Talk:Shiji

Quoted translation seems to have a small error

In the Source Materials section, it quotes the translation of Burton Watson as follows

余嘗西至空桐，北過涿鹿，東漸於海，南浮江淮矣，至長老皆各往往稱黃帝、堯、舜之處，風教固殊焉，總之不離古文者近是。

I myself have travelled west as far as K'ung-t'ung, north past Cho-lu, east to the sea, and in the south I have sailed the Yellow and Huai Rivers. The elders and old men of these various lands frequently pointed out to me the places where the Yellow Emperor, Yao, and Shun had lived, and in these places the manners and customs seemed quite different. In general those of their accounts which do not differ from the ancient texts seem to be near to the truth.

— Sima Qian, translation by Burton Watson[24]

Here Sima Qian writes 南浮江淮. It should not be "I have sailed the Yellow and Huai Rivers" but should be "I have sailed to the Yangtze (江) and Huai (淮) Rivers". In classical Chinese, 河 or 河水 is used to denoted the Yellow River (nowadays called 黄河), while 江 or 江水 is used to refer to the Yangtze (nowadays called 长江). Nowadays 江 and 河 can be used to refer any general rivers, but in the classical time, 江 is exclusively for Yangtze and 河 exclusively for the Yellow River.

It also does not make much sense by saying "to the south I sailed the Yellow and Huai River", because (1) Yellow river is in the relatively northern part of the Han empire and (2) Yellow river is very far away from the Huai River. While the Yangtze and Huai are indeed in the south and the two are relatively close to each other.

I checked the source of Watson's translation (Ssu Ma Chien Grand Historian Of China, 1953 https://archive.org/stream/ssumachiengrandh012602mbp/ssumachiengrandh012602mbp_djvu.txt ) and I confirmed that this is but a mistake by the contributor, but that Watson's translation did say "sailed to the Yellow and Huai". I think It should be a mistake.

But I still do not know what should we do to improve this. If the quotation of a translation has a mistake, how should we improve it?

Perhaps adding a small note below the quotation to clarify the mistake? Lujialin1996China (talk) 07:42, 14 July 2021 (UTC)

Years

I want to know more about the dates that the author wrote. JWsympathizer (talk) 02:15, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

Requested move 21 July 2024

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

The result of the move request was: moved as requested per the discussion below. [I did fix the formatting of the archived section, but that was reverted by participants, so now leaving it this way.] Dekimasuよ! 01:42, 3 August 2024 (UTC)

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Records of the Grand Historian → Shiji – WP:COMMONNAME Folly Mox (talk) 16:48, 21 July 2024 (UTC)

This has been bothering me for years. The subject is only very rarely referred to in English language texts as Records of the Grand Historian (Watson's 1964 translation as a separate title excepted), and further only translated as Records of the Grand Historian in a modest plurality of cases. The common term in English usage is Shiji.

I conducted an incomplete survey of English language sources published over the past 25 years that were in my personal library, until I had to go shopping and got bored. 71 data points comprise this set. I looked at how the book was referred to in English prose, how the title was translated or transliterated as applicable depending on the primary term of reference, and how the title was cited, if different. Identical results from the same scholars (n=6) were discarded, along with one source that only mentioned particular translations as distinct titles, leaving 64 data points. The sources assessed were divided into three categories:

1. Sources entirely about the subject, its author, or the treatment of some other topic as recorded by the subject (includes books, book chapters, and academic articles) (n=11)
2. Sources which cited the subject a lot (like ≈30 times or more) (n=25)
3. Sources mentioning or citing the subject in passing (n=28)

Of the eleven sources in the first group, eleven of them referred to the subject in transliteration: nine as Shiji and two as Shi ji. Of the 25 sources in the second group, seventeen referred to the subject in transliteration (eleven Shiji and six Shi ji), and eight in translation. Of the 28 sources in the third group, twenty transliterated (fifteen as Shiji, four as Shi ji, one as Shi Ji) and eight translated. Of the sources across the second and third groups that referred to the subject in translation (n=16), five cited in transliteration despite using translation in the prose. Across these sixteen sources, the transliteration Shiji was given nine times, Shi Ji twice, Shi ji and Shih-chi once each, with a further three sources providing no transliteration: two citing the title as "Sima" and one citing as SJ, meaning I probably missed an abbreviations section somewhere.

