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)