abraker wrote:

Any thoughts about mapping style or patterns the maps have being in tags?

I don't see any restrictions for this right now as long as they are related to the set. Also don't think that this worth specific mentioning.

the discussion of this topic shouldve ended like w few posts sfter fychos

it makes absolutely no sense that the chinese do not have the higher priority when talking about chinese.. it is Quite Literally the language that they speak AND they are also... Quite Literally... the most Affected by the proposal regarding chinese metadata.. not sure how the priority of a group of people is parallel to a nonreasonable discussion either..

why has the discussion even devolved to the point where we are talking about he method of speaking to one another in chinese when this is in fact about chinese metadata which is mostly targeting the track's title and artist

i think what fycho said makes sense in that chimese metadata should be separated by syllables since it is the standard of romanization used in many other places evidently and it's easier for chinese people to understand the titling + it really doesnt make it any harder to read the title/artist with separated syllables so i dont see the harm in staying consistent with other platforms alongside making it easier for chinese people to..... read their own language L

Mishima Yurara wrote:

it makes absolutely no sense that the chinese do not have the higher priority when talking about chinese.. it is Quite Literally the language that they speak AND they are also... Quite Literally... the most Affected by the proposal regarding chinese metadata.. not sure how the priority of a group of people is parallel to a nonreasonable discussion either..

To your previous post, if we discuss language, we will use terms related to languages and linguistics. I can't avoid that.

Can you elaborate how are people, who are able to read Chinese affected more than people who use Latin script? This is the difference for them: Current system, system in the proposal. In what scenario would Chinese read the the Latin title and convert it to Chinese, if it's in the game already? That's why Chinese isn't the highest priority. They are actually affected the least of all players by that, because they don't need to read the Romanised title/artist.

Mishima Yurara wrote:

it really doesnt make it any harder to read the title/artist with separated syllables so i dont see the harm in staying consistent with other platforms alongside making it easier for chinese people to..... read their own language L

Where's the basis for that? It does make it harder for the reasons mentioned already. In both the proposal and several of these posts. How do Chinese people read it easier, if the text doesn't change for them at all?

ive only seen Romanized Chinese separated by syllables everywhere and not by phrases or any other way

uh.

at any rate, can we agree to clarify what word-by-word means in the proposal and give examples for what to do and what not to do? I did a quick google for the phrase "word by word" and couldn't figure out what it means so...

@Nyquill,it means Each character must be romanised into a single, capitalised, separated word. Refer to this thread for examples and supplementary information.

Also, let's keep the discussion in a healthy direction and stop any personal attack public or privately. Anything that doesn't help the discussion would be removed from now.

can we not have the Mapper decide if the source should be romanized or not or have 2 sections for source (romanized and original) because not giving that to the hands of the mapper would be more consistent

(id personally say to just keep things UnRomanized but thats me)

i get its unicode and it can hold anything but i think thats on the basis moreso that some sources are officially in english and some sources are officially in maldivian and not really because of our choice of language transliteration

what the fuck is this thread now????
Spit at each other elsewhere holy fuc like i have read Wafu's posts like twice by now and i still have no clue what he's saying because i dont get half the words and im not even half bad at english lol, idk how you want to argue about anything if half a psot is about semantics in statements of people that don't speak as accurate english as you or whatever?

anyways this is lol so here's my thoughts on some of the points:
@romanized source: i think that was requested years ago but nothing happened on that front yet so lol
@nyquill: word by word method should then just be char by char or whatever where each character is romanised individually
@Wafu your argument is retarded because it implies they dont use beatmap search to find maps on the website which dominantly lists romanised fields only.
so in any case people that know the language are put on the same level playing field as anyone else.
@Sieg thx for summary i'll do the changes~

Can you people be less dumb when debating about this? like really this hurts to read because it's just so stupid. You arguing about whether or not people have priority or whatever just seems fucking racist in both ways so please stop. People that speak the language and have an intuitive understanding of it should be able to understand what a title means by reading how it's pronounced and everyone else is supposed to understand how it's pronounced

as far as i can see languages relying on phonetics always have that problem where short things can stand for many other things and there's nothing really to do about this, anything using an alternate alphabet to latin script maybe does so for a reason

Shiguma wrote:

I believe that TV size cuts of songs should have the (TV Size) label on them, regardless of the official source. My reasoning for this is, when you search up a song, having the (TV Size) in the metadata won't affect searching for that song, while also making it very clear that whichever set you are looking at is the short version of a song. If we're bringing common sense into metadata, I don't see why we shouldn't do this.

Well I can understand the logic with this however I feel we should stick to the official metadata because, well, it's the official metadata. Seeing if a map is the Tv size/short version shouldn't be to hard for the majority of people. Since things like ~Anime-Ban~ , TV edit. , (short ver.) should make it pretty obvious its the short version of the song. I don't think we should add things like (TV Size) to songs from shows that don't officially differentiate the short version from the full version as it's not official.

First, some insignificant and unstructured observations, thoughts: for organization and perspective. Important-er stuff later.

Firstly, regarding priority, it should be said that westerners/non-Chinese speakers should ostensibly enjoy priority when it comes to this decision. Romanization is for their benefit, because they're unable to read Chinese. But it really depends on how reliant Chinese speakers are on romanization, because I don't know. What settings do most of them use on osu? How do they navigate on the website? I really don't know, feel free to provide enlightenment on this subject.

Secondly, as an English speaker (being ethnically Chinese, I learned Chinese when younger, and have since forgotten it, but I still retain a basical grammatical and conceptual foundation of the language), it is much easier for me to remember romanized titles if different syllables are grouped together into words. Although Chinese and English are both polysyllabic, English is the only VISUALLY polysyllabic language, as we group syllables together into words and, most importantly, separate those words using spaces. Chinese, to my knowledge, generally does not. Having English as a first language has geared my brain towards taking into account spatial grouping when processing language, so I take each isolated group of letters as its own discrete entity and allocate it its own semantic (or, in the absence of fluency in Chinese, quasi-semantic) space and recognize it as such. If what I've said is a little obscurely phrased, then please just take it as testimony from an English speaker that Tushuguan is unequivocally easier to memorize than Tu Shu Guan, and I don't think my threadbare knowledge of Chinese contributes to that at all. Faced with a title such as "Gei Wo Yi Ge Li You Wang Ji" I would quickly become discouraged and not even try to memorize it, except maybe after numerous plays. I'd sooner type in the mapper's name and click through the options presented to me.

Wafu wrote:

2. As for the memory point, again, you are considering this point from the Chinese speaker perspective. That's not the target group. As above, it's about how Latin script works with words. As you probably know, when people who use Latin script read longer words, they generally don't read them, they just recognize it by the shape of the word. Because of that, they will also miss minor spelling errors, because they read the originally intended word by the shape. That suggests (which is a fact by the way) that they memorize text (that is seemingly a word) much easier than syllables. As an example, you probably have the shape of "Romanisation" memorized pretty well. That means if I'd misspell it to "Ronamisation", you would quite likely not notice that. Whereas if I did "Ro Na Mi Sa Ti On", you would more likely notice the error, because you would read it syllable by syllable.

Thirdly, to address the problems of grouping together romanized Chinese syllables into words. It is true that in grouping together syllables there is a lot of ambiguity, but much of that ambiguity should be able to be cleared in context. For instance, taking this charming example provided to us:

Hollow Wings wrote:

"Gu Niang, Shui Jiao Yi Wan Duo Shao Qian?"
this sentence mainly has two meanings:
1. "Hey gril, how much it costs if i buy a bowl of your dumplings?" （姑娘，水饺一碗多少钱？）
2. "Hey gril, how much it costs if i sleep you one night?" （姑娘，睡觉一晚多少钱？）

Context should be able to very easily clear up such ambiguities. What is the song about? What is the rest of the song saying? Context will provide an almost effortless resolution to such conclusions, which I imagine would comprise the vast majority of such instances.
However, some of those ambiguities will be purposely rendered in the form of puns etc., such as here:

Fycho wrote:

For example, specific examples like "他谁都打不过", it's used intentionally to represent two meanings that are "Nobody can beat him" and "He can beat everybody", "Ta / Shui / Dou Da Bu Guo" and "Ta / Shui Dou Da Bu Guo".

These will most likely make up such a negligible percentage of these instances of ambiguity that to go through with the proposed changes and deal with these intentionally ambiguous titles as they come up would not be completely remiss -- but I personally believe that even these hypothetical cases, however rare, should be considered before pushing any changes. That is just my opinion, ultimately it's not up to me.