Oh my gosh do we still have data visualisation templates available? The Charts extension seems like it's not very far along. Describing all this data in prose is confusing me and probably you as well.

Ok so summing up that first bit, the takeaways are that sources that go in depth on the article subject universally (out of eleven sources I happen to have in book or pdf) use transliteration in prose as well as citations. Other sources tend heavily towards transliteration. Totals are 48 for transliterating in prose and citations both, about five for translating in prose and transliterating in citation, and I guess eleven for just using translation (I don't think I was rigorous in making this particular distinction; I was more interested in the terms being used). Total transliteration score is 44 Shiji (35 as primary term of reference), 13 Shi ji, 3 Shi Ji, and 1 Shih-chi.

We're almost there, I think. For the translations, results were of course more varied. I don't want to talk through all this data but also don't want to tab away to look up pie chart templates. Of the sources in the first group, where the article subject is also the subject of the source, 6/11 opt not even to translate the title. The other five all translate the title differently. Of the sixteen sources that use a translated title in prose, the scores are as follows: 6 Records of the Historian, 1 Records of the historian, 3 Records of the Grand Historian, 2 The Grand Scribe's Records, 1 Grand Scribe's Records, 1 Historical Records, 1 Historical records, 1 Annals of the Historian. So, even sources in my library that choose to refer to the article subject in translation do not prefer the rendering that is the present article title.

When combining all translations in the sample (n=33), whether used as the primary term of reference or given as a gloss to the more common transliterated title, normalising to title case and ignoring the distinction between the presence or absence of initial definite article, the totals are as follows: 11 Records of the Historian, 7 Records of the Grand Historian, 5 [The] Grand Scribe's Records, 5 Historical Records, 1 Annals of the Historian, 1 Archivists' Records, 1 Archivist's Records (subtly different, downplaying the role of Sima Tan), 1 Historical Notes, 1 Historians Records ( [sic], likely a typo).

WP:UE, part of the Article title policy, says In deciding whether and how to translate a foreign name into English, follow English-language usage. The usage in English-language sources is primarily to use Shiji to refer to this subject (35/63 in the sample surveyed). Even Shi ji, the much less common transliteration (13/63), is still more common a term than the most popular translation in the sample, Records of the Historian (7/63).

In summary, this ngram, which supports my major finding and not so much my minor findings, and which I could have lazily posted without doing all this reading and typing, but I wanted a stronger argument. Wearily, Folly Mox (talk) 16:48, 21 July 2024 (UTC)

unformatted notes Folly Mox (talk)

Full chapter / article / book

• Zhang 2018 Shiji
• Riegel 2023 Shiji (Records of the Grand Historian)
• van Ess, Domová, Schaab-Hanke ed 2015 Shiji
• Wang 2014 Shi ji (Historical Records)
• Nylan 2016 Shiji (Archivists' Records)
• Leung 2019 Shiji
• (Nylan 1999 Shiji)
• McKay 2018 Shi ji
• Chin 2020 Shiji
• van Ess 2006 Shiji
• Waring 2022 Shiji (Archivist's records)
• Klein 2019 Shiji (Records of the Historian)

Lotsa citations

• Cao 2017 Annals of the Historian (Shiji)
• Chard 2021 Shi ji (Records of the Historian)
• Shen ed 2014 Shiji (Records of the Grand Historian)
• Lewis 1999 Shi ji
• Ma, von Glahn ed 2022 Historical Records (cited as SJ)
• Loewe 2012 Shi ji
• Nylan 2009 Shiji
• Gu 2023 Shiji
• Tse 2017 Shiji
• Kern 2004 Shi ji
• Puett 2002 Shiji

