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The contents of the Talk:Varieties of Chinese/content fork page were merged into Varieties of Chinese on 2 February 2011. For the contribution history and old versions of the redirected page, please see its history.

Kanguole, I'm not clear on what awkward punctuation is being introduced with the use of the {{ zhp}} template: semicolons? If anything, it seemed that it was removing awkward punctuation, or otherwise was leaving the presentation essentially identical. I suppose I'm worried because if the template is too awkward for use in inline text, then it's not really good for anything, because its entire purpose is to be used inline. Remsense 聊 11:36, 18 November 2023 (UTC) reply

Yes, I think the semicolons are a problem. (I was mistaken in mentioning {{ zhi}}, which wasn't used here.) The {{ lang-zh}} template was originally intended for use in parentheses in the opening sentence of articles, where the semicolons are customary. Later the |labels=no option was added with the intention to use the template elsewhere, where semicolons are less usual, so it's not a good fit.

In prose, the most one needs is simplified, traditional (if different), pinyin and gloss, with the order depending on the focus of the context. The convention simplified/traditional makes the alternatives clear, the gloss is marked with single quotes, and then the semicolon (which is never seen in writing on the subject) is unnecessary. Kanguole 12:06, 18 November 2023 (UTC) reply

Certainly, when I submitted changes to the underlying module that enabled this functionality I wanted to change as little as possible, and semicolons were the pre-extant delimiters used, as you know. I originally thought a presentation that looked like

汉字／漢字; hànzì; 'Chinese characters'

using a fullwidth slash between character forms looked good, but I got some pushback on that so I decided to stay inbounds as much as possible. I could go back to the module and try to hammer out some more nicer-looking tweaks, but I want to make sure I'm not stepping on anyone's toes when doing so, since it's not mine and I want to make sure everyone else on wiki who's using it can continue to do so as before. Do you think an option to disable to disable the delimiters would be worthwhile? Remsense 聊 12:12, 18 November 2023 (UTC) reply

Why a fullwidth slash? It's logically at a level above the simplified and traditional characters.

I think that adding |labels=no to {{ lang-zh}} in order to use it in prose was a mistaken approach, and I'm not sure how widely it was used. For one thing not having labels breaks down if you have more than those four, and even then the simplified/traditional alternation is unclear. And then there are the semicolons, which have a quite different meaning in prose. Kanguole 12:37, 18 November 2023 (UTC) reply

It's a tricky style issue, especially one that is ideally fit for almost any article that requires some inline Chinese text. The slash in part is because it makes tabular presentation of characters nicer since they line up due to all the glyphs being the same size. Remsense 聊 12:50, 18 November 2023 (UTC) reply

Chinese (specifically, Mandarin)<!--DO NOT CHANGE TO STANDARD CHINESE The best English language word that can encompass all the forms of Chinese mentioned in the quotation is "Mandarin Chinese". Beifang Fangyan and Northern Chinese are not really covered under 'Standard Chinese', so it would be inappropriate to write this as 'Standard Chinese' which is a more limited concept.--> is one of the [[Official languages of the United Nations|six official languages]] of the [[United Nations]].
I think this might be wrong: the UN doesn't operate with other Mandarin varieties, right? It works in Standard Chinese. Remsense 留 22:34, 3 January 2024 (UTC) reply

The UN is a bit vague about what they mean by "Chinese", but in practice it is pretty clearly Standard Chinese. The editor who added that is blocked, so I'll undo it. Kanguole 23:58, 3 January 2024 (UTC) reply