Fourthly, about "v" vs "u." To Chinese speakers of course "v" makes the most sense, as that is the input they use in their everyday lives, but to the western audience, "v" will make absolutely no sense. "u" and "yu" are both inadequate romanizations of "ü," because "yu" will be pronounced "yoo" by most westerners, but "v" will be next to useless for everybody except for Chinese players. "v" is more ambitious in that it serves to correctly represent a specific sound instead of simply approximating it, but for western osu players it is completely counterproductive.

Fifth, Japanese kanji and Chinese characters are not the same. With kanji this is a non-issue; each kanji does not have its own syllable. Sometimes a word consisting of two kanji will have a three-syllable pronunciation, and a kanji itself can have multiple pronunciations depending on the word that comprises it. Splitting up each character into a single capitalized word is not even possible, so there's no point in comparing them.

Lastly, Chinese is generally referred to as logographic rather then ideographic, as a character represents a morpheme rather than a more nebulous concept, and as ideogram usually refers specifically to a symbol that is independent of any corresponding sound--although of course no logographic writing system is without a phonetic component built into it. The terms themselves are rather fuzzy anyways, so to achieve anything of actual accuracy one has to resort to such ungainly terms as HW's "ideophonographical." However, to call Chinese logographic is not incorrect. In fact, most people, even linguists, do it.


To the crux of the issue.

The real dichotomy here is between practicality and officiality/aesthetics. That is a highly subjective discussion and is conducive to many (as seen here) tetchy discussions. Grouping words together will almost certainly make it more convenient for non-Chinese speakers, there should really be no question about this. I personally don't even pay attention to the name of a Chinese map if it's over three or four characters long; the profusion of capitals and spacing, to my English-speaking mind, is simply inconvenient, and I would rather memorize the mapper's name, the artist's name, and the background instead. Japanese titles, meanwhile, are multisyllabic, and I would rather have a few multisyllabic words than six monosyllabic words. How closely we adhere to "ISO 7098" really should not be a question. We're a small international circle-clicking community, not an official international organization, so shouldn't we rather consider things from a functional, practical perspective?

Of course, such a change would have its downsides, and I suspect that the main, unvoiced (if I may be so presumptuous) gripe that so many Chinese speakers have with this proposal is largely aesthetic. The elegance of the Chinese language lies precisely in the symmetry and ambiguity that this proposal will do away with. In Chinese each character is given equal spatial heft, and to consolidate multiple words would rob them both of their spatial importance as well as the importance that a capitalized letter lends them. In short, when comparing "Wei Lai Shi" to "Weilaishi," Weilaishi to the sensibility of the Chinese speaker (and even to mine partly) seems ugly, wrong, amateurish, and not at all official. Similarly, the troubling part of the inconsistency of word-division romanization having no "stable standard" as HW put it--the troubling part is not that this inconsistency is practically unfeasible, but that inconsistency is aesthetically unappealing. It is not of "official" quality.

Believe me, when it comes to officiality people will often be perfectionist, especially when they have a say in the matter. Why are there so many rhythm game elitists that condescend on osu? Because other rhythm games, with their shinier interfaces and their licensed songs, are more "official." Why is rankability not centered around actual merit, but only flawlessness; why are people so often concerned about whether a certain controversial map enters the ranked section, even if it doesn't affect them? Because the ranked section is the "official" section of the game, and people are perfectionist about it. These are not practical attitudes, but aesthetic ones, and so it is here too, I think. Why should the Chinese not be concerned with how their language is rendered to other people? I, too, would be bothered.

Of course, an aesthetic claim is not as defensible than a practical one, so other, more practical-sounding arguments are resorted to (perhaps subconsciously), but to me these arguments are ultimately immaterial. Practically speaking, word-division is far more useful than syllabic division--the rare ambiguity can be cleared simply by referring to the musical/lyrical context, and the even rarer intentional ambiguity (puns, etc.) can be left simply as single-syllable words, as with the status quo. And yet, due to my aesthetic sensibilities, I prefer the status quo; that is my personal opinion. I can and have been making do with mapper/artist name and background to search out the maps I need.

And of course I haven't even addressed the question in the case that Chinese players do actually rely heavily on romanized titles in osu. If they do, and it is easier for them to have a one-word-per-syllable romanization, then even less of a reason to change.


Lastly,

and off-topic, I would like to say that it is very easy to judge others, and parse their words and find their flaws, but difficult to do the same to yourself. The habit is to be severe towards others but generous only towards yourself and others like you/close to you. This makes it not just possible, but very often for someone to, with one breath, send a rude message to someone and, in the next breath, accuse them of being condescending. Similarly, it makes it possible for someone to accuse someone of sending them a rude message and, in the very next paragraph, act in a supercilious and condescending manner, and throw passive jabs towards their life/background and incivility, and accuse them of barbarity.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nietzsche/#PoweLife
Nietzsche's metaphysical (mostly applicable psychologically) doctrine of the Will to Power is the idea that humans primary pursuit is towards that which will increase their power in relation to others. You can see this surface most often not in the large, sweeping motions of world politics, but in the minutia of everyday conversation and discourse between people who are, shall we say, less than friends (and sometimes even amongst friends as well.) Couple the Will to Power with this quote from Fyodor Dostoevsky: “Lying to ourselves is more deeply ingrained than lying to others,” and you have 95% of society in two short ideas.

So people will resort to silly antics to inflate their sense of power in relation to others, to deft manipulations of truth and to strawmanning and to posturing/boasting. Someone posted a long essay? Let me post an even LONGER essay with even BIGGER words, otherwise they and others might think they are right and I am not (so people have accused Wafu, and maybe they'll accuse me of it too). Someone is using such self-assured language that a tiny part of me thinks he might be right? Let me post this incriminating screenshot of him, or tweet about it so people will agree with me and I will be more assured that I am in the right, and he in the wrong. Someone said I have no priority? Let me capitalize on his poor phrasing rather than consider his words generously and in context, and not even consider that he may simply have worded his thoughts more hostilely than he intended to. Someone is upsetting me with his word choice? Let me throw in the words "arrogant," "fallacious," "non-sense," "barbarian," (just some words I have picked from posts on both sides) and whereas they are in the wrong if they use it, I am not.

This is also why many debates I've witnessed offshoot into various side unrelated directions, in an effort to prove the opposition wrong about anything at all. It's why people will carry on a debate for so, so long, and put so much effort into it, because to lose or even to not reply is to be lowered in power/status. It's why people will resort to strawmanning and ad-hominems, and why people will pick out the weakest arguments on the other side and take those apart while ignoring everything else. Really, if you go around for a week or a month with the idea of the will to power in the back of your mind, just observing (especially on the internet), many many things will become apparent to you.

Yes, it's so easy to look at another person's argument and see it in the worst light possible. Wafu said, "You, as Chinese have no priority in this matter, just because it's about Chinese"? Maybe he only means that he believes the purpose of romanization in osu is to help players not familiar with Chinese to navigate through Chinese song titles, and in light of this it is with extra consideration towards non-Chinese speakers that we should think about this metadata proposal. Even if you disagree, is that so unreasonable a proposition? Correctly interpreted, it certainly cannot be the "most hilarious thing i've saw this day."

And the exact opposite opinion, that "Chinese people have the exact highest priority in this matter, just because it's about Chinese," is not so unreasonable either. As I've said above, why should Chinese players not be concerned with how their language is rendered to other people, and on a website and game that they themselves frequent and have been part of for years? Why would they not be upset if someone else tries to push changes that they dislike, concerning a language that they have spoken for years? And that, too, makes sense.

Before anybody accuses me of being a hypocrite, yes, I am a hypocrite, just like anyone else I do these things often. And you can fun of me for this long post if you want. In the end, all I want to say is, not just here, but in mapping and modding and even in life, be generous not just to yourself but also to others, even if you don't like them.

After reading oko’s (and a few others) annoyingly frustrating post it was such a pleasure going through yours melloe. Thank you for your input

This thread is impossible to dissect, so I'm just gonna post my two cents about the actual topic instead of whether or not who has priority.

The first thing we learned in elementary school in China was how to romanize. Even for people who has mandarin as their first language first learned to romanize via pinyin before anything else. This might sound weird but pinyin is the most intuitive way to understand how to pronounce words without knowing what any characters mean.

What is the issue with joining syllables in romanizations? Well...

For starters, compounds are very loosely defined in mandarin despite being littered with them. In Japanese, you can compound kanji and they would have the hanzi reading as a result. Because of the literal different reading, it's intuitive to compound the romanization as well.

Does joining syllables make words easier to read for people who speak english? Its hard to say. Personally, I find a jumble of pinyin equally as nonsensical as each of them individually without intonation.

