Talk:Dynasties in Chinese history

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article is part of WikiProject China, a project to improve all China-related articles. If you would like to help improve this and other China-related articles, please join the project. All interested editors are welcome.

Start

This article has been rated as Start-Class on the quality scale. (add comments)

[edit] han

whats the difrence between eastern and western han? and which han are we refering to when chinese call themselves han chinese?

It was split in the middle, and it's the same people. -- Jjjsixsix ^(talk)/_(contribs) @ 20:27, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Mnemonics

Since the mnemonics are all in Chinese, I don't think they contribute much to the English-language version of this page. Perhaps if they had a translation as well as a transliteration. I can see that some of the transliterated words seem to refer to the names of the dynasties, but not all of them seem to, and since I speak no Chinese I'm also not sure whether they just are homonyms of the empire names. --64.165.112.146 23:17, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

I agree that they don't seem to serve much of a purpose here on the English wikipedia. They're not homonyms, though, just rhymes/cadences using the actual names of the dynsties. For example, the last line of the first mnemonic is: 宋元明清后,皇朝至此完 which transliterates in pinyin as sòng yuán míng qīng hòu, huáng cháo zhì cǐ wán, and roughly translated as Song, Yuan, Ming, and Qing are last, empires until the end (of the list). It's more like the mnemonic for remembering the names of all the English kings and queens that schoolchildren in the UK learn (or used to learn?). siafu 01:12, 27 July 2007 (UTC)

I'm going to cut the mnemonics section out, regardless, as anyone who knows Chinese well enough to use them probably knows it well enough to read the Chinese wikipedia and find out. siafu 01:14, 27 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Romanisation

Why are romanisations in Chinese languages other that Putonghua being swiftly deleted? Whilst Mandarin might be the official and dominant language of the PRC, this was not the case in imperial China, and thus we should not base our use of the Chinese language solely on modern practice in mainland China, as there are many other Chinese communities around the world where Mandarin is not the lingua franca or the official standard - more often than not this is either Cantonese or Hokkien (Minnan). Indeed, Cantonese is used officially in both SARs of the PRC and is undoubtedly the most commonly spoken Chinese language within Chinese communities in the west. Hokkien is the mosty common first language in the ROC and enjoys a semi-official sort of status being used in politics, in the media, and in government advertisements amongst other things, and it is the most common lingua franca in Asian overseas Chinese communities. The people and communities who speak these languages are usually proudly Chinese and their languages are no less legitimate than PRC Putonghua. It should be noted that linguists generally consider the southern Chinese language to be closer to older forms of Chinese and thus they would probably even be more suitable than putonhua for representing the names of the older dynasties. Why at the moment is it alright to have more than one Mandarin romanisation on many pages, but not any for other Chinese languages? If there is considered to be a problem of cluttering the page, maybe we should use Template:Chinese. Vox latina (talk) 08:20, 5 June 2008 (UTC)