The following is an archived discussion of the DYK nomination of the article below. Please do not modify this page. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as this nomination's talk page, the article's talk page or Wikipedia talk:Did you know), unless there is consensus to re-open the discussion at this page. No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was: promoted by Cwmhiraeth (talk) 05:51, 4 May 2018 (UTC)

Chinese characters for transcribing Slavonic[edit]

Chinese character representing an abbreviation of the word Christ

• ... the Russian Orthodox Church created their own Chinese characters for translating religious texts?Source:One area where there was an acute need for special Hanzi characters was in the translation of liturgical texts into Chinese and Japanese. In order to accomplish this task for Chinese, Archimandrite Gurias (né Gregory Platonovich Karpov) , head of the 14th Russian Mission in Beijing, devised a series of Hanzi characters for representing syllable structures not found in Chinese.[1]

Created by Sfjyu (talk). Self-nominated at 10:16, 18 March 2018 (UTC).

• Article does not meet the length requirements for DYK and fails 2a in the criteria. Currently it has 1,305 characters, but DYK requires there to be a minimum of 1,500 characters. The article also fails 4, because it does not have any in-line citations. I'd recommend that if you're still interested in having a DYK for this article, re-nominate after those basic concerns are addressed. Nomader (talk) 04:38, 19 March 2018 (UTC)

Could be easily done - for example the article currently contains no dates. Were the characters used much? Johnbod (talk) 12:33, 19 March 2018 (UTC)

Sure, it could easily be done but right now the article has no sources at all. It should be fixed and then re-nominated. Nomader (talk) 14:24, 20 March 2018 (UTC)

It can't be re-nominated because then it would not be new enough. It should be fixed, period. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 11:43, 21 March 2018 (UTC)

• @Sfjyu: Do you have any sources that we could use to improve the article? I looked online but I came up dry (in a very cursory search, this definitely isn't my area of expertise). Nomader (talk) 19:25, 22 March 2018 (UTC)
  • Unfortunately, English-language sources for this obscure topic appear to be limited, so the majority of my info was from the Unicode proposal itself (included as an article reference but not cited in-line: [2]). The proposal's reference list only includes primary sources (religious texts in Chinese) which utilize the said characters. Sfjyu (talk) 20:29, 22 March 2018 (UTC)
    • I'll try to improve the article a bit more, update the citing, and see if I can get it into shape. Sfjyu (talk) 21:23, 22 March 2018 (UTC)
      • I've expanded this article a bit, improved the citation, and added an additional source, the official Unicode Standard this time. It undoubtedly could use more improvement, but I believe it meets at least the eligibility criteria now, so I'd like to open it up again for review and editting. Sfjyu (talk) 23:29, 22 March 2018 (UTC)
        • Thanks, Sfjyu! I'm going to ping WT:DYK for a second set of eyes to look at this-- I'm not sure if this still meets the requirements but if someone else thinks so I'll be good with it! Nomader (talk) 18:04, 23 March 2018 (UTC)
        • Just a note here that the article does meet the 1500 character requirement now. Nomader (talk) 18:05, 23 March 2018 (UTC)

• Hi, I came here from the notice at WT:DYK. The article seems to be sourced primarily to footnote 1, but not all the information in the article can be found in the source. I removed a cite to footnote 2 which did not correspond to anything in the source. The entire chart, which is unsourced, seems to be drawn from the page creator's knowledge. Even if this is an obscure topic, it needs solid sourcing from two or three independent references to pass DYK. Yoninah (talk) 11:53, 25 March 2018 (UTC)

Here's what I used source #2 (the Unicode Standard 10.0 doc) for:

• The dates of Archmandrite Gurias' term as head of the Russian Mission (1858-1864).
• These new characters represent syllables not found in Chinese.
• The inclusion of these characters in v10.0 of the Unicode Standard. (It wasn't present in v9.0).

All info is found on page 684 of the document, which I'll cite below (relevant text bolded).

Han Ideographs for Slavonic Transcription. The URO includes twenty CJK Unified Ideographs, U+9FD6 through U+9FE9, which are used for transcribing Slavonic literary documents into Chinese. Renewed contact between the Russian and Chinese Empires from the 18th to the 20th centuries led to the translation of Slavonic literary documents into both classical and vernacular Chinese. The Russian Mission in Beijing was a driving force behind this effort, and many of these characters were coined by Archimandrite Gurias, who was the head of the 14th Russian Mission (1858–1864). Although some existing CJK Unified Ideographs can be used for transcribing Slavonic, these twenty characters are distinct. Many of these characters are unusual in that they represent syllables not usually found in Chinese.

As for the character chart, the characters, construction, Unicode codepoints, and the comments were drawn from the Unicode proposal document. I took the additional step of linkifying those to the corresponding Unicode pages and Wiktionary links. Sfjyu (talk) 21:08, 26 March 2018 (UTC)

• OK, thank you for pointing out the sourcing. However, the source for the hook fact does not mention anything about the Russian Orthodox Church's interest, so I would phrase the hook this way:
• ALT1: ... that the Russian Orthodox Church's mission in China created their own Chinese characters for translating liturgical texts?
• Here is a full review: New enough, long enough, neutrally written, no close paraphrasing seen. ALT1 hook ref verified and cited inline. No QPQ needed for nominator with less than 5 DYK credits. ALT1 good to go. Yoninah (talk) 21:26, 3 May 2018 (UTC)