Goldin 2020 Shiji

• CHAC 1999 Shi ji
• Denecke 2010 Records of the Grand Historian (cited as Shiji)
• Gentz, Meyer ed 2015 Shiji
• (Nylan 2007 Shiji (Archivists' Records) (cited as SJ))
• Kern 2011 Records of the Historian (Shiji)
• Loewe 2011 Shiji (cited as SJ)
• Goldin 2005 Records of the Historian (Shiji)
• Goldin 2017 Shiji (Grand Scribe's Records)
• Hunter 2021 Grand Scribe's Records (cited as Shiji)
• (Hunter 2017 Shiji (Grand Scribe's Records))
• Spawforth ed 2007 Records of the Historian (Shih-chi) (cited SC)
• Liang 2019 The Grand Scribe's Records (Shi Ji)
• (Loewe 2015 Shi ji)
• Barbieri-Low & Yates 2015 Shi ji (Historical Records)
• Schmidt-Glintzner, Mittag, Rüsen ed 2005 Shiji (Records of the Historian)

Passing mentions

• Sørenson 2010 Shiji
• Lander 2023 Shi ji
• Ge 2018 Records of the Grand Historian (cited as Shiji)
• McNeal 2004 Shi ji
• Demandt 2020 Shiji
• Korolkov 2023 The Grand Scribe's Records (cited as Sima)
• Rom 2020 Shiji
• (Tse 2023 Shiji)
• (Zhang ed 2022 Historical Records & Records of the Historian)
• Boileau 2023 Shiji
• Pines in Goldin ed 2013 Records of the historian (cited as Sima)
• Kohn ed 2000 Shiji
• Galambos 2018 Shiji
• Brashier 2011 Historical records (cited as Shiji)
• Song 2015 Shiji (Historians Records)
• Zuozhuan trans 2017 Records of the Historian (Shiji)
• Rainey 2010 Records of the Historian (Shi Ji)
• Wilson 2002 Shiji
• Lee 2020 Records of the Grand Historian (Shiji)
• Rosker 2017 Shi Ji (Historical Notes)
• Allan 2007 Shi ji
• Tse 2020 Shiji (Records of the Grand Historian) (cited as SJ)
• Lagerway, Kalinowski ed 2009 Shiji
• Shi 2022 Shiji
• Pines, Biran, Rüpke ed 2021 Shiji
• Pines 2016 Records of the Historian (Shi ji)
• (Nylan 2021 Shiji)
• (Nylan 2000 Shiji)
• van Ess 2022 Shi ji (Historical Records)
• Amitai, Biran ed 2021 Shiji (Records of the Historian)
• * Brown 2003 Shiji
• Milburn 2014 Shiji (Records of the grand historian)

Notified: WikiProject China. Folly Mox (talk) 16:54, 21 July 2024 (UTC)

I did end up looking at {{Pie chart}}. Apologies to Aza24 for dutifully slogging through my nonsense. Apologies also for the obvious maths error I failed to catch in the OP, where I enumerate the sample size both as 64 and 63.
Term of reference in sampled sources about [an aspect of] the subject Shiji (81.8%) Shi ji (18.2%) any translation (0.00%) n=11	Term of reference in sampled sources, running prose Shiji (54.7%) Shi ji (18.8%) Records of the Historian (10.9%) Records of the Grand Historian (4.70%) [The] Grand Scribe's Records (4.70%) Other (6.25%) n=64
Folly Mox (talk) 11:09, 23 July 2024 (UTC)

Support — wow this is quite something :) That is a rather revealing ngram; I should also note that it seems like this article's existing sources heavily favor Shiji. Given that (as you note) the current over-stylized title is derived directly from Watson's translation, it is not really reflective of the entire scholarship. Other translations seem to favor very different (and completely inconsistent) title translations. Amid such discrepencies, it would be best to resort the pinyin, particularly given its proven dominance in the above analysis. I'm now wondering if a similar move is need on the Shijing page (does anyone really call it the "Classic of Poetry"?). – Aza24 (talk) 07:01, 23 July 2024 (UTC)

I've wondered about Shijing as well: I feel like I see Shijing most commonly, followed by Book of Odes. Our article on Shang shu is particularly out of sync with my educational background, and I can never remember what title we have it at (probably not helped by the fact we give the native name as 書經 – a word not even in my Chinese keyboard's predictive text – instead of the common 尚書). Also many other works listed at Chinese Classics (*Zuo Zhuan seems particularly ripe for downcasing to a more common form, although a different problem at root). Super late for work, Folly Mox (talk) 11:22, 23 July 2024 (UTC)

