Talk:Kaidan

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Shouldn't the lemma be Kaidan? We use Hepburn romanization of the post-war standard reading for all other Japanese terms, so for the sake of consistency this article should be moved. -- Mkill 04:08, 2 December 2005 (UTC)

Wikipedia is not about consistency or Hepburn romanization. Convention is to use the most common English speeling. The term comes from Lafcadio Hearn's book of the same name, which is never called "kaidan" - not even in Japan, where I assume kanji/hiragana is used - and which does not use the spelling "kaidan" except to specify the modern pronunciation, which has already been done on this article. There is no need to use the modern spelling when it is not as common in English. Admittedly, I have met people who were confused by this spelling and pronunciation, including myself and my native Japanese-speaking Japanese teacher, but this article as it is now already explains the resolution to the problem, which would be harder to do if it were moved and already used the modern spelling. This seems to be the exact opposite problem we had with Earless Hoichi/Hoichi the Earless, which was moved to conform to the more common (albeit old-fashioned) wording (which also came from this book), as per Wikipedia policy. elvenscout742 16:27, 16 March 2006 (UTC)

This article should definitely be re-labled as Kaidan. In Japan, as in elswhere the particular spelling of "Kwaidan" refers only to Hearn's book, and not to kaidan in general. It is one of the ways that Hearn's book is seperated from general kaidan.

Note the Japanese-language entry, where the reading is given as "kaidan" with a not that Hearn's book is different, labled "Kwaidan." (MightyAtom 16:18, 1 July 2006 (UTC))

[edit] Kwaidan

To whoever put in the section about "Kwaidan" being an error resulting from Hearn's poor grasp of Japanese: it's not. The word actually did used to have kw in it—the language itself has changed since and lost the w. The same thing happened to Kwannon. --Ptcamn 11:57, 16 July 2006 (UTC)

I second that. The now non-existant syllable is sometimes written with a syllable otherwise in use only when writting some Okinawan words - a "ku" followed by a small "wa". TomorrowTime 14:44, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

Indeed. The "kw" prnounciation is mostly gone in modern Japanese but it historically existed, and remains in some names such as Kwansei Gakuin University. —Tokek 09:48, 22 November 2006 (UTC)