Talk:Hua Mulan

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Any objections to removing the movie poster from this page? There is already a page for the movie Mulan that contains the same image... William Wallace does not have a picture of Mel Gibson next to him. Hiberniantears 18:23, 21 Mar 2005 (UTC)

User:83.235.171.123 restored the poster after you removed it, saying it was "better than no illustration at all". I have replaced it with a public-domain image that I hope everyone can agree on. —Caesura^(t) 19:08, 27 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Thanks Caesura! That's just what I was looking for. Hiberniantears 23:57, 27 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I don't understand why the first paragraph says that her story comes from "a famous Chinese non-fictional poem", while in the Overview section we read of myths... If it is a myth or a legend, albeit an important one in the Chinese culture, how can it be non-fictional?

[edit] Fa Mulan ??

The name Fa Mulan is sometimes used in place of Hua Mulan - does anyone know the issue here? --Ishel99 10:11, 18 February 2006 (UTC)

Dialect. Some variants of Chinese use /a/ for /wa/ and /f/ for /h/. Seems to me a bunch of central dialects fit that pattern, but without looking it up I'm not sure. --Diderot 15:14, 18 February 2006 (UTC)

I count some twenty-four thousand pages on the Internet with the string "Fa Mulan" [1], so your question is a good one. I have answered it in the article. Unfortunately, User:Eiorgiomugini insists on removing the information. Eiorgio, unless you provide at least some sort of justification for your removal, I will have to start treating such edits as vandalism. — Gulliver ✉ 02:16, 14 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] The link to the English poem doesn't work

Can this be fixed? I'd like to read it.

It seems to be fine now.

[edit] Quotations

One cannot alter quotations. The material I added from The Flowering Plum and the Palace Lady is quoted material. The quotations were intended to show how a published translator rendered the original onomatopoeia. For example, it says "She only hears the Yellow River's flowing water cry tsien tsien. You cannot change the spelling of this. If you desire to add information, that is fine. For example, you could add the modern Mandarin pronunciation of those characters in pinyin (although that is unnecessary because the Wiktionary links contain this information). But do not alter quoted material. — Gulliver ✉ 02:16, 14 June 2006 (UTC)

Gulliver, this material as it is presented in the article is not a quote: it is not enclosed in a quotation mark nor indented in a new paragraph. In fact, it is probably not a good idea to take a direct quote from this book (from back in 1976), if the author used WG (or whatever it is) when the modern standard is pinyin.

If your argument is that "tsien-tsien" is some kind of a "reconstruction" of an ancient pronunciation, then it is also quite obvious that the author is using a WG-derived representation for this reconstruction.

In fact, Mr Sergei Anatolyevich's database gives something quite different: [2]. As such, it fits neither modern standards nor Wiki conventions (which is to use pinyin preferentially and WG supplementally). (Another example of the difference between authorities when it comes to reconstruction.) Finally, millions of Chinese people read the poem in modern Mandarin (or whatever language they are speaking) and have no problem understanding the onomatopoeia. So "reconstructing" onomatopoeia in this way, using a non-standard representaiton such as this is quite troublesome and redundant.

Given that the pinyin representaiton is (1) certain, (2) standard, and (3) does not differ that much from Mr Anatyloyevich's reconstruction, I think it's the way to go. --Sumple (Talk) 04:01, 14 June 2006 (UTC)