Talk:Yellow River

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"In Kaifeng, Yellow River is forty meters above the ground level." 40 meters is too high for a river. I guess it should be forty feet.

Contents 1 Length 2 From the Village Pump 3 Clean Up 4 Pronunciation 5 Organization 6 General readability and Misc. Changes

[edit] Length

There are two versions on the length of the river. In this page it is 5500 km long and in the river page it is 4,350 km long. Which one is correct? If it is 5500 km then it suppose to be the sixth longest river in the world. Roscoe x 15:38, 30 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Both Encyclopedia Britannica, the french version of this entry and some research papers I have read give a length of 5464 km. Even more the external links cited for this article says the same. The reporting is not even factually correct so I am tagging the article. Since I'm rather new to editing, feel free to put something more appropriate but the point is, this article needs review.

In: Wang, Houjie, Zuosheng Yang et coll. "Interannual and seasonal variation of the Huanghe (Yellow River) water discharge over the past 50 years: Connections to impacts from ENSO events and dams." Global and Planetary Change In Press, Corrected Proof, (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/B6VF0-4JJ87YF-2/2/5615c81719630e37af54d0ca73accc4b )

In northern China, the Huanghe (Yellow River) is a major source of freshwater (...) for a total of 5464 km before debouching into the Bohai Sea, draining a basin area of about 752,000 km2

--Vincent Boulianne 20:32, 7 May 2006 (UTC)

The Vietnamese version of this article gives 5,463 km as the river's length, by the way. – Minh Nguyễn (talk, contribs) 06:33, 25 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] From the Village Pump

I've just noticed that the Chang Jiang (Yangtze) is literally the "long river" and that the Huang He is literally the "yellow river". Since they seem to share no character in common, are there multiple Chinese characters that are all best translated as river in English or are we just fudging the translations somewhat... in which case the qualification of said translations as "literal" is inappropiate. --Dante Alighieri | Talk 17:14, Sep 13, 2004 (UTC)

Jiang in general, is bigger than He. (At least, when it enters the ocean.) The problem is that in these two particular instances, historical naming takes precedence. Huang He was settled around Xi'an and Xiangyang (btw, why does Xi'an have that '?) at which point the river is not quite wide enough to be called a Jiang. On the other hand, the Yangtze was settled more in the east (Shanghai area), where it was wider. So it rated a Jiang. At least, that's how it was explained to me. -Vina 06:07, 14 Sep 2004 (UTC)

the existence of the apostrophe in xi'an is to identify it as a two syllable name, as distinct from the (very) common single syllable xian. If written with Chinese characters, the distinction is obvious.--Baoluo 02:31, 27 June 2006 (UTC)

In the modern Chinese usage, vina is correct: "Jiang" usually is a bigger river than "He". But for the "Chang Jiang" and the "Huang He", they called so also has some historic origins. In ancient China, the rivers were neither called "Jiang" nor "He", but called "Shui". "Shui" literally means water. There still some rivers has an ancient name with "Shui", e.g, Hanshui. At that time, "Jiang Shui" was the name for the Chang Jiang and "He Shui" was the name for the Huang He. In other word, only Chang Jiang can be called "Jiang" and only Huang He can be called "He". Thousandes years later, the meaning of "Jiang" and "He" were generalized and now they can be used for any rivers. But Chang Jiang still holds the name of Jiang and Huang He still has the name of He.

The Huang He river waz a very large river and from waht i learned many people depended on it and so far az is goes it's still one of the bestb thing tha eva happed to them..on it,an d wit hotu it it waz very hard to leave....i learned all my imformation from my global class and from wat the teacher told us it was very hard to understand at first but then later it was almost like a game cuz u learn everything by dayz and by timing so it's not so difficult.....

[edit] Clean Up

The characteristics section needs cleanup. In particular, the silt statistics need units of tons per some unit time. The section is somewhat vague in other places and needs citations.

I've added time units which I presume are annual flows, which is the standard for discussing river silt loads (high seasonal flow variations in many rivers, including this one, render a daily number as misleading). I'll remove the cleanup tag. 69.228.205.165 02:19, 30 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Pronunciation

Does the "listen" link refer to Cantosese, Mandarin, or there's no difference in pronunciation here? LMB

It's Mandarin.

[edit] Organization

I have noticed some problems with organization and redundancy in this article. In particular, the comment about "When the Yellow River runs clear" being equivalent to "When hell freezes over" appears twice, under "Name" and under "History and Culture." What do you guys think, should that be under the Name heading, Culture, or not at all? RedSkull619 04:02, 5 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] General readability and Misc. Changes

I made a number of changes to make the text more readable. I also made the ranking match the List of rivers by length. The "Yellow River Hydrology Committee" apparently only occurs in the context of this article. The Chinese government web site calls it the "Yellow River Conservancy Committee" and it looks like it uses a different division of the river, but since I could not verify that one way or the other (without spending more time than I have right now), I left the sections as is. Perhaps some one can check out the Physical Geography page on the Yellow River Conservancy Committee website to figure out whether the division is the same as that given in the article. Bear475 02:51, 17 November 2006 (UTC)