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Archive 1

Quotation

"To chant "Long live!" is to contradict natural laws. Everyone has to die sooner or later, whether they be killed by germs, crushed by a collapsing house, or blown to smithereens by an atom bomb. Anyway, one way or another everyone ends up dead. After people die they shouldn't be allowed to occupy any more space. They should be cremated. I'll take the lead. We should all be burnt after we die, turned into ashes and used for fertilizer."

--Mao Zedong, in comments made when signing "A Proposal that all Central Leaders be Cremated after Death" in November 1956

At least according to zhongwen.com, it seems like people praised him shouting wansui, so Mao may not have been against this form of praise. More quotes, anyone? --Tongpoo 19:08, 2004 Oct 21 (UTC)
He wasn't exactly against it. And anyway that was in 1956 when he was still clear-headed. He could be said to be rather senile already during the Cultural Revolution. On the other hand, wansui does not really have to mean "long live" in the modern context. It could just be a cheer or toast to somebody. Saying "Hu Jintao wansui!", for example, is as good as saying "bravo Hu Jintao!". --Plastictv 18:00, 31 March 2005 (UTC)

I've done some research into this quotation and I can find no evidence Mao ever said anything to this effect. Our particular quote appears to come from here, but there doesn't seem to be anything backing it up. There is evidence that Mao did indeed sign such a proposal, and was in fact the first to sign it, but it was not in November 1956, but on April 27th, 1956, and he did not make any sort of speech regarding "long live" or "ten thousand years" that I can see. This does not entirely rule out the possibility that the quotation is an accurate translation, but as they got the date wrong, I find it pretty questionable and so I am going to remove it.

There is a much reproduced article, 毛泽东笑谈生死 (Mao Ze Dong speaks lightly of life and death) which makes a reference to Mao noting that as he ate fish much in life the idea of being cremated and having his ashes scattered in the Chang Jiang to serve as fish food is appealing to him, but this attribution (if accurate and not simply party propaganda) would have to have been dated much nearer to his death.

Vietnam

In Vietnamese, "vạn tuế" is the proper reading of the Chinese characters. However, this word is rarely used in modern context, only in China-related situations (such as in "vạn tuế, vạn tuế, vạn vạn tuế"). In normal usage, "muôn năm" is used instead. Because this term is native Vietnamese and not Chinese, the chữ Nôm character for "muôn" consists of a gate for the sound part (pronounced "môn") and the character for "ten thousand" (vạn) for the meaning part. The character for "năm" consists of the element for "south" (pronounced "nam") and an element for "year" (niên). "Muôn năm" is frequenly heard in communist slogans: "Hồ Chí Minh muôn năm!", "Đảng cộng sản muôn năm!" (for the Communist party), etc. I think it's better to leave both references in instead of just "muôn năm" because it might mislead the reader into thinking that this word is related to the word in the other three languages. DHN 19:34, 15 February 2006 (UTC)

Reversion of Mandarin pinyin description

One of my changes recently got reverted. Equating Mandarin with Chinese is discouraged according to Wikipedia:Naming conventions (Chinese) and we should be as specific as possible when we indicate romanizations in order to avoid ambiguity. Please provide some reasoning for why the reversion is justified. —Umofomia 06:57, 23 June 2006 (UTC)

That is true, and appropriate in the context of discussing a Chinese subject where there may be various common ways of romanising the subject, e.g. Jiang Jieshi vs Chiang Kai-shek, since the indication of romanisation serves to avoid confusion in a reader unfamiliar with systems of Chinese romanisation.
However, this does not apply to this situation because this phrase is unlikely to be encountered very commonly in the Anglophone world, and even then unlikely to be encountered via a minor dialect.
Secondly, "Standard Mandarin" or "Mandarin pinyin" is not a method of romanisation. It is a dialect. The method of romanisation is called Hanyu Pinyin (or, less likely here,Tongyong pinyin). Furthermore, any reader seeking information on the method of romanisation can simply click (or hover over) the link "Romanization", which points to Pinyin.
Finally, in this context, to label it as "Standard Mandarin" would be inconsistent with how the other languages are labelled. The Korean information box is not labelled "Standard Seoul Korean", nor is it labelled McCune-Reischauer (or whatever is the method of romanisation here).
So basically, for the sake of consistency, and because Pinyin is already pointed to in the link, I think the status quo is good enough. --Cheers Sumple (Talk) 09:01, 23 June 2006 (UTC)

Post-mortem sources?

