In addition there was the old practice in Japanese of writing a neologism descriptively in Chinese characters, and writing the pronunciation (usually from English or French) right above it.
This was done with "denwa", which is interesting because people often just read it as "denwa" instead of reading the phonetic guide "terehon", whereas in other cases people always stuck to the phonetic reading so now there are sets of kanji for new words which do not fit with their readings. (however, this has fallen out of favor so people usually use katakana for such loanwords instead)
Mark
On Mon, 28 Feb 2005 16:16:04 -0800 (PST), Felix Wan felixwiki@earthsphere.org wrote:
On Mon, February 28, 2005 3:03 pm, David Gerard said:
So would this be created before or after a Cantonese wikipedia?
I hope that Classical Chinese Wikipedia is more accepted, and I don't mind if it is created before the Cantonese Wikipedia. I hope that we can consider the merits of a Classical Chinese Wikipedia seperately, unaffected by the emotion surrounding Chinese regional speeches.
On Mon, February 28, 2005 2:12 am, abc_root said:
I would like to request a new Wikipedia for classical Chinese or kanbun( 漢文/文言文) which is the standard form of Chinese for about two thousand years and was used throughout East Asia as the formal form of writing. Its importance in East Asia is like that of Latin in Europe. Now that Wikipedias are running or being started for many of the languages in East Asia, it seems that the language which is the backbone of these languages should also have a place.
I find that an interesting idea and will support it. I am just not sure how many people are fluent enough in Classical Chinese to maintain the site.
One problem that might be encountered in writing articles for kanbun wikipedia is how the foreign loanwords (e.g. from English) should be phonetically transcribed when there is no corresponding word in kanbun itself. If they are transcribed using kanji (Chinese characters), there is the question of which language should be used to read the kanji. Here I suggest using an alphabet system of East Asia (e.g. Japanese kana or Korean hangul, or Taiwanese chu-yin) for the transcription and also note the original word in English (or any other language of origin or the roman transcription if the language is not written in roman alphabet). This allows kanbun users speaking different languages to know the original foreign word.
I have different ideas for loanwords. If the loanword is a proper noun, and do not have a historical transcription, we could be better off to leave it in its original form. (or roman transcription?)
If the loanword is a common noun that has a meaning, the way Classical Chinese should work is to coin a word that expresses its meaning. Japanese speakers did a good job in coining "keisai" for economics and "denwa" for telephone, and those terms were well accepted by Chinese speakers. However, newer terms are usually phonetically transliterated in katakana, which in my opinion is a little bit lazy. Many translations in modern Chinese follow that same principle of Classical Chinese. We may pick from those that convey the meaning, not just the sound.
Felix Wan
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