Using modern Korean reading for Central Asia-related terms is ridiculous. Korean reading is one of important sources to reconstruct ancient Chinese reading, but it has nothing to do with Yuezhi! Why don't you use reconstructed sounds? --Nanshu 01:00, 30 Nov 2003 (UTC)

Hello Nanshu. Because it was removed from the article for reader-reference Yuezhi is pronounced WOLSHI in Korean. Why not give us the Japanese pronunciations Nanshu and if you have any info about the reconstructed sounds suggested by scholars like Liu Qiyu (who used Korean & Japanese pronunciations in his reconstructions) why not let us know how much you know.

I didn't add information of the reconstructed sounds only because I feared my data was out-of-date. I referred to a book by Dr. Todo Akiyasu, who died in 1985. According to Todo, Yuezhi was pronounced like "ŋïuǎt dhieg", but I'm not sure this is still supported. --Nanshu 23:13, 2 Dec 2003 (UTC)

I propose a title change from Yuezhi to Rouzhi. In modern Mandarin the character "月" is pronounced yuè, and "氏" as shì; but when it comes to the phrase "月氏", the two characters should be pronounced as roù zhī, its ancient pronunciation. In this kind of situations where one character has two or multiple pronunciations, they are called "破音字". It should be noted that a certain amount of ordinary Chinese speakers do often mistaken in these pronunciations. Hence a change in the title should be done, either from the linguistics point of view or the historical one.--G.S.K.Lee 08:09, 18 Mar 2005 (UTC)

The aknowledged name in English is definetely "Yuezhi", or sometimes "Yueh-Chi", which therefore should remain for the article name, but you are pointing to an interesting point of ancient phonetic that would deserve mention in the article. PHG 11:17, 18 Mar 2005 (UTC)

If someone is going to discuss ancient phonetics in the main entry, it needs to be done properly: "Rouzhi" IS the proper MODERN pronunciation, but it won't have necessarily been how the Han pronounced the characters: didn't fourth tone words still have consonantal stops in the Han? If anyone's got a copy of Karlgren, the Chinese pronunciation could be easily figured out. (I don't at the moment).

Nobody can really tell how Chinese words were pronounced 2000 years ago. "Rouzhi" is the proper modern pronunciation of this kingdom, while "Yuezhi" is definitely a mis-pronounciation. --Mongol 03:22, 30 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Rouzhi only gets 582 hits on Google. Yuezhi gets 51,800. Although "Rouzhi" may be the modern prononciation of the word, its seems the English usage is to write "Yuezhi".PHG 22:51, 18 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Why would anyone think that a phonetic change implies a semantic change? Just because "moon" used to be pronounced the way "meat" is now pronounced, doesn't mean that it used to signify "meat"! --Abou 22:43, 18 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

According to the Chinese Wikipedia page it is indicated that Rou Zhi is a mispronounciation. The Ancient pronouciation should be Yue Zhi.--User:Myf 23：51, 6 March 2006

mtDNA of Scytho-Siberian skeleton Human Biology 76.1 (2004) 109-125

Genetic Analysis of a Scytho-Siberian Skeleton and Its Implications for Ancient Central Asian Migrations

François-X. Ricaut et al.

Abstract The excavation of a frozen grave on the Kizil site (dated to be 2500 years old) in the Altai Republic (Central Asia) revealed a skeleton belonging to the Scytho-Siberian population. DNA was extracted from a bone sample and analyzed by autosomal STRs (short tandem repeats) and by sequencing the hypervariable region I (HV1) of the mitochondrial DNA. The resulting STR profile, mitochondrial haplotype, and haplogroup were compared with data from modern Eurasian and northern native American populations and were found only in European populations historically influenced by ancient nomadic tribes of Central Asia.

...

The mutations at nucleotide position 16147 C→A, 16172 T→C, 16223 C→T, 16248 C→T, and 16355 C→T correspond to substitutions characteristic of the Eurasian haplogroup N1a (Richards et al. 2000). The haplotype comparison with the mtDNA sequences of 8534 individuals showed that this sequence was not found in any other population.

...