At the time of writing the article states: "with kamikaze pilots reportedly shouting "banzai!" as they rammed their planes into enemy ships". Reported by whom? Rogerborg 15:22, 1 December 2007 (UTC)

Kamikaze pilots shouting "banzai!"

Who actually heard kamikaze pilots shouting "banzai!" during attacks? Surviving kamikaze pilots or some US crewmen who heard a "banzai" from the aircraft that was about to hit his ship?
Has anyone actually checked the link that is supposed to verify this claim?--Saccharomyces (talk) 21:11, 29 January 2008 (UTC)

10000 Years Ago

Circa 8000 BCE, there wasn't even a China, and it was still the Neolithic period with a lot of different cultures. Very primitive.... so nothing seems to have QUITE lasted ten thousand years in China yet...! Except the rocks and various artifacts. 204.52.215.107 (talk) 04:30, 17 December 2008 (UTC)

What are you on about? This article is about a phrase, an expression. Nothing to do with what physically happened 10,000 years ago. -- 李博杰  | —Talk contribs email 06:50, 27 February 2010 (UTC)
He's talking about the impermanence of everything and the hopefulness, yet lack of reality, embodied by the term when applied to maintenance of the status quo (apart from Mother Earth, for whom it's a geological blink of the eye). :-) 92.25.3.43 (talk) 15:12, 28 February 2013 (UTC)

Han tu

I took out "Hán tự" from the list of Vietnamese terms on the template. "Han" is the word for Classical Chinese in Vietnamese, as well as in other Asian languages. "Tự" is a descriptor that means "words." It shouldn't be treated as part of the name. Chinese written in Vietnam was the same as Chinese written in China, or at least no one studies it as a separate thing linguistically. In short, there is no need to list it separately. Kauffner (talk) 06:49, 31 May 2013 (UTC)

Vietnamese

The Nom in the infobox has a suspiciously "invented here" quality. The Nom Foundation gives seven characters for muôn as well as four for năm (in the relevant sense of "years"). The Nom Foundation isn't a terribly reliable source, but it is the only source for this kind of information that is readily available in English. The combination given in the box is thus one of 28 possibilities that some editor selected, perhaps arbitrarily. I also found a relevant entry in a Vietnamese Nom dictionary here (See the bottom right of the image). This dictionary gives a citation that uses a non-unicode character for muôn followed by năm / 𢆥. There may not have been any standard way to write this phrase in Nom. It would be more honest to leave this entry blank.

  • I have removed vạn tuế from the chart. This phrase is not properly Vietnamese, but rather a Vietnamese transliteration of the Chinese characters. Vietnamese uses a system for transliterating Chinese called Han-Viet. The system is equivalent to pinyin or Wade-Giles in English. H. Humbert (talk) 05:44, 14 July 2016 (UTC)
Our Han-Viet article implies that it refers to the standard modern (roman) way of Sino-Vietnamese words. This makes sense, as until relatively recently Vietnamese was written in Chinese characters, so it stands to reason that like Japanese and Korean (two Sinosphere languages with which I have much more familiarity than Vietnamese) Vietnamese would have a lot of words that are Sinitic in origin but are pronounced in Vietnamese ways based originally on Sinitic pronunciations. Your comparison to Pinyin and Wade-Giles implies that Han-Viet is some system of transcribing Sinitic languages (or more specifically modern standard Beijingese) into the Vietnamese alphabet. Can you explain this discrepancy? Am I mistaken? Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 13:32, 18 July 2016 (UTC)
"Han-Viet" translates as "Sino-Vietnamese." I'm using the term to refer to the transliteration system, but of course there are other meanings. Traditionally, Han-Viet was considered a "reading," or Vietnamese pronunciation, of the Chinese characters. In modern Vietnam, very few people can read Chinese characters at all, so this terminology is misleading. You can see how the Han-Viet system works from this site. Press "Phiên," put in some Chinese characters, and then you get the Vietnamese. For example, 魯迅 (Lu Xun) is Lỗ Tấn in Vietnamese. H. Humbert (talk) 00:38, 19 July 2016 (UTC)
  • I consulted Đại Từ điển tiếng Việt by Nguyễn Như Ý as well as Từ điển bách khoa Việt Nam. TDTV is Vietnam's top comprehensive dictionary -- Vietnam's Webster's Third. TDBKVN is the country's top encyclopedia. Neither work includes Chinese (or Sino-Vietnamese) characters of any kind. In other words, the characters are not considered part of the modern language, not even in its most formal presentation. The way the infobox is set up, it suggests that they are used in modern times, at least to a limited extent. I think this is quite misleading. Vietnamese are not taught Chinese characters in school, except to the extent that they have learned Chinese as a foreign language. On top of that, the traditional writing system was never standardized. Even if we take form that was worked out for Unicode as standard, there are multiple ways to write each of these phrases. It is original research for us to arbitrarily pick one of the various possibilities ourselves. H. Humbert (talk) 14:10, 28 July 2016 (UTC)

