Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (Chinese)

mirroring my post on Talk: Chinese characters:

---

his applies to various related articles in Category: Chinese characters, in clarifying the often-conflated categories. Here's how I see it:

• Chinese characters are the logographs originally used to constitute the morphemes in the Old Chinese writing system, which is, perhaps unhelpfully, also called 'Chinese characters'.
• A writing system includes orthographic rules and conventions, in this case relating to semantics and phonology in various spoken languages. a set of characters with expected meanings and pronunciations is an array of conventions as such.
• However, I don't think Traditional and Simplified characters constitute separate writing systems per se, even though there are mergers in character variants from the former to the latter.
• Kanji, for example, is a set of characters within the greater Japanese writing system, using Chinese characters.
• I wish we could call these character sets 'scripts', but that word is largely claimed by the systematic graphical (ish) styles such as clerical script and regular script.

Remsense (talk) 04:54, 2 October 2023 (UTC)

The native word used to differentiate Traditional and Simplified character forms is usually 字體 (character form), although typically encountered in the opposite order, as in 繁體字. The word differentiating clerical script and regular script, in contrast, is 書. I'm not sure if any of this is helpful, or really what the question here is supposed to be, but I'd be glad to type more Chinese if the question can be clarified. Folly Mox (talk) 07:07, 2 October 2023 (UTC)

Actually maybe 字形 (character form) is more common than 字體 (character form). I'm probably a little mixed up in my modern technical vocabulary. Folly Mox (talk) 07:11, 2 October 2023 (UTC)

Oh my gosh I thought this was WP:RD/L; this doesn't have to take the form of a question at all. My goodness it might be bedtime. Folly Mox (talk) 07:13, 2 October 2023 (UTC)

very helpful! i guess the default term for 'simplified' and 'traditional' might be 'character form', as opposed to 'writing system' or 'script' or 'character set'? Remsense (talk) 18:05, 2 October 2023 (UTC)

"Character set" makes sense when you're talking about computing, and maybe statistical analysis. "Character form" ("Simplified form", "Japanese form", etc) is probably the closest term for general linguistic description. Folly Mox (talk) 20:08, 2 October 2023 (UTC)

Ef5zak (talk · contribs) made an edit to Adoption of the Gregorian calendar, changing "the Republic of China" to "Taiwan". What is the appropriate word or phrase in this situation? If it matters, it's about a government action to adopt a modified Gregorian calendar, not primarily about the geographic location. Jc3s5h (talk) 01:28, 21 September 2024 (UTC)

Given it refers to the current country, that seems a normal use for Taiwan. CMD (talk) 02:58, 21 September 2024 (UTC)

I agree. In this context, "Taiwan" is clearer, more natural, and more widely understandable than "the Republic of China". Similarly, the same sentence refers to "North Korea" rather than "the Democratic People's Republic of Korea". —Mx. Granger (talk · contribs) 03:24, 21 September 2024 (UTC)

I likewise agree with this position. I also believe that Taiwan better understood to those who may not have an understanding of the geopolitical situation of Taiwan. Ef5zak (talk) 12:57, 11 October 2024 (UTC)

A recent RFC affirmed that templates should use the form "Hong Kong", without the sovereign state. I have added this under Places and slightly extended it to recommend the short form unless disambiguation is necessary, and also include Macau.Asamboi (talk) 00:17, 29 May 2026 (UTC)