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.
--- Felix Wan felixwiki@earthsphere.org からのメッセージ：
On Tue, March 1, 2005 12:54 pm, Mark Williamson said:
Indeed: Such a Wikipedia would be chaos.
It does mirror the proposal from Meta however of a Wikipedia where Cantonese and Mandarin and English, in characters and in
romanisation
(any romanisation of your choosing, no specific one) are all mixed together in one Wikipedia... except even MORE confusing!
Mark
OK, now I get your point. You mean that Classical Chinese interpreted by Chinese should not be mixed with kanbun (Classical Chinese interpreted by Japanese) and other versions of Classical Chinese, don't you?
I am not sure about that. My impression is that there was only one written tradition. However, because most people are not fluent enough in it, actual writings in it could differ. Do we have similar problems with the Latin Wikipedia?
However, I have seen the different dialects of English coexist in en: and the two scripts of Chinese coexists in zh:, I think if there is a will, there is a way. Say, we may collaborate to set a phonetic transliteration guideline which everyone should follow.
I want to ask abc_root how many supporters do you expect to find for that project. I know some enthusiasts from a Classical Chinese forum and I can ask them if they are interested in the project. We can test out the idea at Meta or Wikicities and see how compatible are the modern Chinese and modern Japanese perception of Classical Chinese.
I am not for splitting the existing zh:. I am just excited by new ideas and enjoy the diversity of Wikipedia.
Felix Wan
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