Banzei

The Hiragana shown for 'banzei' is that of 'banzai' [1] SE. Which is the correct word in this case 'bansei or 'bansai' - which, the hiragana or romanji, needs to be changed? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Templexblue (talk • contribs) 14:53, 9 September 2016 (UTC)

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Typically translated as "long live" in English

No native English speaker would say "long live". If it's got to be in Engrish, may I suggest that the article do it full justice and say "rong rive" instead? ;o) ... I think it should be "long life" or "live long", with a preference for the former. What's your choice? 92.25.3.43 (talk) 15:06, 28 February 2013 (UTC)

I think you are mildly uninformed on the English language, though I understand your comment is in good faith. The expression "Long live ~ " is fairly common in the history of the English language, and a way to translate common phrases in other languages, though I admit rarely used these days. See the articles The King is dead. Long live the King. and Viva la revolución. Boneyard90 (talk) 15:14, 28 February 2013 (UTC)
Both of you are right. No native speaker of English would tell someone "Long live!". It would have to be "Live long!", or "Long life". See Star Trek's "Live long and prosper" for example. "Long live" exists only in the third person subjunctive, when the entity for whom or which we are wishing long life is specified. It's not a phrase that can stand alone. Given the context, I am making the change to "Live long!". Long live Wikipedia! Awien (talk) 15:12, 1 September 2016 (UTC)
I changed it back to "long live" without the exclamation point. The lead summarizes the body, and all the examples in the body say "long live". Side note, "live long!" is wrong because you would never tell someone to live long by saying "wan sui" to them. Idiomatically, saying "Mao Zedong wan sui" is equivalent to saying "Long live Mao Zedong". – FenixFeather (talk)(Contribs) 23:10, 3 October 2018 (UTC)

Japan

In Japan the term "Banzai" became extremely common as a war cry during the early Showa era, especially the Sino-Japanese and Greater East Asian Wars.

  • While I indeed heard of such happening, can osmebody explain to me why did they shout 'ten thousand years'? A brainstorm gave us the idea of 'ten thousand years[ will my glory last]' and 'ten thousand years[ will I fight you if I have to]', but no ide a what's the correct version.
No, no, no. Not "I". What about: "May the emperor live 10,000 years (and I not)!"
David Marjanović | david.marjanovic_at_gmx.at | 18:11 CET | 2006/11/9
I heard 10,000 is the number of heaven in ancient chinese. Heaven is not countable (funny thing, still not to date). So the meaning should not be 10,000 in numbers but the expression of countless. Better to say, eternal to heaven. 10,000 is the humanlike expression of counting countless and make it useable in that context. In japanese kanji textbooks BAN is translated with many, all. That would fit a more accurate meaning. Why should one just live 10,000 years and not 10,500 ? :D In modern japanese 'Banzai' is not used much anymore, even not in sports events. It sounds a way to stiff and formal, more a declaration then a chant.2A02:810A:10BF:9AA4:D021:9F20:D87C:A8A4 (talk) 21:28, 8 February 2023 (UTC)

Why not "For myriad of ages!"

萬(万) is often translated as "myriad" because both can hold the meaning of "10000", "innumerable", "countless", but 萬 can also mean "all" or "everything" as well. And pigeon-holing to just "10000" though it numerically expresses that word precisely, by not mentioning the term "myriad" seems to make the article be less accurate.

Similarly, 歳 is mentioned as "year" and it qualifies in its explanation that the meaning expresses number of years a person attained and not the calendar marking of a year. If so, why not discuss the aspects of "age" more?

CJLippert (talk) 02:36, 26 February 2019 (UTC)

Myriad is an expression of 10000 in numbers and Myriads (plural) is used for countless. And well, i strongly believe 'Banzai' is not used as a definite account of years but as an expression of overworldy existence, or as in western philosophy, eternal. Take the forbidden palace as an example. 9,999 rooms because it is worldly. Or in the expression do a thing 10,000 times to master it. But as it goes with common sense, when not written in a book, people are not satisfied to take a step within their sense, till annother 10,000 years ;D.2A02:810A:10BF:9AA4:D021:9F20:D87C:A8A4 (talk) 21:49, 8 February 2023 (UTC)
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