Template talk:zh

The following information has failed Wiktionary's deletion process.

It should not be re-entered without careful consideration.

Going by the reasoning that it's undesirable to have two different codes for the same language, I'd like to propose deleting this code. This template was already submitted at WT:RFM#Template:zh but I would prefer it to be deleted outright, so that {{cmn}} is the only template for Mandarin. —CodeCat 02:34, 6 January 2012 (UTC)Reply

Delete, same reasons. Having two parallel category trees for Mandarin can only cause confusion and genuine difficulty in finding things. Mglovesfun (talk) 15:26, 6 January 2012 (UTC)Reply

I support deletion. However, there are many translation entries that are still using this code e.g encyclopedia. Is there any way to use a bot to clean this up? Jamesjiao → ^{T ◊ C} 02:15, 24 January 2012 (UTC)Reply

It's a really easy replacement to do by bot, but I don't think we need to; both cmn and zh need to point to the zh Wikipedia and Wiktionary, as they exists while cmn.wikipedia.org does not. That does mean I think that {{zh/script}} needs to be kept, probably as a redirect to {{cmn/script}}. It would be possible to bypass that, but it's not worth adding all that extra code to {{t}}; better just to keep the redirect. Mglovesfun (talk) 10:13, 24 January 2012 (UTC)Reply

If we have a zh Wikipedia and Wiktionary, wouldn't it make more sense to delete {{cmn}} and standardize on {{zh}}? Seems confusing to use zh everywhere else but cmn here. It would also seem more consistent with deleting All 3-letter language templates that have a 2-letter equivalent. ~ Robin 09:25, 27 January 2012 (UTC)Reply

Irritatingly good point. Mglovesfun (talk) 10:52, 11 February 2012 (UTC)Reply

While that's true, the code 'zh' officially stands for 'Chinese' which is a macrolanguage, while 'cmn' stands for 'Mandarin'. So they are not really equivalent. —CodeCat 12:16, 11 February 2012 (UTC)Reply

zh is a convenient code but I think that it will eventually disappear from the project, to be replaced by proper ISO language codes : pronunciation, usage notes, definitions, etc. may differ between languages. This process will take much time. Lmaltier (talk) 20:46, 29 February 2012 (UTC)Reply

And are you sure that all current zh entries are about Mandarin? This should be checked before any action. Lmaltier (talk) 20:48, 29 February 2012 (UTC)Reply

At least in the translations sections other Chinese languages also use {{t|zh}} at the moment, I guess it's in order to point the transwiki zhwiktionary. Matthias Buchmeier (talk) 10:44, 6 March 2012 (UTC)Reply

Delete or redirect to {{cmn}}. (If it is kept, it must be renamed: two codes cannot have the same name, it breaks langrev and other things.) - -sche (discuss) 22:24, 18 September 2012 (UTC)Reply

Failed. It still needs to be orphaned though. Can someone with some knowledge of Chinese help with this, maybe with a bot? —CodeCat 22:32, 13 October 2012 (UTC)Reply

I've done some spot-checking. The good news is that the vast majority of transclusions seem to be {{t|zh}} after "Mandarin:" in the translation sections. Another major source is request templates like {{rfe|lang=zh}}, and {{attention|zh}}, which are often under a Mandarin L2 header. When they are under Mandarin, then it's easy bot-work. Changing the parameters should clear the decks for the trickier ones.

Another- and more problematic- batch is Wikipedia templates. I ran into a fair number of uses of {{pedialite|lang=zh}}, which seems to require that language code to find zh.wikipedia (I tried replacing the zh with cmn, but it didn't know what to do with it). Then there are the cases of {{etyl|zh}}, which are often Mandarin, but not in any way that a bot could tell. The cases where zh is the second parameter should be easily fixable by bot since they should match the L2 header anyway. There are also the "Mandarin terms from" and "terms from Mandarin" categories, but I can fix those by hand- derivcatboiler seems to like cmn just as much as zh for the language code. Chuck Entz (talk) 03:18, 14 October 2012 (UTC)Reply

Woah, woah, woah! Simply swapping out {{zh}} for {{cmn}} really doesn't strike me as the best way to go. I strongly suspect that {{zh}} was originally intended as a generic "Chinese" marker, i.e. "some version of Chinese that is not necessarily Mandarin and may in fact be an ancient form of the language". "Mandarin", as I understand it, is specifically the modern Beijing dialect. As such, {{zh}} really should be swapped out for {{zhx}} instead, or ideally some more temporally specific lang code such as {{och}} or {{ltc}}.

Case in point: the etymology for galangal now suggests that the term was borrowed into Sanskrit from Mandarin -- which ultimately sounds like science fiction, as that would require time travel.

Another: the etymology for zen likewise suggests a borrowing from modern Mandarin into Old or Early Middle Japanese. Moreover, the purported "Mandarin" pinyin doesn't match the pinyin given on the linked 禅那 page ("chánnà" vs. "chánnuó").

I'm afraid that the bots have made a bit of a hash of at least a few entries. Would it be possible to walk back their work, and / or redo this swap using some more-appropriate lang code? Then again, maybe this is only an issue where {{zh}} was swapped for {{cmn}} in etymologies -- if so, would it be possible to just undo the bot edits if the swap was in an etym section? -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 06:39, 29 January 2013 (UTC)Reply

If there are etymologies that say Mandarin when they shouldn't, then they should be changed, it's as simple as that... —CodeCat 13:29, 29 January 2013 (UTC)Reply

• Yes. My hope is that it would be relatively easy to generate a list of entries where the bots have changed {{zh}} into {{cmn}} in Etymology sections; otherwise, it's a more complicated issue of trawling through all uses of {{cmn}} and checking if the use is in an etym section...  :) -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 18:23, 29 January 2013 (UTC)Reply