Re: The translation of 漢字 (Was: English editing)

thanks for your comments, Eric. I see this terminological discussion as 
less important than discussion about layout rules and requirement,  but 
since it touches on such a key term for our work, it's probably worth 
trynig to clearly bring out all the arguments for and against, and look 
for supporting evidence. So i'll reply to these points with some 
additional thoughts.

On 01/04/2015 17:14, 慶 劉 wrote:
> Dear All,
>
> I prefer to use “Hanzi” because:
>
> 1. It is clear. Hanzi is Hanzi, it is Chinese-original, and it is
> different from Japanese Kanji and Hanja. Café au lait is different from
> Caffe latte, although they both literally means "coffee with milk".

as a native English speaker, i think the problem is that it actually 
isn't clear to English speakers (which in our case means people from 
around the world who don't speak Chinese but who read our document) what 
is the scope of the word 'hanzi'.

there's a substantial overlap of the code points used to write Chinese, 
Japanese and Korean. The term 'Han characters' as used by, for example, 
the Unicode Standard refers to all of them, without reference to the 
language for which they are used. The term 'Chinese characters' is also 
used widely for the same thing.

In *English*, the term 'kanji' character, on the other hand, normally 
denotes a smallish subset of the large superset, used specifically for 
Japanese language text; as does the term 'hanja' for similar characters 
used in Korean language text.

so if we use the term 'hanzi', do we mean it to refer to a subset of the 
whole or to all chinese-derived/similar characters? (English-speaking 
people will want to understand this). To put this another way, it's not 
immediately clear, for the English speaker, whether layout rules in our 
document related to use of 'hanzi' characters apply equally to all 
characters used in a document for a Chinese audience, where that page 
contains small amounts of text used for Japanese or Korean words. Do the 
latter require different rules?

btw, this definition of hanzi as being only for characters used for 
Chinese language content and as something different from characters used 
in Chinese and Korean seems to be supported by the distinctions drawn in 
the list just below, where hanzi is equated with China, rather than with 
similar or the same characters used in other locations.


> 2. It complies to current standard as Xidorn said, GB12200.1-90 Part 01
> "汉字" is translated to "Chinese character, Hanzi". See 4.1.3.6 of that
> spec, and in  ISO/IEC 10646 Universal Coded Character Set uses:
>> > Hanzi for whole China
>> > Kanji for Japan
>> > Hanja for N. and S. Korea
>> > ChuNom for Vietnam
>
> 3. Since terminology is a serious thing, I think their is a principle
> that an extra new term should not be made to confuse people, especially
> when a suitable term already exits. I don't think "Han Character" is a
> rather a newly made English word and is not well-received yet.

(i'm guessing, Eric, that the word "don't" in the last sentence is not 
meant to be there – otherwise, i'm confused.)

following that assumption, let me note that if you google for 'hanzi' 
you get 578K results. If you google for 'Han characters' you get 21.2 
million results, so i think that that supports the idea that 'hanzi' is 
actually less well received than 'han characters', and that 'hanzi' is 
more likely to be seen as a new term than 'han character'.

If you google 'chinese characters' you get 31.6 million results. So 
perhaps that is a contender, even though it is a more generic-sounding 
term.  It is, however, also used in the translation of the GB standard 
you mention just above. It is also sometimes used in the Unicode 
standard as a synonym for 'Han character'.

as a further data point, i also checked several books on the history of 
Chinese writing, Japanese writing, several dictionaries dealing with 
Chinese-derived characters, and a language tutorial, and they all refer 
to the characters as 'Chinese characters'. Wikipedia, also.

all of the above sources define 'hanzi' as the *Chinese* name for 
chinese characters (as opposed to the English name for Chinese characters).

>
> 4. I don't agree that Kanji is a well-received English word. No matter
> how it is well-accepted, it is a loanword—it is just simply because
> Japanese layout is talked and discussed more than Chinese. When talking
> about Chinese, Hanzi is Hanzi. Do as Roman do in Rome. That's it.


so i'm still struggling to see 'hanzi' as the way the 'Romans' do it 
when speaking English.  And, additionally, i'm concerned that it's not 
immediately clear to English speakers what falls within the scope of the 
word 'hanzi'.

my personal preference would be to use the term 'Han character', since i 
think that the Unicode Standard is a very good go-to place for 
definitions, and those definitions are the ones that most of the IT 
people using English worldwide will be familiar with.

but i'd also be happy to use the term 'Chinese character', if others 
disagree, because the way it tends to be used in general to some extent 
transcends the question of whether it refers to just characters used for 
content in Chinese, or to all characters derived from the Chinese 
writing system.

hope that helps,
ri



>
> Eric Q. LIU
>
>
> 2015年4月1日 19:13、chen-zhuang <chenzh-zhuang@163.com>さんのメッセージ：
>
>> It seems that keeping Han Characters is good choice.
>> Chen Zhuang
>>
>>
>> 在2015年04月01 15时16分, "Richard Ishida"<ishida@w3.org>写道:
>>
>>     On 01/04/2015 07:13, Angel Li wrote:
>>     > +1 to Hanzi if we already have a related national standard
>>     stating that.
>>     > To make it more clear for a broader community, maybe we should
>>     add a paragraph of rational on what do we mean by Hanzi.
>>
>>     I'm not sure why we are trying to change the English language. 'Han
>>     characters' is the common English way of referring to hanzi (or
>>     'ideographic characters', but that is slightly inaccurate).
>>
>>     If we use 'hanzi', people will wonder if this has some different
>>     meaning
>>     than the term 'Han characters', which they know. (And by the way,
>>     very
>>     very few people will actually know how to pronounce it properly.)
>>     If we
>>     mean the same thing as 'Han character', why introduce something
>>     different?
>>
>>     So is there a particular, practical reason to use hanzi rather
>>     than Han
>>     character?
>>
>>     ri
>>
>>
>>

Received on Wednesday, 1 April 2015 18:40:07 UTC