Talk:Naming customs of Taiwanese indigenous peoples

This might work better if it was based on Chinese name not Korean name Kappa 16:30, 13 Nov 2004 (UTC)

The guy who created this article used the DEAD WRONG template to start with. Very few Taiwanese people speak any Korean (some speak Japanese). Taiwan's culture and people are never particularly different from China's. And as far as I know, about ALL Taiwanese names are Chinese names only the word usage differ slightly. Some sections, IMO, have to be totally rewritten or abandoned. -- Toytoy 01:53, Nov 14, 2004 (UTC)
Please be open-minded. While it'd fair to say "most", "vast majority" of Taiwanese surnames are Chinese-derived, ALL is simply not the case. Nor is it the mentality to adopt when attempting to write NPOV articles. A-giau 02:28, 15 Nov 2004 (UTC)
Open-mindedness does not demand sloppy reasoning. This is an encyclopedia article. What we are going to do is to let someone who speaks no Chinese and knows little about Asian cultures have a basic understanding about this topic. The easiest way to do so is to say Taiwanese names follow Chinese naming conventions. Then you will describe the minor variations.
Chickens are birds. Birds are animals. These are the first two things you'll want to say when you're explaining chicken to a bunch of Martians. After that, I will thell them chickens don't fly and they are tasty.
Taiwanese names are variable. So are Chinese names in different provinces. Californian names, following the same logic, are even more variable. There are British, Italian, Germanic, Jewish, African, Asian, Hispanic and Native Americans living in California. They usually follow their own naming conventions plus a little bit of Californian or North American taste. So are the ethnic groups in Taiwan.
To me, this article is mostly of little use. There are no articles about Californian names or West Virginian names. Nor are there Cuban, Bolivian or Peruvian names (they all follow the same Hispanic naming conventions plus a little local flavor). Nor are there Singaporean or Hong Kong names even though their names are much more different from the mainstream Chinese names. -- Toytoy 11:48, Nov 15, 2004 (UTC)
See Korean name, for example. Articles that are considered useless should be listed for deletion. Instead, I note quite a bit of rewriting on your part, mostly reflecting your stated and preconceived bias that "...as far as I know, about ALL Taiwanese names are Chinese names only the word usage differ slightly". The key phrase being "as far as [you] know".
In terms of techniques, listing half a page of Chinese characters (right below the introduction) to "prove" a pet point does not help your hypothetical "someone who speaks no Chinese and knows little about Asian cultures". A-giau 21:22, 21 Nov 2004 (UTC)
Try it. If you mix up a bunch of today's school children's names from Taiwan and China. I bet you will have a very difficult time to tell many of them apart from names alone. Except for the kids from POOR and UNEDUCATED families, Taiwanese names given by educated parents from 50 or 100 years ago were not that different from China's.
Here are 36 historically important persons of Chiayi County. This is a list I randomly gathered from the web. Some of them are still alive (I guess). Most of them were active at least 50 years ago. Can you show me whose names are typically Taiwanese? Can you show me why a Chinese should not have a name like theirs?
許世賢、王得祿、陳澄波、張李德和、葉王、賴雨若、劉傳來、吳鳳、張進通、林玉書、賴淵平、陳嘉雄、何明德、徐杰夫、陳丁奇、余塘、蒲添生、黃文陶、林添木、陳活源、周鍾瑄、王甘棠、賴尚文、李秋禾、賴時輝、莊伯容、蘇孝德、賴子清、黃文、陳際唐、羅峻明、林歡邦、王傳宗、鐘家成、陳夢林、黃宗焜
If you want a bigger list, here's one for you: A List of Taiwanese Poets. If you want a list roughly sorted by time: A List of Past School Teachers. Fact: many, if not most, names are pretty neutral. 蔡伯宏, 何平, 何炎周, 何德壽, 林金定, 何天註, 黃石生, 郭玉枝 and 賴俊修 were all teachers before 1920. They were under Japanese occupation. Most of them might not be able to speak Mandarin Chinese. Yet many of their names are still very similar to today's names both in China and Taiwan. Please DO an UNBIASED survey of names. -- Toytoy 12:34, Nov 26, 2004 (UTC)
The whole concept of names similar between Taiwan and China is fatally flawed in one way - even in China commonly used names and name structures vary from dialect region to dialect region. Taiwanese names often conform closer to the Fujianese standard than anything else, and that's not even considering Aboriginal names and Hakka names on top of all the "ordinary" Chinese names.--203.70.89.231 07:42, 11 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]