It's worth mentioning that even the people who establish and practice these standards have trouble determining when to compound and when not to, and thus provide alternate romanizations:


From the US library of congress romanization guidelines

I think it would be the most consistent if we retain the word-by-word romanization method. There's no way anyone would mess up if we do. If you were to learn Chinese, your school would most likely teach you pinyin using the word-by-word method, so that's a plus. Then again, I haven't learned Chinese in well over 15 years, so take that as you will.

Alternatively, we can also implement this document here: https://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/romanization/chinese.pdf

Names and titles will have joined syllables whereas everything else is separate. This is the way the American government romanizes Chinese today. In my opinion its a lot of work for very little merit, but hey, we're adhering to standards an accredited institution set out.

Nyquill wrote:

Alternatively, we can also implement this document here: https://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/romaniz ... hinese.pdf

iirc, this was one of the options we were considering. It could be worth discussing this option if people want to follow the standards. It solves some of the brought up issues. I doesn't solve the "v" issue, which should be fixed regardless of keeping or changing the current system as it has no basis other than keyboard layout.

Sieg wrote:

abraker wrote:

Any thoughts about mapping style or patterns the maps have being in tags?

I don't see any restrictions for this right now as long as they are related to the set. Also don't think that this worth specific mentioning.

The reason I mention this is that some maps in 8k mania tend to be either 8k or 7k+1 and it's impossible to know until you download and check them out. Putting down "SV" or "stream" or etc would also allow the added benefit to search for types of maps in any gamemode. I feel like something should be mentioned in guidelines.

For the TV Size thing, drop some opinions:

For example this song: https://osu.ppy.sh/s/477045
The song has a game ver that without "~TV animation ver.~", and has a TV ver later that labled with "~TV animation ver.~" to distinguish. They are different in Instrument and lyrics. In this case, (TVsize) aren't necessary but not for "~TV animation ver.~". That popular "~Anime Ban~" is pretty similar stuff.

I believe there is a metadata discretion when handling things like this.

Maybe I'm not complete to read the whole thread because there are much about ignoring things. I just want to say some intuitive thoughts about the language Chinese.

First of all, still many Chinese type in English to search title of Chinese songs in osu! for the sake of consistency. Personally, I'm used to type pinyin to search for song title because osu! in the past had poor support on unromanised searching (maybe it's because many maps from 2012 and earlier only have their romanised one, both for Chinese and Japanese songs, as metadata at that time was not much forced).

melloe wrote:

Thirdly, to address the problems of grouping together romanized Chinese syllables into words. It is true that in grouping together syllables there is a lot of ambiguity, but much of that ambiguity should be able to be cleared in context. For instance, taking this charming example provided to us:

Hollow Wings wrote:

"Gu Niang, Shui Jiao Yi Wan Duo Shao Qian?"
this sentence mainly has two meanings:
1. "Hey gril, how much it costs if i buy a bowl of your dumplings?" （姑娘，水饺一碗多少钱？）
2. "Hey gril, how much it costs if i sleep you one night?" （姑娘，睡觉一晚多少钱？）

Context should be able to very easily clear up such ambiguities. What is the song about? What is the rest of the song saying? Context will provide an almost effortless resolution to such conclusions, which I imagine would comprise the vast majority of such instances.

However, some of those ambiguities will be purposely rendered in the form of puns etc., such as here:

Fycho wrote:

For example, specific examples like "他谁都打不过", it's used intentionally to represent two meanings that are "Nobody can beat him" and "He can beat everybody", "Ta / Shui / Dou Da Bu Guo" and "Ta / Shui Dou Da Bu Guo".

These will most likely make up such a negligible percentage of these instances of ambiguity that to go through with the proposed changes and deal with these intentionally ambiguous titles as they come up would not be completely remiss -- but I personally believe that even these hypothetical cases, however rare, should be considered before pushing any changes. That is just my opinion, ultimately it's not up to me.

In fact for many contemporary Chinese ballads, their titles are deliberately came up as such (in the form of puns). As for the first example given here, the song title can still be sexually suggestive even if its formal title is about dumplings. Because Chinese lyrics are not as logical as daily language,
and people just can easily get the ambiguous meaning because there is no way to distinguish their pronunciation difference in a song-wise tone without logical context. "Context will provide an almost effortless resolution to such conclusions" as you said is often not the truth. Joint of Chinese characters into a single word will often cause loss of meaning in this way. (I have more examples, one of which is my uploaded map)

Fourthly, about "v" vs "u." To Chinese speakers of course "v" makes the most sense, as that is the input they use in their everyday lives, but to the western audience, "v" will make absolutely no sense. "u" and "yu" are both inadequate romanizations of "ü," because "yu" will be pronounced "yoo" by most westerners, but "v" will be next to useless for everybody except for Chinese players. "v" is more ambitious in that it serves to correctly represent a specific sound instead of simply approximating it, but for western osu players it is completely counterproductive.

I'm not sure if you go through the HW's post thoroughly but there was an example given to prove that the change from "v" to "u" will result a worse case under certain conditions: “绿光” & “露光” will be both romanised in "Lu Guang" while their actual pronunciation are completely different. For non-Chinese speakers, I don't think it can be a better way either to pronounce it or to remember the title by any means. Ofc I understand that "v" has no connection with the actual pronunciation of "ü". I was also confused when I first used a keyboard to type Chinese. However, this is just a general knowledge for all Chinese users and Chinese learners. That's how we Chinese grow up. So even we may understand that "v" can be senseless in pronunciation manner,
I don't get why non-Chinese speakers have the advantage to ignore such knowledge (which is common to us) at all. When you want to memorize a title in a different language, accepting its small piece of rule/regularity (actually it's really small) is not demanding is it? In fact for the pronunciation of Japanese romanised way of "ra" (similarly, ri, ru, re, ro), the actual pronunciation is far from /ra/, but somehow similar to be in the middle of /ra/ and /la/. Personally I'd even say it sounds much closer to /la/ in general. But when you have to memorize it, you simply accept its setting of being forced "ra". That's the same thing.

Lastly, Chinese is generally referred to as logographic rather then ideographic, as a character represents a morphheme rather than a more nebulous concept, and as ideogram usually refers specifically to a symbol that is independent of any corresponding sound--although of course no logographic writing system is without a phonetic component built into it. The terms themselves are rather fuzzy anyways, so to achieve anything of actual accuracy one has to resort to such ungainly terms as HW's "ideophonographical." However, to call Chinese logographic is not incorrect. In fact, most people, even linguists, do it.

I don't know how you call Chinese logographic so steadily so I just want TRUE evidence. And I don't even want to read Wafu's post again because he was simply doing this once and once again without compelling support. Anyways, the most intuitive thoughts of the language Chinese is still ideographically, based on how we accept Chinese education for more than 12 years. Many words that combined by two or more characters are also generated by the joint of meanings of those characters together. For example, “未来”(future) can be split as “未”(not happening) and “来”(come). And the easy joint would be "has not come yet", which is the close meaning of "future". And the word “银行”(bank) can be split as “银”(silver, which is the general currency in ancient China) and “行” (an organization/commercial firm focusing on specific fields, pronounced as Hang). And it's obvious that the joint of those two meanings an organization/commercial firm focusing on money, which is bank.

The third example would be my own map https://osu.ppy.sh/s/598869 “花儿纳吉” (The actual correct pronunciation should be Hua Er Na Zei, which is different from normal Mandarin pronunciation Hua Er Na Ji). This title has no direct meaning from Mandarin as it's from minority Chinese language (Qiang language). The official meaning is "Being happy like a flower". However, the song title still has its similar meaning to the combination of Mandarin in Chinese culture , which was also part of intention by the song author: “花儿” is flower, “纳” is containing/accepting, “吉” is happiness. If being wrongly considered as logographic, the song title would be less valuable, which is what we cannot accept. There are just thousands of more examples so I have to stop here.

As a result, I completely don't understand why you guys keep trying to call Chinese logographic by any means. It's highly COUNTER-INTUITIVE. And in fact the change of combining characters is highly impractical (as you wanted to state below the opposite way) in this way, because simply consider each character as pronunciation (as logographic indicates) will result in MEANING LOSS and CULTURE LOSS, which is definitely a wrong way to approach to Chinese language.


To the crux of the issue.

The real dichotomy here is between practicality and officiality/aesthetics. That is a highly subjective discussion and is conducive to many (as seen here) tetchy discussions. Grouping words together will almost certainly make it more convenient for non-Chinese speakers, there should really be no question about this. I personally don't even pay attention to the name of a Chinese map if it's over three or four characters long; the profusion of capitals and spacing, to my English-speaking mind, is simply inconvenient, and I would rather memorize the mapper's name, the artist's name, and the background instead. Japanese titles, meanwhile, are multisyllabic, and I would rather have a few multisyllabic words than six monosyllabic words. How closely we adhere to "ISO 7098" really should not be a question. We're a small international circle-clicking community, not an official international organization, so shouldn't we rather consider things from a functional, practical perspective?

