I think the main problem is lack of fluent speakers.
Many people don't believe such a thing exists for Latin, but there are definitely people who are fluent in Latin and can make use of more complex sentence structures.
Mark
On Thu, 03 Mar 2005 19:18:46 -0500, Adam Bishop grenfell_@hotmail.com wrote:
From: Delirium delirium@hackish.org Reply-To: wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org To: wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Request for classical Chinese Date: Thu, 03 Mar 2005 18:57:52 -0500
Adam Bishop wrote:
On the Latin Wikipedia I think we try to be as classical as possible - the style of Cicero, or Caesar, or Vergil, or that sort of era (1st century BC - 1st century AD). It's not always possible; for example if we want to write about modern people or places, we may have to use a neo-Latin construction, or ecclesiastical Latin to write about a religious topic. (Personally, I admit that I let a few medieval Latin constructions slip through once in awhile, as horrible as that may be to the purest classicists :))
As compared to historical Latin works, the Latin Wikipedia seems to use *much* simpler sentence structures and grammatical constructions and so on, which to some extent also minimizes the differences between different eras of Latin. Is that on purpose? If so, is that something that'd be applicable to a classical-Chinese Wikipedia?
-Mark
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It's not on purpose in the sense that we are consciously making a "simple Latin" wikipedia, but everyone writes according to their own level of comprehension - there are many excellent Latinists there (I am not one of them!), but of course there are no native Latin speakers, either to write in more complicated Latin or to correct what we write.
Adam
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