GeoNames Forum

Hi all!

Here is the thing, I need to know which Chinese is it when a record from the Alternate Names tables is of IsoLanguage "ZH", is it Simplified Chinese? Traditional Chinese?

Thanks in Advance!

Regards

Take Care

"zh" stands for both.

From the w3 website:
http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-css-lang.en.php

I have used the language codes "zh-Hant" and "zh-Hans". These language codes do not represent specific languages. "zh-Hant" would indicate Chinese written in Traditional Chinese script. Similarly “zh-Hans” represents Chinese written in Simplified Chinese script. This could refer to Mandarin or many other Chinese languages.

Until recently the codes "zh-TW" and "zh-CN" were used to indicate Traditional and Simplified versions of Chinese writing, respectively. In reality, "zh-TW" should indicate Chinese spoken in Taiwan, although there are more than one Chinese language spoken in Taiwan. Similarly "zh-CN" represents Chinese spoken in China (PRC). This could refer to Mandarin or any other Chinese language.

is there any isolanguage to separate Traditional from Simplified?

This thread is a year old, but apparently it's still an unresolved issue. The "zh" language code can be either traditional or simplified Chinese, and the two have to be separated. The codes the codes "zh-tw" and "zh-cn" are still the most common language codes for distinguishing between the two and I recommend we start using those codes to separate the two instead of just "zh".

Currently the names might be all simplified or all traditional, I don't know. Someone familiar with the language would be able to tell us. And actually about half of them aren't in Chinese at all but are are the Romanized transcribed names (not the Chinese symbols but the spelled out phonetic transcription, which shouldn't be labeled as Chinese). Plus there are over 3000 names with the language code "zho", which is the ISO-639-2 code for the same language as "zh", so those are the same thing as the "zh" language (and are apparently a similar mix of Chinese and phonetic transcriptions). Basically it's all a bit of a mess right now.

please feel free to correct errors and inconsistencies.

Marc

Is there a way for me to make a mass change like that (such as to change all 3000 "zho" language codes to "zh")? I'm not sure how to do that.

Where did you find entries with language code 'zho' ? I cannot find a single one. Are you using a rather old dump?

Best

Marc

Hi,
I had the same question if there is a way to distinguish between simplified and traditional chinese when they are labelled with 'zh'. Doing a small research of very few examples I found that all names I found were from wikipedia as simplified chinese.
I wonder if with the years that passed, now there is a clear way to get simplified chinese / traditiona chinese separately or know which one it is.

Thanks.

As you have already noted, most Chinese alternate names are simply marked with 'zh'. Only a few are marked with zh-CN or zh-TW. The numbers right now are:

number | lang code
372923 | zh
1385 | zh-CN
266 | zh-TW