Sorry but I just think the way of changing is even more impractical for the reason stated above

Context after here is not holding new idea so I delete them in my post. But anyways, I'm completely not convinced how changes on Mandarin/Chinese metadata would help it be more practical. On the contrary, they're ignoring the general case of Chinese and making things even worse.

CrystilonZ wrote:

Shad0w1and wrote:

So let's face the reality, there isn't a standard for Chinese romanization into ANSI code. I can't understand that without a commonly accepted standard, why would you guys try to change the current metadata rule?

We've expressed (thoroughly I believe) what problems the current system has. Please read all the previous points made in this discussion.

no, you don't understand, using nonsense metadata will fuck up all Chinese players and all Chinese learner players. Wtf are you considering making a nonsense international standard and let all the players think wtf is the osu meta?

and if you don't understand why almost all Chinese opposed to this proposal, I am telling you because it will fuck up almost everyone who actually know mandarin. We don't want that happen. No matter its the lv problem or ISO noun problem, they make no sense to all Chinese learners and Chinese players, this will make everyone struggle to search for songs. And you cannot just make an osu news post saying we changed the Chinese meta because we redefined an international standard !!!

also, romanize is not for english speakers to be able to read words. Lmao each semester my professors (in the US) are struggling to read students names from Germany, Ireland, India, Russia and tons of other countries. Even you romanized their names from the original language, it does NOT mean you can pronounce it. And Lv, Nv is the same case as Ra, Ri, Ru, Re, Ro in Japanese and similar cases in all other languages. You can't expect people who do not know the language to pronounce it correctly. The romanized meta, in this sense, it a way for learners to deal with the song searching.

And it seems like I have to open another post for Wafu

Wafu wrote:

1. First of all, you did use the ISO document as your argument, but you didn't even know that the citation about "ideophonograph" language was just confirming what CrystilonZ posted. You agree with ISO on the same thing that you disagree with CrystilonZ on. They state the same thing.

We illustrate many reasons why each Chinese character has its own meaning and such meta would be ignored when words are joint together. And you're just repeating "same thing", "it's not non-sense", "you're ignoring what I am saying". It may be useful for one time but not for many because people don't see you're supporting ideas. You are just repeating yourself.

Wafu wrote:

Yes, I agree with that point. Some Chinese characters indeed do use "pictographic and ideographic features". You even quoted me saying that. That doesn't make the language pictographic or ideographic, because even the characters with pictographic or ideographic features are logograms. That makes the language logographic. Why do you call something non-sense and then say the same thing?

Another repeat. First of all, please provide good evidence/support to "That makes the language logographic" or you're just repeating your own words. That would lose the ground where you try to stand on. Secondly, when you accept a majority part of the language has "pictographic and ideographic features", you don't accept the fact that when combining words together such feature will be lost and it can be highly detrimental to the language meta. I just don't get it.

Wafu wrote:

7. If you have problem with me comparing how osu! works for 2 different Romanisation, I think there's a different problem. Stop calling me ignorant if you ignore what I've even written in that paragraph. It's also not non-sense. I literally just say how people work. How can that be non-sense? That is an observation.

The new system you are trying to bring out has huge difference than Romanisation we've had, as HW, Fycho and I illustrated lots of evidence and facts ("五环境内"，"他谁都打不过"，"花儿纳吉"）So seeing how people work in the past doesn't mean you're qualified enough to judge romanisation of Chinese correctly. In fact I don't think any automatic system could handle such romanisation correctly. In these cases native Chinese speakers still have louder voice.

Wafu wrote:

2. No, "v" doesn't work the best, it doesn't work at all because it has no linguistic basis. That doesn't mean "u" is the best, although we agreed that it generally won't make difference for a regular player, there are still many options that can be considered, but it can't be "v", and probably not "y", because that's associated with a different sound (even in other Romanisation systems we use). "u" pronounced in a certain way will result in the "ü" we are going for, it really is the core sound of it, I described this in the post 2 times already, so I guess I don't have to repeat myself.

I've already explained in my previous post that using "u" will cause terrible ambiguity. You insist on pronunciation of "v" is different from what we want, while you ignore the fact that ALL OTHER alphabets have their own pronunciation function in Chinese pinyin. The "v" is the most convenient one when you have to find a new thing corresponding to "ü". And again, it's just a language setting. That's how it's used for decades. You non-Chinese speakers should not have the advantage to ignore that. After all it's not demanding for people to remember such a small thing if they want to approach to Chinese. Pronunciation of "v" should not become the barrier of knowing any of Chinese, or they're determined to fail to learn it anyways.

Wafu wrote:

Third point, not sure why you are personally attacking me. How do you know what my education is, what my job is, what my real life is? You don't know any single thing about my personal life, so don't act like you do.

Answer:

Wafu wrote:

but remember it works vice-versa.

Wafu wrote:

Your false accusations (of us not reading stuff or not being professional) did, indeed, make me send you this message (and it is called exactly that: "Private message"). I'm not making fun of you as it was not public, you making it public doesn't mean I'm making fun of you. I wanted you to know that putting this down to "there's no research" was unfair of you, as you didn't invest your time into the research either. Was I being rude to you in the private message? Yes, as as you were when you clearly did, intentionally ridicule the proposal, except I at least could keep it private.

Last but not least, insulting others in private message doesn't mean that you were polite at all. It only means you pretend to be polite but failed and you wanted to hide the fact that you were not. So please learn to stay calm and polite consistently.
----------------------------------
Just an observation: No native Chinese speakers ever try to support such changes. You're trying to prove that it's easier to memorize and to pronounce for non-Chinese speakers, but we have tried super hard to prove that you haven't gone through Chinese and there are tons of fact that counters your idea of making the romanised result to audience easier and better. But I don't see your reaction of ever acknowledging that, which is very disappointing in a discussion. The changes literally try to change the Chinese language into something that Chinese speakers don't know, while you are completely indifferent about it. So do not say "conservative" again when you cannot find any other reasons that why all Chinese speakers disagree. After all, it still sounds ridiculous if no Chinese agree on Chinese metadata changes anyway.

If you guys could summarize what rule you want to change/add, that would speed up the process here a lot. Something like In the case of romanizing ü, use v, not yu. Or something like that. This is just an example btw. I disagree with using "v" as romanization since English speakers will pronounce "v" differently from how it's supposed to be pronounced in Mandarin.

I would like to add a few extra rules to the proposal, taking into account other languages that so far haven't been discussed, since everyone's been caught up on the Chinese romanization debate.

With respects to Korean romanization, I'm wondering if we should continue applying the McCune-Reischauer system for romanizing Korean. This is the system that the Library of Congress is using. Nyquill brought up an excellent point about using romanization systems that other large institutions are currently using and it works a lot better than creating our own modified system in most cases (unless we are simplifying).

I'm bringing this up because there is also the Revised Romanization of Hangeul system that was introduced on July 7th, 2000 which has been applied to various Korean road signs transportations etc... The major change of course being that the new system eliminates diacritics in favor of digraphs.

A possible rule would look like:


Additionally, we could introduce the use of digraphs and two-vowel letters into the proposal:


Another language to examine is Thai. The Library of Congress recommends nine additional rules for Thai romanization which are:

Library of Congress wrote:

Romanization
1. Tonal marks are not romanized.
2. The symbol ฯ indicates omission and is shown in romanization by “ … ” the conventional sign for
ellipsis.
3. When the repeat symbol ๆ is used, the syllable is repeated in romanization.
4. The symbol ฯลฯ is romanized Ia.
5. Thai consonants are sometimes purely consonantal and sometimes followed by an inherent vowel
romanized o, a, or ǭ depending on the pronunciation as determined from an authoritative
dictionary, such as the Royal Institute's latest edition (1999).
6. Silent consonants, with their accompanying vowels, if any, are not romanized.
7. When the pronunciation requires one consonant to serve a double function – at the end of
one syllable and the beginning of the next – it is romanized twice according to the
respective values.
8. The numerals are: ๐ (0), ๑ (1), ๒ (2), ๓ (3), ๔ (4), ๕ (5), ๖ (6), ๗ (7), ๘ (8), and ๙ (9).
9. In Thai, words are not written separately. In romanization, however, text is divided into words
according to the guidelines provided in Word Division below.

My question for Thai romanization is whether we should treat them similarly to how we are treating Chinese romanization which is to separate words with spaces, or if we should clump them together, for example: พระนางเจาพระบรมราชินีนาถ romanized as: Phranāng Čhao Phrabǭrommarāchinī Nāt or Phranāngchaophrabǭrommarāchinīnāt. Also, should we make all the separated words uppercase, or only the first? Since Thai chains everything together, there is no indicator for upper and lower case when we split the phrase up (if we do).

