Talk:Heinlenville

How do you find the strange Chinese name?

You add the Chinese name "海因倫鎮里的" since this page still in "Chinatowns in San Jose, California" page, and you seems haven't given a reasonable reference to this name. As a native speaker of Chinese, I must say this name is too strange that almost impossible to be true, because it means "Those living in Heinlenville town", "里的" means is a adjective that describe something's relative position (and the subject is missing). The "散那些唐人埠" also feels strange, we seldom use this meaningless transliteration since ancient times, "Chinatown" correspond to "唐人埠" is correct, but "San Jose" can not be "散那些" (means "throw them away"), the city usually be transliterated as "圣荷西/圣何塞"

I report this problem is because this name appear in OpenHistoricalMap and discussed (then questioned) by other editors from OSMChina, I hope this research is rigorous, because it may affect a lot of downstream projects, otherwise we will become a Zhemao Sister when we record history.

--快乐的老鼠宝宝 (talk) 08:23, 10 November 2023 (UTC)

@快乐的老鼠宝宝: Thank you for pointing out this issue. The Chinese name should be "海因倫鎮". There is an interpretive sign at Heinlenville Park that has a panel titled "Life in Heinlenville" (海因倫鎮里的生活), which I mistakenly clipped as "海因倫鎮里的" instead of "海因倫鎮". I've corrected the article and added a citation. I also corrected Wikidata and OpenHistoricalMap. I apologize for not looking up the individual characters to verify that I had correctly isolated the name from the title.

Another panel of this same sign apparently gives "散那些唐人埠" and the transcription "San-Doy-Say Tong Yun Fow" as one of "The names the Chinese population also called Heinlenville". This transcription also appears in [1], Yu (1991), Praetzellis et al. (2008), and Brahinsky & Tarr (2020). Pfaelzer (2008) gives a slightly different transcription, "San-Doy-Say Tong Hung Fow". As noted in [2], the residents spoke Toisanese, not modern standard Mandarin or Cantonese.

Unfortunately, this sign is the only source I know of for the name in Chinese characters. I did my best to transcribe it, by manually correcting the output of an OCR tool. The last time I visited, I took a crude panoramic photo of the sign with my phone, but it's far too distorted to upload to Commons. I've uploaded it instead to my personal website so you can verify the transcription: [3][4]. I would be happy to make prompt corrections.

 – Minh Nguyễn ^💬 08:42, 29 January 2024 (UTC)