Talk:Zhan Tianyou

Requested move 18 August 2015

Zhan Tianyou → Jeme Tien Yow – He himself used this romanization, so I think we should respect that, since he was clearly able to speak English. See Yale University archives. The German, French and Malagasy versions all use "Jeme Tien Yow". "Zhan Tianyou" is from a Chinese romanization system invented ~40 years after his death, using a Chinese dialect he probably couldn't even speak. Timmyshin (talk) 03:44, 18 August 2015 (UTC)

• Support WP:UE, MOS:IDENTITY ; Just because pinyin exists does not mean that everything is written using it. We have established English language usage for people from when they were alive and in English speaking regions where they used certain spellings themselves, and in contemporary English language publications. We should not be revisionist and pretend that everything uses Pinyin. -- 67.70.32.190 (talk) 05:58, 18 August 2015 (UTC)

WP:IDENTITY says "When there is a discrepancy between the term most commonly used by reliable sources for a person or group and the term that person or group uses for themselves, use the term that is most commonly used by reliable sources". As Google Ngram shows, "Zhan Tianyou" is by far the most common spelling. WP:UE is irrelevant as both spellings are used in English sources. -Zanhe (talk) 09:05, 18 August 2015 (UTC)

• Support I support the move. As a practical matter, redirects can get readers to the article no matter what spelling they use, but I think the text of the article itself would be more coherent using the original spelling of the name. Quotes from Jeme himself, or from others who knew him during his life would not have to be messed with. As for later biographical writings, he has been discussed in both Wade-Giles and pinyin, so that will simply have to be dealt with as all such problems are. Rgr09 (talk) 06:42, 18 August 2015 (UTC)

Just to note, this is how the Boorman biography, which is one of the main sources for the article, handles this problem; it uses Tien Yow Jeme throughout, with the WG spelling only at the top. Rgr09 (talk) 06:49, 18 August 2015 (UTC)

The Boorman source was from 1967, before Pinyin became the dominant romanization standard for Chinese. Most modern sources since the 1980s overwhelmingly use Zhan Tianyou. -Zanhe (talk) 09:08, 18 August 2015 (UTC)

• Strong Oppose - We use WP:COMMONNAME, not rare idiosyncratic spellings. Google Ngram overwhelmingly favours "Zhan Tianyou" (the WG spelling "Chan T'ien-yu" has fallen out of use since the 1980s, while "Jeme Tien Yow" is so rare that it does not even appear on the chart). And it doesn't matter when the romanization system was invented, or we'd have to use Chinese characters for all ancient Chinese people who never spelled their names in the Latin alphabet. -Zanhe (talk) 08:32, 18 August 2015 (UTC)

'Jeme Tien-yow' will get you an ngram. 'Jeme Tien' gives the largest number of hits, and this is certainly him. Dashes and random use of Yow, yow, yau, vau (probably a bad scan in google books) account for the variation. In any case, the tiny number of books in the sample makes this a problematic measure. To the extent he has been written about in English, Jeme Tien Yow is common, and appears in recent works. Rgr09 (talk) 15:01, 18 August 2015 (UTC)

Yes, "Jeme Tien-yow" gets an ngram. But as the ngram shows, it was mostly used a century ago, while "Zhan Tianyou" has been dominant since the 1980s, when pinyin became the ISO standard for romanization of Chinese. -Zanhe (talk) 23:53, 18 August 2015 (UTC)

• Oppose. I get 160 21st century GBook hits for "Zhan Tianyou" railroads -llc, 43 for "Jeme Tien Yow" railroads -llc. If you follow these hits to the end, there are seven pages of Zhan hits, two pages of Jeme hits. So even though more half the hits are ghost books, the ratio is representative. ConstitutionalRepublic (talk) 23:41, 18 August 2015 (UTC)

• Note that the article was at Jeme Tien Yow until this undiscussed move although it began life in 2007 as Zhan Tianyou. —  AjaxSmack  02:15, 19 August 2015 (UTC)

The article was created as "Zhan Tianyou", but moved without discussion or edit comment to "Jeme Tien Yow". I moved it back to the original title, noting that it was the common name and the standard spelling. -Zanhe (talk) 02:26, 19 August 2015 (UTC)

On closer inspection, there's actually another move we both missed. The article was created in 2005 as "Jeme Tien Yow" and moved to "Zhan Tianyou" in 2006. In any case, that does not change the fact the current prevailing spelling is "Zhan Tianyou". -Zanhe (talk) 02:32, 19 August 2015 (UTC)

Thanks. I missed all of that. —  AjaxSmack  02:34, 19 August 2015 (UTC)

There's clearly no consensus on moving the article. However, I still think reasons for moving or not moving articles are worth some discussion. First, I don't see that the ISO status of pinyin is relevant at all. How do the majority of scholarly and/or popular works refer to the subject? This is central. Second, the subject's own preferences are not to be just waved away. For living persons this should be obvious. For deceased persons it is still not trivial. Third, using Google Books as a means of determining the commonly accepted form of a name is a very dubious proposition. In the example cited above which turned up 160 books cited for Zhan Tianyou, the first one is "Manchurian Railways and the Opening of China: An International History", a collection of articles edited by Elleman and Kotkin. This book does not show up in the 43 results for "Jeme Tien Yow" so apparently that's a plus in the Zhan column, a minus in the Jeme column. But if you look at the book, Zhan Tianyou only shows up in the bibliography, where the transliteration has been normalized as pinyin. This does not reflect the author's preferences or the editors' preferences. Jeme/Zhan is listed in the index as Jeme T'ien-yow. This is the preference of the author of the article discussing Jeme, Chang Jui-te, who has published several articles in professional journals on Jeme. Jeme did not use the hyphen or aspiration mark himself, according to the Boorman biography, but I don't see how this justifies waving away Professor Chang's work. Note also that Google Books dates are by no means reliable. This book is listed as 2015, but this is a 2015 reprint of a 2010 book. Google books is simply not a reasonable way of determining commonly accepted name forms, especially for people like Jeme, who get written about less frequently than others. Rgr09 (talk) 07:49, 19 August 2015 (UTC)

No tool is perfect, and one can always pick individual examples to support their personal preference. But Google Ngram is the best tool we have for determining common names without introducing personal biases. The subject's personal preference is important, but WP:IDENTITY stipulates that we "use the term that is most commonly used by reliable sources" when there's a discrepancy. And Pinyin's status as the ISO standard is by no means irrelevant. According to WP:Naming conventions (Chinese), "The titles of Chinese entries should follow current academic conventions, which generally means Hanyu Pinyin without tone marks." -Zanhe (talk) 22:20, 19 August 2015 (UTC)

I hope ngram is more reliable when there is more data to work with. I don't think there is an ISO for historical studies, but we do have WP:PINYIN. The courts don't allow "rule of the dead" and neither should we. This subject died before pinyin was created, so we should not expect him to have an informed opinion on it. ConstitutionalRepublic (talk) 04:41, 20 August 2015 (UTC)