The two rules I am proposing are:


and


Attached are helpful transcription keys for Thai:






Another language that is becoming more and more relevant is Arabic, and there are some issues I would like to bring forth with regards to its romanization.

Here is the table for romanization of Arabic:


As you can see, some issues come up. In the romanization of ص ص ص ص for example, (whether initial, Medial, Final, or Alone) the romanization becomes " ṣ" however, the diacritical mark is not something that can be used by osu because it is still not unicode. I would like to propose that all of these diacritical "," attached to letters be removed for the sake of simplicity and because osu currently does not support them. Therefore something like " ص◌نضوِ◌خ" should be romanized as "sandwich".

Another problem with Arabic is that it is typed in reverse, right to left. Should we also apply this to romanization? In this case "ص◌نضوِ◌خ" would actually be romanized as "hciwdnas" when read left to right as English readers are expected to do.

The rule I am proposing is:


Additionally:


However, there is also the problem of Judeo-Arabic romanization which differs slightly from traditional Arabic romanization. Judeo-Arabic of course, stems from the Jewish Arabs many who live in Iraq and have adopted a slightly different script with respect to certain nouns and verbs. The most common Jewish Arabs are those from Baghdad. Anyways, I digress.

Attached are examples of Judei-Arabic romanziation:


So I would like to propose the following:


Yet another language I would like to cover is the Cherokee language, also known as the Tsalagi Gawonihisdi, which is an Iroquoian language of the native CHerokee people to which there are approximately 300,000 tribal members. In terms of syllabary, I again lean to the ALA-LC Romanization table that was prepared by the Library of Congress attached here:



Because the language does not use capitalization, I am wondering if a rule should be made to force lower case on all songs, titles, artist, and sources with Cherokee origins. Below I propose the two following rules:


As well as:


Lastly, I would like to bring attention to another pictographic language. In fact, Chinese is not the only pictographic language left in the world. I'm sorry, Hollow Wings, Chinese is special, but it is not that special. You guys have forgotten about the ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphics. Such a shame.

Below is a chart on monoliteral hieroglyphs and their hieratic equivalents as researched by R. Lepsius in his book Denkmäler aus Aegypten und Aethiopien Abth. II





As you can see, not all hieroglyphs have been translated yet, and some are still in the process of being discovered due to many pyramids and ancient Egyptian pyramids currently being lost to time. Therefore I have a few set of rules to propose:


Additionally, because not all Hieroglyphs have been transcribed yet:


Lastly,


I hope this will be of use to you guys, and I hope to see some more fruitful and productive discussion come about.

from what i can tell, there are two main issues... first: splitting syllables 1 by 1 and second, using v for ü.

for the first one, syllable by syllable makes more sense. that is evident through the fact that creating words out of specific syllables will block other readings. it's true that it might be easier to memorize if artificial words are created but those would necessarily be arbitrary since those divisions between syllables (to create words) are not used in the actual language. at that point the romanization would be inaccurate...

second: the v shit
the point of romanization is to create a "word" in latin script that can be read by westerners. what chinese people do while texting unfortunately is not important to this discussion
v would not be pronounced as anything resembling ü by any westerner. using something that would definitely be pronounced completely wrong doesn't suit the purpose of romanization. using something like "ue" or "yu" which is (as i understand) how ü is supposed to be said makes much more sense.

i'll turn simple now.

------

CrystilonZ wrote:

To be honest I'm very pissed off right now and you have no idea how hard it is for me to post in this calm manner.


You, as Chinese have no priority in this matter, just because it's about Chinese. I believe all people here are civilised people and civilised people argue with reason.Read more about this here <Argument from authority>

i'm already pissed off since idea of "Wafu: 'You, as Chinese have no priority in this matter, just because it's about Chinese,' " came up.

HOW THE HELL YOU CAN SAY OR AGREE WITH THAT?

if any other person out of Chinese has higher priority than Chinese people ever be defined, that'll be a huge humiliating to us.

ANYONE GONNA NEVER GOT ANY HIGHER PRIORITY THAN CHINESE PEOPLE ABOUT CHINESE MATTERS.

you are saying tell me figure out what nonsense means to you, then you gonna figure out what that point of view means to us.
and i'll keep using the word "nonsense" if you keep that point of view like that.
and i'll keep calling your posts based on that points of view "nonsense" if you keep regard Chinese people like "You, as Chinese have no priority in this matter, just because it's about Chinese, ".

wanna "vice-versa"? here it is.

------------------

look at the current topic's direction, full of useless discussion about concepts or grammars, not ever contribute to it any longer.

CrystilonZ or wafu never got the most important point, even they think they know it like "i agree with you that Chinese shall be understood with context".
↑ hell no.

we Chinese ever get involved to this topic already explain things about this lots of time, but you never solve what may really trouble in any answer to that point.

the ambiguous words separating troubling situation won't just happen during romanisation, because:
Chinese characters may be written in representing various meanings on purpose.
that will effect us to saperating words.

AND I'M TIRED OF SHOWING EXAMPLES.
but i'll still give one more if it can eventually let you understand.

↓ EVRYONE NOTICE THIS EXAMPLE PLEASE BECAUSE I THINK THIS IS IMPORTANT. PLEASE. ↓
↑ EVRYONE NOTICE THIS EXAMPLE PLEASE BECAUSE I THINK THIS IS IMPORTANT. PLEASE. ↑

now answer me to the point: how to build a transcription that can express both of those meanings?
saperated romanized words won't do it because none of them express the original Chinese characters or words or sentences correct.

you gonna build no more better transcription system if you can't solve problem like this, which is widely happened in Chinese separating work.

this is far more away from the problem if Western people or non-Chinese speakers could understand/remember/search/etc. Chinese things better or not, it's about only romanisation of Chinese itself.

and no one had answer this, but just arguing with endless useless things.'

------------------

i'll do no more examples because i've already showed enough.

the best choice of Chinese romanisation system to osu community will always be doing it in one-by-one-character method, which cause least trouble in expressing Chinese characters' meanings.

and that's what ISO did world level widely.

and that's why i wanna communite to international people with standards that had been proven or identified, to cause less drama like this.

some people just don't get it and wanan make things forward, which is really out of osu community range and already be proven that is not a better choice already.

if you gonna use some GB/T like "The Basic Rules of the Chinese Phonetic Alphabet Orthography", then i'll be pleasure to talking about other several GB/T that identified by PRC which all about romanisation.
but it will still be a bad choice to me that we can even rule this community by some single contry's standard, but not the international one which already exisist and identified.

if staffs insist creating new rules aside any of them, then so be it.
i'm not staff so i can't do anything, maybe just sign and wait for troubles occur.

------------------

if nonsense continues, then fine, the problem in this post may never be solved and there's no solid evidence to change the current transcript system for Chinese characters.

i'll ignore all of those arguments or nonsense with concepts or whatever else without standards that can reach international level from now on.

bless naotoshi for summarizing what others took essays to say into two easy to read paragraphs
this isn't even sarcastic
bless you naotoshi

Monstrata wrote:

Songs with Korean metadata must be romanised using the McCune-Reischauer system for romanizing Korean when there is no romanisation or translation information listed by a reputable source.

May I ask why you chose the McCune Reischauer system in particular? Some quick research reveals it is currently only used officially in North Korea, with "Revised Romanization of Korean" being the current official system used for South Korea. As uhhh.... 99% of korean songs , especially those mapped in osu, come from South Korea, it would make far more sense to use that instead, overall. This may need more input from those who are more familiar with Korean.

Monstrata wrote:

Another language to examine is Thai. The Library of Congress recommends nine additional rules for Thai romanization which are:

could you please cite said documents that you mention throughout your post by linking them in case anyone wants to review it for themselves.

Monstrata wrote:

Another problem with Arabic is that it is typed in reverse, right to left. Should we also apply this to romanization?

No, roman characters are written from left to right. It would obscure the meaning and reading to write them in reverse order. Japanese can also be written from right to left, albeit in vertical lines instead of horizontal, do we romanise it backwards? no.


Overall, besides maybe, yeah we should definitely address korean as kpop is pretty popular on osu, the rest of this seems like needless bloat to the ranking criteria due to how infrequently songs in Thai, Arabic, or Cherokee, or, in Hieroglyphs, would be mapped. These should continue to be handled case-by-case and use common sense like they currently are.




Also, in general guys: while this discussion about mandarin and chinese is definitely important, please be sure to not neglect reviewing the draft itself and pointing out any other areas it could be improved. I believe both sides for the Chinese debate have at this point said anything that needs to be said to represent their viewpoint, which at this point leaves fixing out things like romanisation of ü or deciding if anything else should be considered when revising the current draft based upon these discussions.


