On 05/22/2011 07:39 PM, Andre Engels wrote: Andre, that's not accurate explanation. Chinese script is not purely logographic, but logo-syllabic (or logo-phonetic). There are *phonetic* parts inside of the writing system. By far the most numerous category are the phono-semantic compounds, also called semantic-phonetic compounds or pictophonetic compounds. These characters are composed of two parts: one of a limited set of pictographs, often graphically simplified, which suggests the general meaning of the character, and an existing character pronounced approximately as the new target word. Examples are 河 hé "river", 湖 hú "lake", 流 liú "stream", 沖 chōng "riptide" (or "flush"), 滑 huá "slippery". All these characters have on the left a radical of three short strokes, which is a simplified pictograph for a river, indicating that the character has a semantic connection with water; the right-hand side in each case is a phonetic indicator. For example, in the case of 沖 chōng (Old Chinese /druŋ/[46]), the phonetic indicator is 中 zhōng (Old Chinese /truŋ/[47]), which by itself means "middle". In this case it can be seen that the pronunciation of the character is slightly different from that of its phonetic indicator; this process means that the composition of such characters can sometimes seem arbitrary today. Further, the choice of radicals may also seem arbitrary in some cases; for example, the radical of 貓 māo "cat" is 豸 zhì, originally a pictograph for worms,[citation needed] but in characters of this sort indicating an animal of any kind. Xu Shen (c. 100 CE) placed approximately 82% of characters into this category, while in the Kangxi Dictionary (1716 CE) the number is closer to 90%, due to the extremely productive use of this technique to extend the Chinese vocabulary. This method is still sometimes used to form new characters, for example 钚 bù "plutonium") is the metal radical 金 jīn plus the phonetic component 不 bù, described in Chinese as "不 gives sound, 金 gives meaning". Many Chinese names of elements in the periodic table and many other chemistry-related characters were formed this way. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_script#Phono-semantic_compounds

On 05/23/2011 10:33 AM, Milos Rancic wrote: But different Chinese languages will still use the same character for different but related phonetic component.

When words are from the same root, the same character is generally used regardless of modern pronunciation. In Traditional Chinese, phonetic elements are mostly based on older pronunciations which might not make sense in all modern Sinitic languages; sometimes in Simplified Chinese these are replaced by phonetic elements based on Mandarin pronunciation. However, Milos, I believe you have misinterpreted "logophonetic" here. Although the script has phonetic elements, this does not mean that the phonetic elements are based on modern pronunciations. So for example, 西瓜 is the word for watermelon in every Sinitic language (as far as I'm aware). In Mandarin it is pronounced "xi gua"; in Cantonese it is "sai gwaa", in Min Nan it is "sai koe", in Shanghainese Wu it is "si kwo" (I have not noted tones here due to different tone systems in these languages). In spite of differing words, since they are all from the same etymological root, they are all written exactly the same way with the same characters. This is probably not the best example since neither of these characters has a phonetic element, but that is irrelevant because even if they did the case would be the same. What DOES make Sinitic (Chinese) languages different when written is the following (*this is important*): Words that are not etymologically related to the equivalent in other Sinitic languages are often/usually written differently; grammar and syntax can be different (as an example, in Shanghai Wu you can say "We drink coffee" as "Ala kafi che" which is literally "We coffee drink"; in Mandarin it would be said as "Women he kafei", literally "We drink coffee", notice the different word order), including grammatical particles which have no direct equivalent. Imagine for a moment that English and Spanish used a similar writing system. "I want you to give me a piece of bread" and "Quiero que me des un pedacito de pan" would be written differently due to differing grammar: "I want you to give me a piece of bread" would be written as "[I] [WANT] [YOU] [TO] [GIVE] [ME] [A] [PIECE] [OF] [BREAD]" "Quiero que me des un pedacito de pan" would be written as "[WANT]-[FIRST PERSON SINGULAR] [THAT] [TO-ME] [GIVE]-[SECOND PERSON SINGULAR SUBJUNCTIVE] [A] [PIECE]-[DIMINUTIVE] [OF] [BREAD]". Also, "Cuando va a llegar Maria?" (accents missing) and "When is Maria going to arrive?" "Cuando va a llegar Maria?" would be written as "[WHEN] [GO]-[THIRD PERSON SINGULAR] [TO] [ARRIVE] [MARIA]" "When is Maria going to arrive?" would be written as "[WHEN] [IS] [MARIA] [GOING TO] [ARRIVE]" or something like that. Note here that the "arrive" comes after "Maria" in English, but before in Spanish. These are relatively simple examples, but although in many ways English and Spanish (and many other Western European languages) have relatively similar syntax (as compared to, say, Asian, African or American languages) and are related, due to these grammar differences it would be impossible to unify them in writing. It is essentially the same case with Sinitic languages. However, there is another issue at play here: the classification of Sinitic languages and dialects is a bit controversial, and it is possible that some of these "languages" identified by the Ethnologue would not want or need a separate version. Jin Chinese, for example, is often identified as a divergent dialect of Mandarin, and I'm doubtful that a Wikipedia written in Jin in Chinese characters would differ substantially from zh.wp, and almost certain (though I am willing to be proven wrong) that they would not differ enough in writing to merit separate Wikipedias. Also, I am somewhat doubtful that varieties such as Puxian, with 2.5 million speakers who are almost all highly literate in Standard Chinese (=written Mandarin), would ever have enough editors or readers to amount to much. Sinitic Wikipedias we currently have, such as Cantonese, Wu and two of the Min languages, are fortunate to have much larger numbers of speakers, existing tradition of literature written in them, and a very high degree of regional linguistic pride (especially noted for Cantonese). So varieties such as Puxian, Min Zhong, Pinghua and Huizhou seem unlikely to attract enough attention to be viable projects. I also wonder, with regards to Arabic varities, if it is really in our best interests to follow Ethnologue classifications, which often follow national borders rather than linguistic boundaries. For example, I have been told that Moroccan, Tunisian, Libyan and Algerian Arabic are all easily mutually intelligible, often considered a single language called "Derija". I am certainly in favor of having Wikipedias in colloquial varities of Arabic, but I don't know that it is wise to encourage maximal linguistic balkanization and division of resources when it is possible to allow people to coalesce around a common language. Rather than blindly following the Ethnologue, I would advocate a greater reliance on expert opinion and advice, and advocacy with ISO committee when necessary to get codes changed/created/merged/deleted. -m. 2011/5/23 Milos Rancic <millosh(a)gmail.com>

