Locations in chinese writing

Question

I am looking into locations in chinese letters. I have following items in my locations table.

Location	Country
한국	South Korea
中國	China
日本	Japan
臺灣	Taiwan
香港	Hong Kong

The problem I noticed is in the order. These locations are not in Place, Region, Country format.

for most of them it seems it is in format CountryRegionPlace with no spacing or comma. I think each group is written as a pair of 2 letters, but I am not sure about it.

I will have more questions once I get the basics.

Comments

When would the proper names of these countries be used, ie, Peoples’ Republic of China or Republic of China?

---

I don't think it's necessary to write the full names, just as we don't use 'United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland' or 'Bundesrepublik Deutschland'.

Both the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the Republic of China (ROC) think that Taiwan is part of China and they both claim that they are the legitimate government of China. It's just that the PRC controls  mainland China and the ROC the island of Taiwan, in their eyes parts of China.

---

Some of us do use Bundesrepublik Deutschland, particularly for the time when there also was a Deutsche Demokratische Republik.

---

There is no problem to have official names recognized as the country. So I added Republic of China and People's Republic of China (with apostrophe).

https://wikitree.sdms.si/function/WTShowTable/Table.htm?table=Countries&filter=CHN

Answer 1

I added support for non latin characters to WikiTree+. search engine. You can now search for CJK script.

https://wikitree.sdms.si/default.htm?report=srch1&Query=%ED%95%9C%EA%B5%AD&MaxProfiles=500

Answer 2

The Korean letters are Hangul (Korean script), not Chinese characters (Hanzi/Kanji). These are letters arranged in a block for each syllable. A block (so a syllable) seems to be one letter on webpages, so a 'two-letter word' is actually a two syllable word. Most Korean places seem to have two syllables, so two blocks.

As far as I know Chinese characters are one word or one morpheme. Their sound is one syllable. Again, most places have two syllables, so two characters.

Answer 3

Aleš,

I was going to try to explain Japanese addresses, but I realized that someone's probably done this before.

Here's a good explanation:

https://resources.realestate.co.jp/living/how-to-read-a-japanese-address/

I hope that helps.

Just a little more information... Japanese is one of those languages where everything is in a different order from European languages. So, English, for example, has President Biden, while Japanese has バイデン大統領(Baiden-daitouryou - (Biden-President)).  In the UK, a date may look like this: 25-12-2021 (Happy Christmas!) - lowest (day) to highest (year), while in Japan it would look like this: 2021年12月25日  (2021 year 12 month 25 day). So, in the same way, addresses start from the big and work towards the small. Oh, and there are no spaces in a Japanese text, which makes parsing it slightly more difficult (though less difficult than Chinese, for reasons I won't get into here.)

I hope that makes sense.

Comments

Thanks, that explains it very simply. I will be able to incorporate the prefectures into the table. 

The article doesn't mention the country. I guess wikitree locations should start with 日本. And I guess there are no postal numbers on wikitree. 

Does this system change if you go back in history for hundreds of years. Like 19, 18, 17,... century. 

---

Yes, the name of the country is 日本, and that starts the location.

Yes, it does change as you go back in history. The modern system of prefectures was set up after the Meiji revolution/restoration in 1868. Before that, place names - at least area names - were very different... I don't know all the details (I can find out for you...*), but it was all different. The names of cities were also sometimes different.  Tokyo, for example, used to be called Edo. And the kanji (Chinese characters) for place names have also changed over time. Sendai (in the north-east), for example, is 仙台 today, but it used to be 仙臺, and before the 17th century it was completely different again.

For what it's worth, I very much doubt that WikiTree will be growing very much in Japan, as the records are simply not available. The little that is available online (photocopies of old records) hasn't been digitised, so people could spend weeks searching through everything to find any information.  When I tell Japanese people about WikiTree, they find it hard to believe.  Even if I show them the online sources, they can't believe that we can trust this information.  (I don't want to class a whole country as 'they', but this is my personal experience.) 

* Wikipedia has a good page with the names of all the historical (pre-Meiji) provinces: Provinces of Japan - Wikipedia . It's interesting to note that the kanji (character) they used to denote province (国) means 'country' today.  (Well, I think it's interesting, anyway.) 

---

Here are all Japan locations using 日本 on wikitree.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1M_3jFvzr8AHKKExYORU57EfUWlklo4gVONetTBi7Rk8/edit?usp=sharing

Are there any guidelines on mixed writing in locations on WikiTree?

---

Are you asking me about WikiTree guidelines...? What do you mean about mixed writing? Do you mean some Japanese/Chinese characters and some using the Roman alphabet?  I don't know, but I feel it would be wrong...

At a glance, I see something a bit wrong in that file - it's probably not a big deal, but I do see lots of these. Here's one example:

日本兵庫県城崎郡香住町 日本,兵庫,県城,崎郡,香住,町

The first part of that is the location -

日本 Japan

兵庫県 Hyogo-ken (ken=prefecture)

城崎郡 Kinosaki-gun (I think)  ('gun' is a smaller area)

香住町 Kasumi-cho ('cho' literally means 'block', though this could also be 'machi' which means 'town')

What I'm noticing is that the commas on the right are not correct. (日本,兵庫,県城,崎郡,香住,町)  This is being broken down in the wrong places.  In terms of parsing the locations, if you need to do that, this may cause problems.  If you don't need to worry about that second column, then maybe you're OK.

