Talk:HMS Curlew (1812)

Romanization

@Acad Ronin: Let's put the postal romanizations of city names as a parenthetical rather than replacing the pinyin, as suggested by WP:PINYIN. I assume the specific source you're citing uses postal, but I think we should still use the pinyin unless a clear majority of modern sources on a topic do otherwise (like with Amoy). I've had several discussions recently that came to the same conclusion:

• Wikipedia talk:WikiProject History/Archive 6#New or old placenames
• Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (Chinese)#Historical names of Chinese places
• WT:MOSCHINA#Suggested new section - historical articles

SilverStar54 (talk) 17:58, 25 May 2023 (UTC)

Hi Silverstar54, Not sure what you are suggesting. What is a "postal romanization". What I use in the articles I write is what is in the sources. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, what captains wrote was highly variable, sometimes even varying within the same document. The names they use appear to be English approximations to the local name at best, but often are simply a name that became standard within the British East India Company, and bearing no relationship to the name locals used. What I do, as you may have seen, is to use the name in the source, with an underlying link to the WP name. My hope is that anyone curious about the place named will click on the name and be taken to the WP article on the place. One can do the same thing with a parenthetical link at a fairly trivial cost of extra bits. I prefer my way of doing things, but so long as we preserve in the article the source name and the WP name, I don't really care. I have no position on what is the appropriate transliteration of that name; all I care about is that the reader be able immediately to find the article, and that any researcher know what name to look for when searching the sources. Cheers, Acad Ronin (talk) 00:30, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

My goal is for casual readers to be able understand China-related articles without needing to know/constantly cross-reference older romanizations. But I also recognize what you've said about older romanizations being useful for researchers, so I think the use of parentheticals is the best solution here. I'll go ahead and edit the page but ping me if there's an issue. (Btw, Postal romanization is just one of the early attempts to systematize Western romanizations of Chinese place names. It's often found in older sources, especially related to trade and travel.) SilverStar54 (talk) 22:08, 30 May 2023 (UTC)