Edit:
Additionally, please consider making tl;dr versions of your posts, this thread is nearly impossible for most people to read in its current state due to its sheer scale. It's gotten a bit out of hand.

If saying "v" couldn't be readed by foreigners and makes misconception, then we probably need to rework the Japanese rule as ra / ri / ru / re / ro are actually pronounced as la / li / lu / le / lo in Japanese, which is kinda unfriendly towards those latin scripts users who don't know Japanese. English speakers will pronounce "ra" differently from how it's supposed to be pronounced in Japanese.

As all of us known, Modified Hepburn(Japan gov uses Kunrei) and Pinyin(China gov uses Pinyin) system are the international standard systems, people who learn Chinese will start as pinyin, and when they start learning input lately, they will know "v", and "v" is the most familiar and well-known letter for Chinese speakers and leaners. "u" messes up with the vowel "u", and "yu" would be pronounced as "yoo" or other wrong pronunciation by most English speakers. Both are not inadequate for representing "ü". If anyone has better choice than "v", feel free to advise rather than suggest useless stuffs. Otherwise we will keep the "v" for "ü".

I'll give a summary for the discussions later. (already did at https://osu.ppy.sh/community/forums/top ... rt=6554329)

Fycho wrote:

If saying "v" couldn't be readed by foreigners and makes misconception, then we probably need to rework the Japanese rule as ra / ri / ru / re / ro are actually pronounced as la / li / lu / le / lo in Japanese, which is kinda unfriendly towards those latin scripts users who don't know Japanese. English speakers will pronounce "ra" differently from how it's supposed to be pronounced in Japanese.

As all of us known, Modified Hepburn(Japan gov uses Kunrei) and Pinyin(China gov uses Pinyin) system are the international standard systems, people who learn Chinese will start as pinyin, and when they start learning input lately, they will know "v", and "v" is the most familiar and well-known letter for Chinese speakers and leaners. "u" messes up with the vowel "u", and "yu" would be pronounced as "yoo" or other wrong pronunciation by most English speakers. Both are not inadequate for representing "ü". If anyone has better choice than "v", feel free to advise. Otherwise we would keep the "v" for "ü".

It's not the same. R and L are pronounced almost the same way across most phonetics. V and u are way different since V is a consonant.

Ask yourself, how would you pronounce ü using english phonetics. The answer should not be "v" because that's a voiced labiodental fricative. Not a vowel.

Monstrata wrote:

It's not the same. R and L are pronounced almost the same way across most phonetics. V and u are way different since V is a consonant.

Ask yourself, how would you pronounce ü using english phonetics. The answer should not be "v" because that's a voiced labiodental fricative. Not a vowel.

Even so, it's also the fact that few westerners pronounce it ever correctly in tournament commentary or any other similar situations. If "l" is indicates the actual pronunciation much better, "it should be changed to reflect the pronunciation correctly to be friendly to non-Japanese speakers" (as how pronunciation theory goes without taking care about any other factors)

So I'm still unsure about how much pronunciation should matter here.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Proposal wrote:

If the artist or title field exceeds the uploadable maximum length, or both together cause Windows filenames for the .osu files to exceed 255 characters, any additional markers from the fields causing this have to be dropped consistently and if this is still not sufficient, the corresponding fields need to be abbreviated reasonably and end in ... to signal that this song title has been shortened.

I'd love to see this one got added! But maybe we can ask mapper to provide the whole song name in a specific area? For example, creator's words or so. Otherwise we just cannot tell what song it is exactly

The discussion of "Romanization of Chinese" should stop until we figure out from these posts. You are free to discuss after that.

Now for the sake of not getting the thread flood and return to a normal discussion about other stuffs, no shitposts, no non-helper posts, no flame or personal insult, action will be taken if necessary. Behave yourselves, otherwise you shoulder the responsibility.

quote="F D Flourite" Maybe I'm not complete to read the whole thread because there are much about ignoring things. I just want to say some intuitive thoughts about the language Chinese.

First of all, still many Chinese type in English to search title of Chinese songs in osu! for the sake of consistency. Personally, I'm used to type pinyin to search for song title because osu! in the past had poor support on unromanised searching (maybe it's because many maps from 2012 and earlier only have their romanised one, both for Chinese and Japanese songs, as metadata at that time was not much forced).

Before I say anything, please don't read what I have to say already thinking about how to refute it, or argue against it, or prove me wrong. Some things I actually agree with you on so please try to actually consider what I'm saying.

melloe wrote:

Thirdly, to address the problems of grouping together romanized Chinese syllables into words. It is true that in grouping together syllables there is a lot of ambiguity, but much of that ambiguity should be able to be cleared in context. For instance, taking this charming example provided to us:

Hollow Wings wrote:

"Gu Niang, Shui Jiao Yi Wan Duo Shao Qian?"
this sentence mainly has two meanings:
1. "Hey gril, how much it costs if i buy a bowl of your dumplings?" （姑娘，水饺一碗多少钱？）
2. "Hey gril, how much it costs if i sleep you one night?" （姑娘，睡觉一晚多少钱？）

Context should be able to very easily clear up such ambiguities. What is the song about? What is the rest of the song saying? Context will provide an almost effortless resolution to such conclusions, which I imagine would comprise the vast majority of such instances.

However, some of those ambiguities will be purposely rendered in the form of puns etc., such as here:

Fycho wrote:

For example, specific examples like "他谁都打不过", it's used intentionally to represent two meanings that are "Nobody can beat him" and "He can beat everybody", "Ta / Shui / Dou Da Bu Guo" and "Ta / Shui Dou Da Bu Guo".

These will most likely make up such a negligible percentage of these instances of ambiguity that to go through with the proposed changes and deal with these intentionally ambiguous titles as they come up would not be completely remiss -- but I personally believe that even these hypothetical cases, however rare, should be considered before pushing any changes. That is just my opinion, ultimately it's not up to me.

In fact for many contemporary Chinese ballads, their titles are deliberately came up as such (in the form of puns). As for the first example given here, the song title can still be sexually suggestive even if its formal title is about dumplings. Because Chinese lyrics are not as logical as daily language,
and people just can easily get the ambiguous meaning because there is no way to distinguish their pronunciation difference in a song-wise tone without logical context. "Context will provide an almost effortless resolution to such conclusions" as you said is often not the truth. Joint of Chinese characters into a single word will often cause loss of meaning in this way. (I have more examples, one of which is my uploaded map)

I think you must misunderstand me, because I am pretty much in agreement with you on this. As for the first example, if the song content itself is not sexual in nature then naturally the song title should be not sexually suggestive. However, I have already said that puns are intentional ambiguities that cannot be resolved by any combination of word groupings, and that that is one reason to not go through with the proposed changes, which is actually what you said--we are in agreement on this. Let me clarify, I am not flat out taking a single stance with every paragraph I type, I am just offering my own opinion on different matters regarding this topic, sometimes in favor of the proposal, sometimes against.

Fourthly, about "v" vs "u." To Chinese speakers of course "v" makes the most sense, as that is the input they use in their everyday lives, but to the western audience, "v" will make absolutely no sense. "u" and "yu" are both inadequate romanizations of "ü," because "yu" will be pronounced "yoo" by most westerners, but "v" will be next to useless for everybody except for Chinese players. "v" is more ambitious in that it serves to correctly represent a specific sound instead of simply approximating it, but for western osu players it is completely counterproductive.

I'm not sure if you go through the HW's post thoroughly but there was an example given to prove that the change from "v" to "u" will result a worse case under certain conditions: “绿光” & “露光” will be both romanised in "Lu Guang" while their actual pronunciation are completely different. For non-Chinese speakers, I don't think it can be a better way either to pronounce it or to remember the title by any means. Ofc I understand that "v" has no connection with the actual pronunciation of "ü". I was also confused when I first used a keyboard to type Chinese. However, this is just a general knowledge for all Chinese users and Chinese learners. That's how we Chinese grow up. So even we may understand that "v" can be senseless in pronunciation manner,
I don't get why non-Chinese speakers have the advantage to ignore such knowledge (which is common to us) at all. When you want to memorize a title in a different language, accepting its small piece of rule/regularity (actually it's really small) is not demanding is it? In fact for the pronunciation of Japanese romanised way of "ra" (similarly, ri, ru, re, ro), the actual pronunciation is far from /ra/, but somehow similar to be in the middle of /ra/ and /la/. Personally I'd even say it sounds much closer to /la/ in general. But when you have to memorize it, you simply accept its setting of being forced "ra". That's the same thing.

