creation of the World Wide Web. It is one of the ironies of intellectual history that, of three major methods of writing Chinese—characters, Pinyin and GR—it should be the quaint, ungainly GR alone that presents no problems of input, transmission or display on today's computers.

Anything in Chinese can be typed in GR on a QWERTY keyboard and sent as a message, without risk of loss of tonal information, to any Chinese-speaker anywhere in the world. Typing characters or Pinyin with tone marks presents problems of input, and possibly transmission or display as well. In one case GR has actually been used as an input method for typing Pinyin. Chao would have been delighted at this vindication of his method; but he would not have been surprised, as can be seen from the discussion of such key concepts as information, redundancy and communication theory in his masterly study Language and Symbolic Systems.

Sample of GR text
This extract from Y.R Chao's Sayable Chinese gives a flavour of the look and feel of GR used in practice. The topic is scholarly ("What is Sinology?"), but the style colloquial in tone. The tonal spelling "clues" have been highlighted using the same colour scheme as in the list of provinces. Versions in characters and Pinyin are given below the GR text.


 * "Ha nn sh y ue" de m ingcheng due y Jongg w o y e ou id e an butzuenjin q de yi h we y . W oo men tingshuo y e ou "Yi nn du h sh y ue", "Aij yi sh y ue", "Ha nn sh y ue", e r l m eiy e ou tingshuo y e ou "Shila h sh y ue", " L uom aa sh y ue", gen q m eiy e ou tingshuo y e ou "Ingg w osh y ue", "M ee ig w osh y ue".  "Ha nn sh y ue" je y g m ingcheng w anch y uan b e aushy h Ou-M ee i sh y uej ee due y na h shie y ii jing che r n l uen de g uu la o -g w ojia de w enhua h de i-j oo ng chingka nn de ta y du h.


 * GR tone key
 * Tone 1 (basic form: unmarked) Tone 2 Tone 3 Tone 4

Chinese characters:
 * 汉学的名称对中国有一点不尊敬的意味. 我们听说有印度学,埃及学,汉学,而没有听说有希腊学,罗马学, 更没有听说有英国学,美国学. 汉学这个名称完全表示欧美学者对那些已经沉沦的古老国家的文化的一种请看的态度.

Pinyin version:
 * "Hànxué" de míngchēng duì Zhōngguó yǒu yìdiǎn bùzūnjìng de yìwèi. Wǒmen tīngshuō yǒu "Yìndùxué", "Āijíxué", "Hànxué", ér méiyǒu tīngshuō yǒu "Xīlàxué", "Luómǎxué", gèng méiyǒu tīngshuō yǒu "Yīngguóxué", "Měiguóxué". "Hànxué" zhèige míngchēng wánquán biǎoshì Ōu-Měi xuézhě duì nàxiē yǐjīng chénlún de gǔlǎo-guójiā de wénhuà de yìzhǒng qīngkàn de tàidù.

Not yet added
W oo men Jongg w o de w enhua h j ii chian- n ian l ai ijy r m eiy e ou jongdua nn, n aa l ii n eng gen na h shie jongjian w angle-g w o l uenshia nn che r ng w ei jy rm indi h de Yi nn du h , Aij yi d ee ngd ee ng shiang-t yi -bin q -lue nn ne? ... Jongg w o y e u y an w entzy h j ii chian- n ian l ai la o sh y e ou r en tza y yon q j de, bin q m eiy e ou fe y dia w, gen Yi nn du h de Fa nn w en, Aij yi de shian q sh y ng w entzy h y ii jing che r ngle s yy -y e u y an s yy w entzy h de ch y ngsh y ng buto r ng.

我们中国的文化几千年来一直没有中断, 哪里能跟那些中间亡了国沦陷成为殖民地的印度,埃及等等相提并论呢? 中国语言文字几千年来老是有人在用着的, 并没有废掉, 跟印度的梵文, 埃及的象形文字已经成了死语言死文字的情形不同.