Another example:

日本奈良県葛下郡高田町 日本,奈良,県葛,下郡,高田,町

県 is 'ken' (prefecture) and it should be at the end of 奈良 (Nara), rather than connected to 葛. The next comma is a big mistake, too, as the next part of the location is 葛下郡 - Katsuge-gun (I think). You can see the same '郡' as in the previous example.  Then again it has '町' separated from the rest of it (it should be 高田町, which I assume is Takada-machi, though it could be Takata or -cho)... It's a tricky language to read.

Anyway, I hope that helps.

---

I meant Japanese/Roman mixture, as you can see in some locations.

2nd column is my split to words. It is based on 2 characters, but I guess that assumption was wrong. I will have to redesign that.

---

Oh, sorry, I didn't realise you made that file.  If you follow what it says in that link I gave you, you  won't go too far wrong.  Basically, place names are followed by the suffix of their 'level'. Going back to my second example - 日本奈良県葛下郡高田町...

It splits like this: 

日本 (Japan)

奈良県 prefecture

葛下郡 gun (district)

高田町 block/town 

But they're not always the same.  This one - 仙台市泉区 - for example, has 'shi' (city) and 'ku' (ward).  Again, take a look at that page I linked to.

As for the mix of Japanese and Roman... It's not normal, but I don't think it matters so much.  You would never see a location written with a mix like that in Japan, but you do see road signs and station names with the Roman alphabet used.  Looking again at the list, there are not many examples of that mix and they look odd to me.  One of them (日本クイuシュu) is actually garbage (though I assume it was someone trying to write Kyushu (九州), though it's hard to explain why).

And just in case... in the examples above, it does look like all place names have two characters followed by the suffix, but that's not true -- some place names may have one character, while others may have more than two - one that springs to mind is 陸前高田市 (Rikuzentakata-shi), which has four characters before the 'city' suffix.

(I'm afraid I know nothing about Chinese or Korean location names.)

---

I added prefectures for Japan in both writings. here are the numbers.

https://wikitree.sdms.si/function/WTShowTable/Table.htm?table=Countries&filter=JPN

I also updated the Spreadsheet and added another page with all recognized Japan locations..

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1M_3jFvzr8AHKKExYORU57EfUWlklo4gVONetTBi7Rk8/edit#gid=0

I think it is pretty good for now. If you see any problems or have some suggestions to improve things, let me know.

---

On your page, the only problem I see is 'Hokkaido-dou'.  The 'do' in Hokkaido is the 'dou' that you've added.  'Hokkaido' kind of translates as 'Northern Sea Circuit', and that 'Circuit' is equivalent to 'Prefecture'.  It's always 'Hokkaido' and never 'Hokkaido-dou'.

I've gone through your file and added commas where necessary/appropriate in the column headed  'Reverse location' (the ones with an 'x' next to them have been edited).  I've also left a few comments about some of the strange things I see.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Bdu14jwuelQWZcva8XsIqSB9YV_GX372-ghbkpHQ6PQ/edit?usp=sharing

I hope that helps.

---

I corrected Hokkaido and I am waiting on access to your table. Thanks for the help.

---

I think I've just given you access. (I didn't realise it wasn't open already).

---

As I wrote in the document, you can now search for a profile on WikiTree+ using the value in column A like: https://wikitree.sdms.si/default.htm?report=srch1&Query=%E6%97%A5%E6%9C%AC%E5%8C%97%E6%B5%B7%E9%81%93%E5%BE%8C%E5%BF%97%E7%B7%8F%E5%90%88%E6%8C%AF%E8%88%88%E5%B1%80%E8%B5%A4%E4%BA%95%E5%B7%9D%E6%9D%91

I don't see any automated way to split the name except if I have a list of all locations. And you probably have thousands of places. Can I assume 郡 always means end of the location? It seems that 市 also means start of the sublocation.

---

As I said earlier, all subdivisions (apart from the smallest ones, which people are probably not entering into WikiTree anyway) are followed by a suffix.  It's basically like this:

Old areas (Big regions, 'Circuits'): 道

Old Provinces: 国, 州

Prefecture-level: 県,都,府,道

Next-level (district, city): 郡,市

Then (ward): 区,組

Finally ('town', village): 町,村,字

But, some of these may be found as part of the address and not just as a suffix. One of the ones in that file was Yokkaichi-shi, which is 四日市市.  The second of the two 市s is the suffix 'shi' (city), but the first one is just part of the name of the city.

Here's another tricky example: 市川市国分  This is an area called Kokubun (国分) in the city of Ichikawa (市川市) . You see again the two 市s, but also there's the 国, which is the character used for provinces in pre-1868 Japan.  I suppose with the 国, if you know the date, you can judge whether this is referring to a province name or not.  

Notice also that the '道' in Hokkaido (北海道), Japan's largest Prefecture, was used for large regions in the pre-revolution days.

I hope that helps. Good luck!