On ven, 2002-03-08 at 09:18, Jimmy Wales wrote:
Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
Just see articles about anything Japanese on English Wikipedia. They contain Japanese names of everything.
But shouldn't these Japanese names generally be written in the Roman alphabet (Romaji), not in Kana? If I open up an Encyclopedia Britannica article about 'anime' or 'sushi' or 'Hirohito' or 'Konoe Fumimaro' I don't expect to see kana, but Romaji.
Bring up the wikipedia article on [[Miyazaki Hayao]] (or, for that matter, [[Sushi]]) for an example of what we're talking about. Kanji/kana are provided as supplementary parenthetical information, while the main text uses the English name and, if different, the Romaji form.
I'm not a real stickler on this point; as I say, I could be convinced. I'm just saying that it strikes me as fairly odd to put Kana or Kanji character sets into other languages, except in some very special cases.
What other special case could there be than "something originating in culture X, here's its real name in the language of X in case you can read X and want to look up more information or, heck, are just curious".
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)