Wǒmen Zhōngguó de wénhuà jǐqiān nián lái yìzhí méiyǒu zhōngduàn, nǎlǐ néng gēn nàxiē zhōngjiān wángle-guó lúnxiàn chéngwéi zhímíndì de Yìndù, Āijí děngděng xiāngtí bìnglùn ne? Zhōngguó yǔyán wénzì jǐqiānnián lái lǎoshi yǒu rén zài yòngzhe de, bìng méiyǒu fèidiào, gēn Yìndù de Fànwén, Āijí de xiàngxíng wénzì yǐjīng chéngle sǐ yǔyán sǐ wénzì de chíngxíng bùtóng.

Revised Finals table
From Pinyin:

From current GR page

Participles
Turkish has several participles, including present (with the ending -en2), future (-ecek2), past (-miş4) and aorist (-er2 or -ir4). These forms can function as either adjectives or nouns: oynamayan çocuklar "children who do not play", oynamayanlar "those who do not play"; okur yazar "reader-writer = literate", okur yazarlar "literates".

The most important function of participles is to form modifying phrases equivalent to relative clauses in most European languages. The participles used in these constructions are the future (-ecek2) and an older form (-dik4), which covers both present and past meanings. The use of these "personal" or "relative" participles is illustrated in the following table, in which the examples are presented according to the grammatical case which would be seen in the equivalent English relative clause.

GR description: summary for main article

 * Note: In this section the word "tone" is abbreviated "T": thus T1 stands for Tone 1, or first tone, etc. To assist readers unfamiliar with GR, Pinyin equivalents have been added in brackets.

Basic forms
An important GR innovation, later adopted by [Pinyin]], was to use contrasting unvoiced/voiced pairs of consonants to represent aspirated and unaspirated sounds in Chinese. For example b and p represent IPA [p] and [pʰ] (p and p‘ in Wade). Another feature of GR surviving in Pinyin was to write words (usually of two syllables) as units: eg Gwoyeu rather than the Wade Kuo2-yü3.

The most characteristic—and potentially confusing—feature of GR is the use of the letter j and the digraphs ch and sh to represent two different series of sounds. When followed by i these letters correspond to the alveolo-palatal sounds (Pinyin j, q, and x); otherwise they correspond to the retroflex sounds (Pinyin zh, ch, and sh). Readers used to Pinyin need to pay particular attention to these spellings: for example, GR ju, jiu and jiou correspond to Pinyin zhu, ju and jiu respectively.

GR orthography has these other notable features:


 * iu represents the close front rounded vowel (IPA ) spelt ü or in many cases simply u in Pinyin.
 * Final -y represents allophones of i (IPA, and ): GR shy and sy correspond to Pinyin shi and  si respectively.
 * el corresponds to Pinyin er (-r being reserved to indicate T2). The most important use of -(e)l is as a rhotacization suffix, as in ideal = i dean + -(e)l, "a little" (yìdiǎnr).

Tonal modifications
GR modifies the basic T1 spelling of syllables to indicate tones 2, 3 and 4. This is accomplished in one of two ways:


 * either a vowel is changed to another vowel resembling it in sound (i to y, for example, or u to w)


 * or a silent letter (r or h) is added or inserted after a vowel.

Chao's preference was to use the first more concise method wherever possible. The following rules of thumb cover most cases.

 Tone 2: i/u → y/w; or add -r 
 * sh y ue, ch w an, cha r ng, bai r  (xué, chuán, cháng, bái)

 Tone 3: i/u → e/o; or double vowel 


 * sh e ang, d o an, da o, g ee i (xiǎng, duǎn, dǎo, gěi)

 Tone 4: change/double final letter; or add -h 


 * da y, go w , dua nn , bi nq , chiu h  (dài, gòu, duàn, bìng, qù)

Neutral tone: precede with a dot (full stop)


 * perng.yeou, dih.fang (péngyou, dìfang).

Exception Syllables with an initial sonorant (l-/m-/n-/r-) use the basic form for T2 rather than T1. In these syllables the (rarer) T1 is marked with -h- as the second letter. For example ma is T2 (má), whereas mha is T1 (mā).

Abbreviations
A number of frequently-occurring morphemes have abbreviated spellings in GR. The commonest of these are: -g (-ge), -j (-zhe), -m (-me), sh (shi) and -tz (-zi). In texts published before 1950 the letters v and x are used as abbreviations to mark reduplication. For example shieh.x represents shieh.shieh ("thank you"), while haoshuo vx! stands for haoshuo haoshuo! "you're too kind!".