Support on renaming to Shiji, and I echo Aza's ideas that we really should just use the romanization on the classics. The Book of Documents/Shujing seems like a good candidate. The Xiaojing gets translated a fair bit, but "Classic of Filial Piety", "Classic of Family Reverence" and "Book of Filial Piety" are all in fairly common use there. Generalissima (talk) (it/she) 16:50, 23 July 2024 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Post-close discussion

Oh wow! Now can someone help me change the redirects in all the pages I've ensured consistency in saying the previous title in for the past year? I think it's unfortunate in the sense that many links will have to do more to explain what the work is, and I worry it will just be indistinguishable to the average reader in running lists. Remsense诉 02:38, 3 August 2024 (UTC)

Redirects are WP:NOTBROKEN, so there's no pressing need for us to undo the work you've kindly done. Whenever I need to cite the Shiji (or, more commonly, fix a citation to it), I always include a |trans-title= parameter for readers who might not know what it is, and provide a brief description if it's mentioned in prose.

I was a bit surprised by the results of my own research into this, even though it jived with my impression of the literature. I suppose the polysemy of the word 史 may have helped bolster the popularity of rendering the title in transliteration more often than translation.

You know I like and respect you, Remsense, so if you do want the links you've changed over the past year to reflect consistency with the article title following this RM, I'll put NOTBROKEN aside and will absolutely help you change them all. There are 1380 links. A good tool to get us going would be a bespoke citation template, {{Cite Shiji}}, which should reduce the necessary copypasta, and I will try to write it for us.

Which running lists are you concerned about? Folly Mox (talk) 09:18, 3 August 2024 (UTC)

Certainly! To be clear, the move is obviously correct, and I was mostly joking around about urgency. It'll happen naturally. :) There are certainly more pressing things I need to get off my butt and write a proper script for. Per running lists, this is just a general point: if we're listing some classics for the reader, like this from Chinese characters:

Historically, character literacy was often acquired via Chinese primers like the 6th-century Thousand Character Classic and 13th-century Three Character Classic, as well as surname dictionaries like the Song-era Hundred Family Surnames.

If these used the pinyin names here, it feels like a net negative for the average reader without additional explanation. That's how it goes, though. Remsense诉 09:33, 3 August 2024 (UTC)

@Remsense: I agree with you there: translation in running prose, in articles where the titles aren't even cited as sources, is superior to transliteration irrespective of the actual article title. How we talk about a topic in prose has more leeway in terms of editorial discretion than how articles are supposed to be titled.

Speaking of polysemy, I don't read Generalissima's comment above that we really should just use the romanization on the classics as applying to every work whose title ends in 經, and (without having looked into it whatsoever) I can't think of a reason e.g. San zi jing / Sanzijing / San Zi Jing would ever overtake Three Character Classic as WP:COMMONNAME.

I do think the article titles in the topic area could use a revisit in some cases. Aza24's suggestion of the Shijing is a good one, and Generalissima's suggestion of the Xiaojing, and I might have a look at the Shan Hai Jing and Sima Fa. We're probably screwed when it comes to the 尚書 / 書經 / Classic of Documents / Book of Documents / Classic of History / Venerated Documents due to the whole variety, but I do think Book of Documents (the current article title) is the both the most ambiguous option and least closest translation of the titles. We also have a lot of weird ambiguity and iirc inapt redirects around the 周禮、儀禮、禮記 subset, which is partially a consequence of their transmission history.

Similarly, Chinese classics the article is a mess. It's a prime case of why we should have an exception in MOS:CHINA for permitting native names in lists and tabular data even when a local article exists, and if you look at the wikicode, we have a number of piped links where the linktext matches the article title and it's being piped to a redirect, as well as cases where the article title, linktext, and link target all differ. Probably a conversation for another page, or a WP:SOFIXIT which was on my radar last summer but lost contact in the autumn. Folly Mox (talk) 11:52, 3 August 2024 (UTC)

