User talk:Laohia

Hi Laohia, and Welcome to Wikipedia!

First of all, I'd like to say that I look forward to seeing your contributions on China-related, especially Teochew-related topics. Please don't take this message in the wrong way, as I'm not trying to discourage you or undermining your efforts.

You've said on Talk:Chaozhou dialect that you're trying to promote the use of Peng-im as the Romanization method of Teochew. However, Wikipedia always attempts to follow the most common and/or most official standards and conventions (see Naming conventions and Manual of Style), not promote new standards and conventions that members judge to be more logical or convenient. Since Teochew is a more common spelling than Diojiu, and since Chaozhou is the official pinyin romanization method (though admittedly of Mandarin rather than Teochew), I believe it should be Teochew and/or Chaozhou dialect that is used throughout the Chaozhou dialect page, not Diojiu. (Plenty of irregular spellings are followed here simply because they're more common, e.g. Keelung, Quemoy, etc.)

Now Teochew seems to be a rather fluid case here, since there is no universally accepted "official" romanization method. In this case I'd strongly, strongly recommend that you use Chinese characters or IPA as much as you can, and the official Guangdong province romanization, if ever needed. I apologize if this seems like a setback to your efforts in promoting Peng-im (and I must say that personally I support your efforts in promoting Teochew culture through this and other efforts), but unfortunately Wikipedia isn't the place for promoting standards that are not accepted universally.

I'm aware that this message may seem somewhat discouraging to you. My initial efforts on Wikipedia (incidentally also language-related: on Singlish, the dialect of English spoken in Singapore) were buoyed up by plenty of encouragement, and I apologize once again if this message has been less than completely encouraging. As I said, I do not harbour any ill will towards your efforts in promoting Teochew culture. And I certainly look forward to seeing a more complete version of the Chaozhou dialect article. ;)

Cheers! -- ran (talk) 05:47, Jan 19, 2005 (UTC)

Hello Ran,

YOur points are reasonable. I would prefer to use "Chaozhou" to refer to the dialect, people, and place over "Teochiu" (though that is important in the disambiguation because it is still popular) since Pinyin is a consistent widely accepted romanization.

"Teochiu" is NOT part of a romanization standard that is consistingly used by people today, and persisting in its use would just lead to confusion.

The GagiNang is actually almost identical to the Guangdong Shantou University romanization. For instance the term Diojiu (Teochiu) is the same in both system. The numeration of the tones are also the same.

The Guangdong systerm though uses non-intuitive letters (for Western speakers) to represent some of their sounds. For instance, the "j" sound (j in English) is represented by a "z". But it is still a very good system of represent the sounds of Diojiu.

So I will use Mandarin in the text (Chaozhou, Shantou, etc) but use the Guangdong Peng-im to give vocab and grammar examples.

I can also reference the dictionary and other sources that use it as well.

Unfortunately, the site has been down when I have a chance to work on it, but I will make the changes very soon.

Thank you for the suggestions. Also I would welcome comments/help on the linguistics and comparisons with Mandarin, Cantonese, and Hakka since I have limited knowledge in these areas.

laohia