On Mar 2, 2005, at 7:09 AM, abc_root wrote:
I hope in the kanbun wikipedia simplified
Chinese(China) does not
appear.
Obviously those deviate a lot from the normal characters and only
spoil the
beauty of kanbun.
As for phonetic transliteration, I personally prefer not to create any
new
words from transliteration using kanji. (I'll live with those that are
in
common use.) The ancient people did this because they did not think of
creating an alphabet and that caused a lot of confusion in trancribing
foreign words when speakers of different languages follow their own
pronunciation. But now we have quite a few choices of alphabets to use
and
there is no need to do that again. If someone still prefers to do
that, I
can only suggest he note down the original word, too.
For the procedure of starting a new wikipedia, I'm still not very sure
and
hope to hear suggestions from you guys.
Precedent would indicate that this should be allowed based on other
languages which have no native speakers (e.g. Anglo-Saxon).
While it is true that this proposed wikipedia could be blocked based on
some requirement of number of project members, given the nature of the
proposal, it would not be hard to accumulate any arbitrary number
fairly quickly. However, it would also allow the de facto sepearation
of traditional and simplified, as traditional users could capsize this
wikipedia relatively quickly if they so desired.
It is perhaps time to consider creating some category for "languages
with no native speakers" and placing all wikipedias in them.
Personally I believe there is a value to these kinds of project -
because it gets people to write in old languages, which is an essential
element of fluency and scholarship. However, the purpose of these
projects is, necessarily, different from existing languages, which have
a reader base looking for primary information.
Moreover, there is something that these projects detract from, which
needs help - namely wikisource. For every Latinist trying to figure out
how to write about the java programming language, there is one less
latinist to work on creating a wikisource version of latin texts, and
so on. It seems to me if there is all this energy for languages that
exist as source text, then there should be some way of making
wikisource a more attractive outlet for people's energy.