Again I am offering a two-sided view, so that anyone who reads my post (if they don't want to slough through the other very, very long posts) can have multiple perspectives to build their own opinion off of, perhaps I should have made that more clear. For proposal: v makes no sense to westerners. Against proposal: u is not the same as ü, so "v" is a better choice if we want to be exactly precise about that particular vowel instead of just approximating it with "u," the tradeoff being of course that westerners will be confused.
Non-Chinese will not even know to look up the usage of "v" at all, unless you go around and tell everyone, they will just accept it as a strange aspect of the Chinese language and continue pronouncing it "el vee" or "lvvv" or "liv," instead of actually pronouncing it "lü."
In Japanese the IPA notation /ɾ/ as in ra ri ru re ro in English is simply marked as "r" instead of getting its own special character--in other words, we are approximating the pronunciation. And I suspect many non-Japanese have not even memorized that fact, and if they know that "ra" is actually /ɾa/ it's only because they have heard it from anime or something. If we were to do the same for Chinese, we would be again be approximating the ü sound by labeling it "u."

Lastly, Chinese is generally referred to as logographic rather then ideographic, as a character represents a morphheme rather than a more nebulous concept, and as ideogram usually refers specifically to a symbol that is independent of any corresponding sound--although of course no logographic writing system is without a phonetic component built into it. The terms themselves are rather fuzzy anyways, so to achieve anything of actual accuracy one has to resort to such ungainly terms as HW's "ideophonographical." However, to call Chinese logographic is not incorrect. In fact, most people, even linguists, do it.

I don't know how you call Chinese logographic so steadily so I just want TRUE evidence. And I don't even want to read Wafu's post again because he was simply doing this once and once again without compelling support. Anyways, the most intuitive thoughts of the language Chinese is still ideographically, based on how we accept Chinese education for more than 12 years. Many words that combined by two or more characters are also generated by the joint of meanings of those characters together. For example, “未来”(future) can be split as “未”(not happening) and “来”(come). And the easy joint would be "has not come yet", which is the close meaning of "future". And the word “银行”(bank) can be split as “银”(silver, which is the general currency in ancient China) and “行” (an organization/commercial firm focusing on specific fields, pronounced as Hang). And it's obvious that the joint of those two meanings an organization/commercial firm focusing on money, which is bank.

Do the words ideograph and logograph mean something to you that they don't to other people? You seem quite adamant on this. I only mentioned this matter as a very unimportant one, which is why I put it last. The terms ideograph and logograph themselves are very nebulous, ill-defined, any usage of either will not be very accurate unless you append extra stuff to make something long and complicated like "ideophonographical." In my experience, an ideogram is something that represent a particular idea or concept. 上 would be an ideograph, and Chinese for 1 2 3 would be ideograph. However, 的 is not really a concrete concept, it's more of a morpheme (the smallest unit of meaning in a language), like the english -ly or -ing. Concepts, too, can be morphemes, so the label "logogram" cover both complete concepts as well as morphemes. However, this topic is ultimately really quite trivial and not all that important to the discussion at hand, so if the words "logogram" and "ideogram" have a definition to you that I'm not aware of and it's extremely importanat to you that Chinese be called "ideographic," I'm more than happy to comply.

The third example would be my own map https://osu.ppy.sh/s/598869 “花儿纳吉” (The actual correct pronunciation should be Hua Er Na Zei, which is different from normal Mandarin pronunciation Hua Er Na Ji). This title has no direct meaning from Mandarin as it's from minority Chinese language (Qiang language). The official meaning is "Being happy like a flower". However, the song title still has its similar meaning to the combination of Mandarin in Chinese culture , which was also part of intention by the song author: “花儿” is flower, “纳” is containing/accepting, “吉” is happiness. If being wrongly considered as logographic, the song title would be less valuable, which is what we cannot accept. There are just thousands of more examples so I have to stop here.

As a result, I completely don't understand why you guys keep trying to call Chinese logographic by any means. It's highly COUNTER-INTUITIVE. And in fact the change of combining characters is highly impractical (as you wanted to state below the opposite way) in this way, because simply consider each character as pronunciation (as logographic indicates) will result in MEANING LOSS and CULTURE LOSS, which is definitely a wrong way to approach to Chinese language.


Again, with how adamant you are on this topic of logo/ideograph--does ideographic and logographic have a meaning I'm not aware of? I don't have any agenda in calling Chinese logographic, that's just what it is according to the definition of ideo/logographic that I have. Maybe you have a different or more correct definition, in which case feel free to teach me.

If we are to talk about practicality, then you have to consider perspectives from both sides. Impractical to whom? You have to remember that many non-Chinese don't speak Chinese and don't know anything about Chinese meaning or culture to begin with, so joining words will not result in any meaning or culture loss for them. The only difference for them is that it will be easier to remember. Of course it will be impractical to Chinese speakers, but for English or other non-Chinese speakers it will be easier to remember song titles (I have talked about this earlier, and included relevant quote), this is what I mean by practical.

To the crux of the issue.

The real dichotomy here is between practicality and officiality/aesthetics. That is a highly subjective discussion and is conducive to many (as seen here) tetchy discussions. Grouping words together will almost certainly make it more convenient for non-Chinese speakers, there should really be no question about this. I personally don't even pay attention to the name of a Chinese map if it's over three or four characters long; the profusion of capitals and spacing, to my English-speaking mind, is simply inconvenient, and I would rather memorize the mapper's name, the artist's name, and the background instead. Japanese titles, meanwhile, are multisyllabic, and I would rather have a few multisyllabic words than six monosyllabic words. How closely we adhere to "ISO 7098" really should not be a question. We're a small international circle-clicking community, not an official international organization, so shouldn't we rather consider things from a functional, practical perspective?

Sorry but I just think the way of changing is even more impractical for the reason stated above
Yes, it will be impractical for you as a Chinese speaker, but I was talking about practicality for the many non-Chinese people who play this game. Let me bring in what you said later to Wafu and address that point:

Just an observation: You're trying to prove that it's easier to memorize and to pronounce for non-Chinese speakers, but we have tried super hard to prove that you haven't gone through Chinese and there are tons of fact that counters your idea of making the romanised result to audience easier and better. But I don't see your reaction of ever acknowledging that, which is very disappointing in a discussion.

I'm a native English speaker, and even after having learned some Chinese for some years as a child, it is still much easier for me to remember Chinese titles if they are grouped together into longer bundles that, visually speaking, more closely resemble "words" such as one might see in English. I have addressed this in the second point of my original post. (Also I tested it on some non-Chinese speaking friends without context, and here are the results: for some people, a Chinese word is easier to remember when separated by syllable, IF there are about three or less syllables overall. For longer titles, maybe four syllables or above, grouped words is easier to remember.

Context after here is not holding new idea so I delete them in my post. But anyways, I'm completely not convinced how changes on Mandarin/Chinese metadata would help it be more practical. On the contrary, they're ignoring the general case of Chinese and making things even worse.
I think you have to understand the argument from both sides--this is not just for this particular issue, but a life lesson for everywhere. Of course these changes will seem 100% silly to you, because you are Chinese, but you have to consider it from a westerner perspective: they don't know any Chinese, and for them grouped words are much easier to remember, because grouped words more closely resembles our own language.

However, again, just as you should consider everything from different perspectives, I already have considered it from a native Chinese-speaker's perspective and I have already said why I support the status quo, some of those arguments you have repeated here. Even if it doesn't change your opinion, it is good practice to truthfully consider other perspectives and be generous to them.

Also, I did not know that Chinese so heavily depended on romanization to search for Chinese songs in osu, which is why I asked about it, so definitely thank you for providing that information, I'll take your word for it. More reason to keep status quo, I guess?
/quote
can't embed more than 2 quotes within each other lol

Hi, I have some serious concerns regarding the romanisation of emojis, as they are not mentioned anywhere in the proposal.

What would be the most acceptable method of romanising emojis when there are no measures to keep consistency? For example, the 😀 emoji could be romanised as :-) or , whether the nose is included becomes a subjective matter which needs to be avoided for metadata rules.

Hence I propose for consistency

When romanising emojis that contain faces, avoid using noses as they are fairly uncommonly used

In addition, how are symbols with no clear emoticon meant to be romanised? There is no clear way to express 🍆, 👺 or 💩 with basic latin unicode.
Using discord format such as :weary: k_hand: :sweat_drops: really doesn't have the same effect

In addition, there are cases where emoticons have characters that are not accepted under traditional romanisation such as ヽ༼ຈل͜ຈ༽ﾉ, not to mention the presence of kaomoji which have no clear method of romanisation such as (⁎⚈᷀᷁ᴗ⚈᷀᷁⁎). How should these circumstances be handled when dealing with songs that use emoticons like these?

abraker wrote:

The reason I mention this is that some maps in 8k mania tend to be either 8k or 7k+1 and it's impossible to know until you download and check them out.

