Talk:Bauhinia blakeana

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 Bauhinia blakeana is within the scope of WikiProject Plants, an attempt to better organize information in articles related to plants and botany. For more information, visit the project page.
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Hong Kong To-do:
edit purge
  • Clean up all MTR station pages. They are literally all over the place. Two model pages are Tsing Yi Station and Sheung Shui Station. They each describe a feature special to the station, Station layout, exit, and connections, as well as neighbouring stations and the station "box".
    • We will also need plenty of updated pictures (e.g. removing all KCR-related images except those on the KCR article). Check that all pages have basically the same language structure as Tsing Yi Station and Sheung Shui Station. Links to location maps are good too. (Should also perform these checks on Chinese Wikipedia.)
  • Clean-up pages that link with TVB, especially its series pages.

If Chinese characters (such as 香港蘭) are included, could someone add the pronounciation or transliteration of please. --Yodakii 04:12, 30 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] POV

Hi. I earlier made a (facetious) edit noting the egocentrism of the PRC heads following the sentence on the name change of the flower, which was aptly removed for bias. Problem is, the sentence still scrapes me as I read it, as there apparently is zero explication of why a government would insist on removing the term "foreign" from the established scientific name of one of its flowers (strangely, I believe the character connotes simply "ocean" equally as much as it does "foreign"). Frankly, if I was new to China, I would think the PRC childish, at best, to be going around renaming everything for no cause, and I would like to know why it did so. It makes the article sound less encyclopedic and more like a PR bulletin. Does anybody know the reason? And if it is egocentrism, xenophobia, or self-promotion, can this article state it (if with gentler phrasing) and still be called neutral?

I recognize that the political side of this discussion may be taking place in other arenas, but it does directly apply here, in that bothersome sentence. Anybody have any views? Thanks. Bravo-Alpha 07:48, 2 December 2005 (UTC)


I think it's messy and unnecessary. Why should an English encyclopedia article reflect on the name of something in another language, unless it directly pertains to the English article?

I also don't understand how "This unique endemic flower is special of Hong Kong's ecosystem [sic, sic, sic]" could also grow in India. And Blake didn't discover the plant. He only came to HK in 1898! To be honest, it's a horrible article generally. Johnny Goodshoes —Preceding unsigned comment added by 202.130.159.184 (talk) 07:08, 1 April 2008 (UTC)

Endemic species can be introduced to other places. For example Norfolk pine is endemic to Norfolk Island, now they grace many homes and offices around the world as indoor plants. However whether the bauhinia is endemic to HK needs to be verified and cited. As to the Chinese name 洋紫荊, it is not a scientific name of a species to begin with. The scientific name is and always will be Bauhinia blakeana. 洋 has been associated with numerous other foreign concepts and objects. Removing 洋 from the Chinese name can be said as a sort of Linguistic_purism. Many languages have from time to time purged loan words and used more native terminologies. Whether this is an official PRC policy, or a natural linguistic evolution needs to be referenced. Is the Chinese modified name relevant in an English-language article? It's a question of adding interest really. Personally, I grew up (born in 1979) learning the term as "洋紫荊". I don't know when the subtle change occurred but most current Chinese sources now use "紫荊" such as in the case of Grand_Bauhinia_Medal (大紫荊勳章). "Discover" is the common terminology when discussing species classification. Whoever first describing it scientifically and classifying it would be discovering the species. It is not the same as talking about "Discovery of America" which obviously had native population before Columbus. See Species_first_discovered_in_Hong_Kong. --Kvasir (talk) 15:52, 1 April 2008 (UTC)