Talk:Inariyama Sword

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Shouldn't the transcription use the normal system of transcribing Man'yōgana? "Wakë" ought to be "wake2", and so on; to help make sure that it's obvious that the different Man'yōgana for the same modern Japanese syllable don't necessarily mean that the vowel is different. Sjiveru (talk) 00:44, 14 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

That would be my preference as well. However, if you check the actual citation given, that is transcription given. So it cannot be changed. Regards, Bendono (talk) 13:52, 16 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Wouldn't a note suffice, explaining the difference between the numbered and diaretic transcription styles?
FWIW, it looks like Seeley's transcription came from a book by Murayama and Miller, published in 1979, as noted by Seeley himself in his footnote #16 on page 20:
... and as noted by Wontack Hong's 1988 book Relationship between Korea and Japan in early period: Paekche and Yamato Wa, on page 98:
A lot has changed in the last thirty-odd years regarding how languages are transcribed into the Latin script. I see no reason to hew blindly to older transcription methods that have fallen into disuse, unless a particular piece of text is being presented as a straight quote. The transcription in the Inariyama Sword article here is cited, but is not presented as a straight quote; given also the presence of the indisputed source text in kanji, changing from the outdated diaretic transcription to the current numbered transcription would be much more of a style issue than anything that could possibly be construed as original research.
That's my 2p, at any rate. -- Cheers, Eiríkr Útlendi | Tala við mig 18:10, 11 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]
I agree with Sjiveru and Eirikr's discussions; this is a matter of conventional style, not research. Wikipedia's style is for a generalist audience who cannot be expected to understand, on the first read, a particular academic transliteration of a historical form of Japanese. By analogy, Wikipedia articles on Pythagoras's mathematics use Arabic numerals, even though many of the sources cited would have used Greek and Latin numerals. This is not research, but convention to suit the audience. As for noting the difference, I believe that too is not necessary. The proper place to discuss it is in a new article on transliteration systems for historical Japanese. For this article, let the sources' work justify their own particular choice, and let Wikipedia render their work for a general audience. Seraphimek (talk) 20:12, 13 May 2016 (UTC)Seraphimek[reply]