In that case it probably belongs to the osu!mania RC, anyways you should suggest wording and bring a bit of discussion on the topic if you feel that this is worth to add to the guidelines here or there.

are we good on word-by-word romanization for Chinese and if not, can someone cite why in less than 200 words?

keep in mind that the ONLY thing that matters re: romanization is that the title itself can be readily linked back to its source material, we're not after translation or context preservation or anything like that, only transliteration

please and thank you

unicode emoji can be converted to their nearest native equivalent for transliteration's sake, if they dont have one (ie: eggplant, etc), then they dont get ported, ez

Ephemeral wrote:

keep in mind that the ONLY thing that matters re: romanization is that the title itself can be readily linked back to its source material, we're not after translation or context preservation or anything like that, only transliteration

Well that's kinda important. Because in UBKRC, we actually considered the compatibility within osu!. There was that agreement that if it's possible, we should choose what is similar to Modified Hepburn, to keep the metadata consistent etc. (I believe it was for Cyrillic and Chinese)

If that is not the case now, the current system is indeed better, but the "ü" to "v" should be discussed.

I tried to summarize from the whole discussion, and the romanisation of Chinese method will be status quo (word-by-word method).
Adjust the wording of it a bit to avoid misunderstanding. Whoever disagrees the method of romanisation rule feel free to contact me in PM and I am willing to explain it to you.

Glossary:
Character-by-character Romanisation: Each Chinese character must be Romanised using Hanyu Pinyin system, and each romanised character must be capitalised and separated with a space.

Rules:
Songs with Chinese metadata must be Romanised using the Character-by-character method in Romanised fields when there is no Romanisation or translation information listed by a reputable source. The same applies to the Source field if a romanised Source is preferred by the mapper.


Below are things that we haven't reach an outcome, which still need to be public discussed:
The romanisation of "女/吕"(Nü / Lü)'s vowel "ü". Current we have two choice "v" and "yu". Here are the pros and cons.
v:

1. It's consistent with current ranked maps, players who can't speak Chinese wouldn't struggle to search songs.
2. "v" is the most common and familiar way to Chinese native speakers and leaners, and it's used in the input keyboard. People who learn Chinese will have to know "v" if they start typing pinyin.
3. It couldn't be read properly by English speakers as it's not a vowel in English.

yu:

1. It could be read easily by English speakers.
2. English speakers would read it "yoo", which has different tone from "ü" (I can't find an proper English word to express the correct tone of "ü").
3. "y" is consonant, "yu" is made from one consonant and one vowel while the original is one vowel "ü".

Feel free to drop opinions about it.

Closest pinyin sound to ü is "yi" btw. I can see why "yu" would be read as "yoo" cuz you naturally make "oo" sound with u. You naturally make "ee" sound with i. "yi" is closest imo as someone who speaks mandarin and english, what do you think?

Monstrata wrote:

Closest pinyin sound to ü is "yi" btw. I can see why "yu" would be read as "yoo" cuz you naturally make "oo" sound with u. You naturally make "ee" sound with i. "yi" is closest imo as someone who speaks mandarin and english, what do you think?

I can agree with that. It's not exact, but way closer than "yu" or "v", at least if you read it as in any other romanisation system we currently use.

@Fycho ""v" is the most common and familiar way to Chinese native speakers and leaners", nobody does that. Majority of people will still write "ü" and if you use the "v" on the pinyin layout, you will end up getting "ü" anyway. "v" is associated just so that you memorize where it is on the layout, not because of any relation to the character.

About the whole v, u, yu, whatever thing. It's not like people who don't know the language would pronounce things right anyway. For example, anyone who doesn't know Spanish would know that ll is not pronounced as l but /ʎ/ <- this thing, yet I doubt anyone would change how the Spanish word is written (since it's in the Latin alphabet already I guess?)

Similarly, we have æ ø å in Norwegian/Danish (and ä ö å in Swedish) which usually just get changed to ae, o/oe, aa, at least in Norwegian. The ø kinda sounds like the i in first, while å is like the o in old.

My point is kind of that even in languages that use the Latin alphabet, they have their own sounds and sometimes characters that there's no way to accurately approximate, so the priority should rather be on making it unambiguous and easy for foreigners to type and communicate the title as accurately as possible.

Why don’t we just allow Unicode characters to be used when submitting beatmaps and we can solve all our problems? (serious)

Kroytz wrote:

Why don’t we just allow Unicode characters to be used when submitting beatmaps and we can solve all our problems? (serious)

Because searching would be much more complicated. Majority of people couldn't type characters such as ǔ, ü, etc. and wouldn't find anything in the end.

CXu wrote:

Similarly, we have æ ø å in Norwegian/Danish (and ä ö å in Swedish) which usually just get changed to ae, o/oe, aa, at least in Norwegian. The ø kinda sounds like the i in first, while å is like the o in old.

Yes, but "ae", "o/oe" and "aa" seem to have a basis in pronunciation, at least. "v" is a choice based on keyboard layout. Which will not be even close if you actually try to pronounce it.

Monstrata wrote:

Closest pinyin sound to ü is "yi" btw. I can see why "yu" would be read as "yoo" cuz you naturally make "oo" sound with u. You naturally make "ee" sound with i. "yi" is closest imo as someone who speaks mandarin and english, what do you think?

In my opinion "yi" is not feasible to be implemented since there already exists "yi" as a syllable in Pin Yin system. Using yi will produce new confusions.

I think, "yu" is not a better choice than "v" since when combined with, for instance, "l", or other consonants, the pronunciation (under the prospective of a non-Mandarin speaker) is quite deviant from what it supposes to be (in Mandarin).

Fycho wrote:

It could be read easily by English speakers.

Also, before you try to regard "easier to pronounce for non-Mandarin speakers" as an advantage of any other choice than "v", you need to make sure whether the pronunciation of the new choice is, at least, inclined to the correct pronunciation of that in Mandarin, otherwise, the "easier to speak" statement will not be a valid reason. Since "yu" is far more from being similar to ü, it is already disqualified itself for having the advantage in pronunciation.

ü in Mandarin, is quite a special one. Almost none, I mean, including v itself have priority or advantage from the aspect of pronunciation, as it is almost impossible to find an approximate incarnation, I mean, an alternative or representative of ü from the alphabet used as a reference in the Romanization process.

Another example in Pin Yin is “x”, for example “Xue”, of which the pronunciation also differs from English. So why it is not brought up in the draft, to replace x with other characters when Romanization? Many other examples could be raised up here but I guess this is enough.

One cannot expect Romanization to teach them how to speak a language, though it might help people to get some insight about the pronunciation of it. Navel-gazing on finding alternatives that serves the “pronunciation” nemesis-like task people presumptuously equipped onto the process of Romanization is pointless. Therefore, I would appeal people to discuss from other aspects – treat v, yu or no matter what characters equally as to this point of view.


When I was writing this reply, I spot another post in the thread so I would like to add something more here:

Wafu wrote:

nobody does that. Majority of people will still write "ü" and if you use the "v" on the pinyin layout, you will end up getting "ü" anyway.

Are you sure nobody does that? And are you sure you will end up getting ü? What do you mean by “pinyin” layout? Input method? Softwares? Human-machine interfaces? If so, why osu! cannot do that? Asserting by vocabularies like “nobody” is not convincing, you might need to provide evidence to support your idea.

Wafu wrote:

Majority of people couldn't type characters such as ǔ, ü, etc. and wouldn't find anything in the end.

So what do you actually mean? You posted "Majority of people will still write ü" while "Majority of people couldn't type characters such as ǔ, ü, etc."

Fycho wrote:

For the TV Size thing, drop some opinions:

For example this song: https://osu.ppy.sh/s/477045
The song has a game ver that without "~TV animation ver.~", and has a TV ver later that labled with "~TV animation ver.~" to distinguish. They are different in Instrument and lyrics. In this case, (TVsize) aren't necessary but not for "~TV animation ver.~". That popular "~Anime Ban~" is pretty similar stuff.

I believe there is a metadata discretion when handling things like this.

Well if it's from the TV version the mapper should use "~TV animation ver.~" and then the game version it shouldn't use "~TV animation ver.~" I think I basically repeated what you said aaaaa

Wafu wrote:

Kroytz wrote:

Why don’t we just allow Unicode characters to be used when submitting beatmaps and we can solve all our problems? (serious)

Because searching would be much more complicated. Majority of people couldn't type characters such as ǔ, ü, etc. and wouldn't find anything in the end.

You could add the alternate romanizations in the tags so that it does pop up when searching tho. If a title had “lüe” then you’d add “lue” and “lve” into the tags and now people can search them. I dunno, seems simpler to do it that way imo. Keep original title, and add the complicated multi-spelling stuff into tags