Hello, I am even more pessimistic. Of course, Wikipedia exits in many languages, but many Wikipedia language versions are still quite small and of low quality, typical encyclopedias-to-become, but still no really useful encyclopedias by now. Kind regards Ziko 2011/5/23 Milos Rancic <millosh(a)gmail.com>om>: -- Ziko van Dijk The Netherlands http://zikoblog.wordpress.com/

An'n 23.05.2011 17:37, hett Ziko van Dijk schreven: If we consider the extent of old pre-internet paper encyclopedias as the threshold between "encyclopedia-to-become" and "encyclopedia" and if we don't aim at the top-tier encyclopedias, but at the middle-tier which was not as complete as the top-tier works but affordable, we are at about 150,000 entries, I guess. From my experience at the German Wikipedia it was at about 200,000 articles when the last articles were created where I had the feeling that no serious encyclopedia could do without them. For a naturally grown and not bot-fueled Wikipedia that should roughly be the number of articles to become indeed useful ... in coverage of topics relevant to the readers, quality is another issue. But I guess the quality of the Wikipedias is better than the quality of the big Wikipedias back then when they were the same size, because the smaller Wikipedias nowadays can draw from the bigger Wikipedias, an sourced information pool that was not available before. Looking at <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias> we have 17 Wikipedias that have more than 200,000 articles. Among them none that haven't had encyclopedias before the internet age. Actually there are no languages anywhere in the top group where we could really prove our mission of bringing knowledge to people who before had no chance to obtain it in their native languages. All of them are either strong languages that have supporting national states and had decent encyclopedias before or they are bot fueled (Esperanto is neither, but it's also no language to reach people unreached by education). Galician with 71,000 articles is the first language that has no strong supporting state/territory and is not mainly build by bots, where we serve an outstanding service to the language community. But they are of course reached by Spanish/Portuguese education. Telugu with almost 48,000 articles seems to be the biggest wikipedia in a language where we serve the language community with things that wouldn't exist otherwise. Yes, I think we are far away from being a useful and important encyclopedia except for the national languages of the first and second world. Marcus Buck