Proposed new record for 'wadegile'

[Doug Ewell]

Michael Everson <everson at evertype dot com> wrote:

>> .s/, typically//
>> .s/,//
>
> I do not know what these solidi mean, but I will not agree to remove 
> "typically" because there is no guarantee that Wade-Giles orthography 
> was never used for a non-Mandarin dialect of Chinese.

They mean what you suspect, that Randy proposes to remove (e.g.) the 
string ", typically" with the empty string, thus deleting the content.

>>> in the romanization developed by Thomas Wade in the mid-19th
>>> century,
>>> and reached settled form with Herbert Giles'Chinese-English
>>> dictionary
>>
>> .s/and/which/
>> .s/'/' /
>
> I have no idea what you mean by this.

The same: replace the passage between the first and second slashes by 
the passage between the second and third.

Here Randy has a good point: the sentence is ungrammatical as it stands, 
and there needs to be a space between "Giles'" and "Chinese".

>> I find the statement "in all books on China published before 1979"
>> implausible.
>> The textbook we used when I studied Mandarin used pinyin exclusively,
>> and was published in 1978.  I recall the switch to pinyin in Chinese
>> place names (e.g. Beijing instead of Peking) in US magazines and
>> newspapers happening *long* before that.
>
> Mayhap, but the quotation comes from Krieger, Neill, and Reynolds 1997
> so they are responsible for its content.

Agreed.  Mark put quotes around the passage and that lets us off the 
hook.  I suppose we could add "[sic]" if we wanted to call attention to 
the authors' almost-certain factual error, but I don't see what that 
would accomplish.  The purpose of quoting that passage is clear: there 
is a lot of extant material written in Wade-Giles, and that justifies a 
subtag.

--
Doug Ewell  *  Thornton, Colorado, USA  *  RFC 4645  *  UTN #14
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