Talk:Dao De Jing

COMMENT: The historical existance of Lao Tzu in unconfirmed according to the Encyclopaedia Britannica. What is your source for the statement that the existence of Lao Tzu is historically confirmed? That the Tao Teh Ching is not the work of one man is generally accepted.

---

I'd suggest you simply make the change that you believe is necessary; this will save time, and if the author doesn't like it, he can always change it back (and then you could discuss the problem). Just my suggestion. -- Larry Sanger

COMMENT: There is no justification for any such categorical statement. To take but the matter of Ssu-ma Ch'ien, I quote:

  Even the 'biography of Lao Tzu' which may be found
  in the 'Historical Records' (Shih-chi) of Ssu-ma Ch'ien (second
  century B.C.) is not without its inconsistencies. This record 
  describes Lao Tzu as having been an archivist of the Court of 
  Chou, and further states that he is said to have 
  personally instructed Kung Fu Tzu (Confucius). (Which is
  inconsistent with other supposed information about Lao Tzu.)

Indeed, the author of the 'Historical Records' himself expresses doubt about the authenticity of the available information. Thus, although you may of course personally hold the opinion that Lao Tzu existed and the Tao Te Ching is the work of one man, it is altogether inappropriate to present these views as accepted fact.

---

I'm curious about the decision to place the main article under the Pinyin transliteration. The Wade-Giles is by far the most common in general english usage, and indeed has almost been adopted as a part of the English language. Merriam Webster lists an entry for Tao but none for Dao, furthermore a brief and informal survey of my bookshelf has revealed that all three of my translations of the Laozi have Tao Te Ching written on their spines, and even in the footnotes to the two copies of the Analects I have, both use the Wade-Giles tranlit. w/r/t Tao, even though both texts usually use pinyin for non standard western words. Finally, The text of the article itself uses Confucius rather than Kong Fuzi as would be expected by a strict adherence to pinyin. I understand that pinyin is the preferred method of transliteration, but in many ways, the earlier spelling has become so common in English usage as to make the pinyin usage in this case irregular.

It would be a big task to redirect this article to Tao Te Ching, so if whoever made the initial decision could please speak up with their reasoning, it would be much appreciated. I don't want to do all the redirects and then just have someone swoop in and undo them all.JFQ

---

Move: Capitalization

Also, even if it is more suitable to use the pinyin transliteration, shouldn't all the words in the title be capitalized (Dao De Jing) instead of the current one? (Just like we have The Art of War but not The art of war[?].) --Lorenzarius

I personally like the all capitalized version better. I think "Tao Te Ching" would be a more appropriate article title, despite the greater accuracy of Pinyin, simply because the article is in English, and the vast majority of English language versions of the work spell it in Wade-Giles. User:kwertii

Since neither the original writer nor anybody else spoke up in favour of retaining the lowercase, I have deleted the redirect and moved the page. --Menchi 23:25 29 Jun 2003 (UTC)

And the history of the deleted redirect page is:

• M 08:51 25 Feb 2002 . . User:Conversion script[?] (#REDIRECT Dao de jing)
• 04:07 30 Jun 2001 . . User:Stephen Gilbert

--Menchi 23:27 29 Jun 2003 (UTC)

---

Te, not Teh

The pre-pinyin common romanization "Tao Te Ching" is the Wade-Giles romanization, not "Tao Teh Ching". There's no syllable teh in Chinese, in either pinyin or Wade-Giles. The yunmu eh in Wade-Giles is not the schwa as in 德 (pinyin: de, Wade-Giles: te), but it is like the English interjection eh!, as in 葉/叶 (pinyin: ye, Wade-Giles: yeh). The Wade-Giles ehs zhuyin equivalent is ㄝ and pinyin equivalent is e (like the schwa, but they never occur in the same context, save for one tiny exception of 誒, and in this case, it is rendered in pinyin as ê, which also happens to be what the schwa in Wade-Giles is when it stands alone. The table below should help clarifying).

Zhuyin	Pinyin	Wade-Giles	Character	Example
ㄜ	e	ê, -e or -o (after h- or k-)	鵝 'goose'	德 'virtue'
ㄝ	ê, -e	eh	誒 'eh!'	葉/叶 'leaf'

The hyphens in the table above signify that there's something (shengmu[?]) proceeding it. So -e could be te, de, etc. Menchi 05:53 Feb 11, 2003 (UTC)

The -h in Teh is a relic of a pre-Wades-Giles convention to mark words that have the entering tone (rusheng) in non-Mandarin dialects. Google gives about 3000 hits on Tao Teh Ching, mainly for old publications (and about 73000 hits for Tao Te Ching) Stephen C. Carlson 04:32 Feb 13, 2003 (UTC)

Thank you for the insight, Stephen! What more do you know about this pre-W-G transliteration? Do you know what it's called? Thx. -- Menchi 06:21 Feb 13, 2003 (UTC)

There was no real standard and it does not have a name other than pre-Wades-Giles, but this convention was used by James Legge[?], an early 19th cen. translator of the Chinese classics. Another convention was to use two different spellings for what pinyin j- corresponds to: either k- or ts- depending on how that sound was pronounced outside of Beijing (or Peking as Legge spelled it). Stephen C. Carlson 06:34 Feb 13, 2003 (UTC)

---

Bibliography?

Is there a Bibliography anywhere in here on the Tao Te Ching?