The N1a haplogroup was not observed among the native American, east Asian, Siberian, Central Asian, and western European populations. The geographic distribution of haplogroup N1a is restricted to regions neighboring the Eurasian steppe zone. Its frequency is very low, less than 1.5% (Table 6), in the populations located in the western and southwestern areas of the Eurasian steppe. Haplogroup N1a is, however, more frequent in the populations of the southeastern region of the Eurasian steppe, as in Iran (but only 12 individuals were studied) and southeastern India (Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh territories). More precisely, in India haplogroup N1a is absent from the Dravidic-speaking population and is present in only five Indo-Aryan-speaking individuals, four of whom belonged to the Havik group, an upper Brahman caste (Mountain et al. 1995).

...

The absence of the Eurasian haplogroup N1a in the 490 modern individuals of Central Asia (Shields et al. 1993; Kolman et al. 1996; Comas et al. 1998; Derenko et al. 2000; Yao et al. 2000; Yao, Nie et al. 2002) suggests changes in the genetic structure of Central Asian populations, probably as a result of Asian population movements to the west during the past 2500 years.

AAPA 2004

East of Eden, west of Cathay: An investigation of Bronze Age interactions along the Great Silk Road.

B.E. Hemphill.

The Great Silk Road has long been known as a conduit for contacts between East and West. Until recently, these interactions were believed to date no earlier than the second century B.C. However, recent discoveries in the Tarim Basin of Xinjiang (western China) suggest that initial contact may have occurred during the first half of the second millennium B.C. The site of Yanbulaq has been offered as empirical evidence for direct physical contact between Eastern and Western populations, due to architectural, agricultural, and metallurgical practices like those from the West, ceramic vessels like those from the East, and human remains identified as encompassing both Europoid and Mongoloid physical types.

Eight cranial measurements from 30 Aeneolithic, Bronze Age, Iron Age and modern samples, encompassing 1505 adults from the Russian steppe, China, Central Asia, Iran, Tibet, Nepal and the Indus Valley were compared to test whether those inhabitants of Yanbulaq identified as Europoid and Mongoloid exhibit closest phenetic affinities to Russian steppe and Chinese samples, respectively. Differences between samples were compared with Mahalanobis generalized distance (d2), and patterns of phenetic affinity were assessed with cluster analysis, multidimensional scaling, and principal coordinates analysis.

Results indicate that, despite identification as Europoid and Mongoloid, inhabitants of Yanbulaq exhibit closest affinities to one another. No one recovered from Yanbulaq exhibits affinity to Russian steppe samples. Rather, the people of Yanbulaq possess closest affinities to other Bronze Age Tarim Basin dwellers, intermediate affinities to residents of the Indus Valley, and only distant affinities to Chinese and Tibetan samples

(Sigh) This page is starting to look like a repeat of Elam with warring over date formats... Again we see the same bogus claims from the crowd that favors the cumbersome BCE instead of the recognizable BC, that "BCE was the original format for this article"...

Folks, that's what article histories are for. Anyone who says BCE was the "original format" either hasn't done the research into the article history, or is just plain fabricating. From September '03 (when the article was created) to April '04, the only dates that appeared anywhere in "Yuezhi" were all BC. Following that, there was a "mixed" format, as someone added some BCE dates later on without changing the original. Since then there have been several flips back to the original BC format, lasting anywhere from an hour to two months before getting flopped back to BCE. You might come up with all kinds of interesting arguments for why you think BCE looks prettier, or is more "politically incorrect" than plain old BC, or whatever. But "We were here first" ain't one of them. Codex Sinaiticus 13:33, 21 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

sigh indeed. I thought we were meant to be writing an international encyclopaedia for an international audience - most of whom are not already experts in what they are looking up. We really should adapt our language to suit that audience - and not just in choosing BC over BCE. Everytime someone voices the "let's go with the original editor" argument, it means they again are not thinking "how do we best convey this to our audience", and that's true regardless of whether they correctly identify what the original form was or not. In this case, from what Codex writes, at least they appear to have shot themselves firmly in the foot for this article and we can go back to the original (and globally understood) format, jguk 14:36, 21 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Please look at the history indeed. This page was a meaningless stub until it went through a complete rewrite by Nat Krause in April 26th 2004, which became the basis to today's article. The rewrite was done in BCE/CE. Most contributions have accordingly been done in BCE/CE ever since. There is little point in arguing for an BC/AD standard now. As you know, many people agree that BCE/CE is the international standard for historical publications (this varies with countries, but very much so in the US), and hopefully Wikipedia history articles ought to be aiming at historical publication status. PHG 21:20, 21 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]