I'll just interject here, in a reply to my own comment that I posted in a single diff as two comments because it got too rambly and tangential, the additional tangent that I'm extremely fond of how titling was handled for Durrant, Stephen; Li, Wai-yee; Schaberg, David, eds. (2016). Zuo Tradition. Zuozhuan. 左傳: Commentary on the "Spring and Autumn Annals". University of Washington Press. ISBN 978-0-295-999159. Of course we have |title=|script-title=|trans-title= for use in citations, but I wish our article titles had such flexibility. We're pretty stuck with the conventions chosen decades ago, so this isn't really actionable, and I should start prototyping templates instead. Folly Mox (talk) 12:22, 3 August 2024 (UTC)

Template:Cite Shiji

Reading Module:Template wrapper/doc in another tab right now. It seems like a source-specific CS1 wrapper shouldn't be particularly difficult to implement, even for me.

Altering the links to Records of the Grand Historian to a bespoke citation template I haven't started writing yet to bypass the redirect should still be done manually, since sometimes we'll want to cite multiple chapters while only displaying once the full bibliographic information, or use guoxue instead of Wikisource for the chapter-url, or etc., and I haven't yet looked into all the different use cases. My impression is that the first thousand or so will be Han / pre-Han biographical articles which have been content-stable for the last ten or fifteen years, where the reference will be plaintext Records of the Grand Historian, vol. NN, which we could probably AWB / JWB into a template. The other uses may prove more complicated. Folly Mox (talk) 11:52, 3 August 2024 (UTC)

Ok, I have to run errands here for awhile momentarily, but I've put together a bespoke citation template at User:Folly Mox/Cite Shiji. It mirrors how I've cited the book, but supports comma-separated author names as well. As a proper CS1 template wrapper, it also supports overwriting any of the defaults, but can also be used to link Wikisource easily. Haven't added support for other online sources yet.

Let me know if there's anything that seems stupid or wrong. I plan to finish the documentation, move the template to the Template: namespace, and start adding transclusions this weekend, but I created it in my userspace so the TfD regulars don't spawnkill it for being unused. Folly Mox (talk) 16:44, 3 August 2024 (UTC)

Oh, that's super nifty! I just learned how to do proper wrapped templates two days ago because the first time I looked it seemed too scary because it had 7 parameters instead of 3. Remsense诉 16:46, 3 August 2024 (UTC)

Because I made a horrible error, and mistook the source of one Wikisource page for the source of a different Wikisource page, TIL I've been providing incorrect publication information every time without exception I've ever cited the Shiji since I started using citation templates in the late 2010s.

The forcing factor that led to me making this error in the first place is the CS1 templates' refusal to display |orig-date= when |date= is empty, combined with the inability to set |date= in BCE. I think I must have grabbed the Zhonghua 1959 edition information from the pdf I had of it back before 2021, but it's the annotated edition, at zh:s:史記三家注, not the one I've been consistently linking at zh:s:史記.

So after a lengthy digression into the textual transmission of the Shiji, and a visit to the hoary and decrepit chinaknowledge.de of all places (amongst many others), I think I determined the correct publication information of zh:s:史記, up to punctuation. As a side effect, User:Folly Mox/Cite Shiji now supports citing 《史記三家注》. I think I'm satisfied with the functionality, and the testcases all seem to check out, but I'm not 💯 on how I'm rendering the annotated edition in translation, and need to expand User:Folly Mox/Cite Shiji/doc#Examples.

I still haven't even looked at how the book is actually cited in the wild, and anticipate eventually incorporating functionality to cite multiple chapters for all the old articles using general references, but uh I thought I'd just make a status report here. Folly Mox (talk) 20:00, 4 August 2024 (UTC)

Do you think Gan Luo is notable enough to be split into his own article?

Thank you, I'm not sure whether this is discussed before or not. Lan Pee (talk) 07:08, 30 September 2024 (UTC)

As a historical person, he's only mentioned in the article 244 BC, and doesn't even have a mention in Lü Buwei. His story does seem to have been fictionalised in multiple modern media, mostly variations on the title 甘羅拜相. zh:甘羅 exists. I'd say start with adding contextualised information into related articles. I'm not yet informed enough to posit an opinion on notability, and I have to go to work now. Folly Mox (talk) 11:15, 30 September 2024 (UTC)