Wikicha Administravia

ps - I am definitely very for this, though I hope that if a bunch of Teadrunk folks are involved in discussing / editing the glossary that we can work out some cross-promotion and maybe have some of the discussion parts here (rather than a wiki talk page). Just a thought. I think such a glossary could be a really big help to users of the forum, to Wikicha, and also to people who are looking for information about tea.

I think it would be great if we could include sound recordings by native speakers, and links to online dictionaries (like nciku) as well.

Nciku has recordings of a lot of individual words as pronounced in fairly standard mandarin, though because of tone interactions, phrases or compound words might sound slightly different than the words strung together (see the example below of two individual words, then the compound word). Teaspring and some other merchants have recordings of some tea names. If we get a big enough list, we could maybe cajole (or bribe) some native speakers into doing recordings for us, at least in Mandarin. I know Cloud was working on recordings of words for his pu'er glossary, but not sure if they're online anywhere or if we're allowed to use them.

As far as knowing how to pronounce things, at least in terms of stuff written in hanyu pinyin, a good start is looking at some of the excellent guides online, like the one at Sinosplice. One bad thing about having a romanization system that looks like English but isn't designed to be pronounced phonetically as it would be in English is that it's very tempting and easy to pronounce things incorrectly (even if you "know better").

Since you asked about a specific word, I'll try and give you some rough ideas; disclaimer... I'm neither a native speaker of Chinese nor a very good speaker... maybe someone else could explain it better or more accurately. Shuǐ xiān is a little tough; in Mandarin, it's between "shooey" and "shway", and shien (like dog in french), with a tone that starts in the middle and goes up on the first word, and a high flat tone on the second. The difference between sh and x is a little tricky to explain... they're similar sounds, but with sh, the tongue is pretty far back in the mouth, where x is closer to a normal western sh, but with the tongue even a little further forward, so the sound is a little brighter. A lot of Mandarin speakers (esp. folks in South China and Taiwan) don't actually say 'sh' 'zh' and 'ch' sounds "properly" (i.e., in standard Mandarin) - so you might also hear it said with a straight s sound on the first word (sway shien). As a non-native speaker, I think most people would argue it's better to err on the side of standard Mandarin.

http://www.nciku.com/search/zh/detail/%E6%B0%B4/1314250
http://www.nciku.com/search/zh/detail/%E4%BB%99/1316460

You can actually hear the two together at:
http://www.nciku.com/search/zh/detail/% … B%99/39460
(shui xian is a compound word which refers to a particular flower)

Nice. That's pretty much what I had in mind. Maybe an "aliases" column too for common terms used for a tea from other romanization systems, nicknames, etc. (i.e., for tieguanyin, ti kwan yin, ti guan yin, tiekwanyin, TGY, TKY). My other idea was to have top level sections, and maybe sub-sections, like "teas", "teaware" => "yixing clay types", etc. At some point might be good to be able to have internal references ("see foo" or "see also foo"), preferably based on existing wiki redirects / links.

Is there a way to tie the stuff in the glossary to the article via a template? I.e., have a standard template at the top of the page for a particular tea, and have that tied to the stuff in the glossary and vice-versa? In other words, a self-updating system, so that if someone edits the tea or the glossary, it changes it both places? Probably the simplest way to do this would be to have the actual data in the page for the tea (in a standard format), then have the glossary extract that information dynamically (or periodically). Doing it periodically would have some advantages in terms of caching.

Scraping the data from (say) Babelcarp would be simple technically, however, I imagine Lew Perin might not appreciate it unless you can get him on-board with the project. The big advantage (or disadvantage) is that the data would be updatable by anyone. We would certainly (at some point) want to have a search interface as well as a flat "glossary" type page. The main problem I see with importing external data is what you do if there's already an existing wikicha page for a term (either with the exact same name, or with a similar, but different name).

Getting a big chunk of names in simplified and auto-translating to traditional is also easy (via Google translate or the like). Generating pinyin on the fly might be semi-easy if you wrote your own plugin - Chinese pera-kun uses a built in dictionary (which I think can be used by anyone) that maps characters to their pinyin.

I'm not much of a PHP programmer, but I could write some perl crap to do scraping / data-wrangling of stuff if no one else volunteers.

What you suggest is actually pretty possible with modifying the plugin I used to categorize the Chinese greens. It will be awhile before I start hacking on that, though.

I think definitely hanyu pinyin (with tone markers); as far as sticking words together or not, not so sure. I guess compound words together, individual words apart? I would actually think everything separate would be most consistent.

As I was saying before, using the computer to generate the pinyin (and then correcting any minor inaccuracies) is probably the quickest way to do this.

Yeah, to mock it up, but before we go too far in putting data into the page I need to work out how to dynamically generate the tables based on metadata on related pages.
Or we can cut and paste the data later.