[Foundation-l] Klassical Chinese

[Milos Rancic]

On Fri, Sep 5, 2008 at 4:23 PM, Ting Chen <wing.philopp at gmx.de> wrote:
> What I wonder is, is there a meaning to write an encyclopedia with this
> language. Who would look for Olympic Games in a classical chinese
> Wikipedia, except the people who write the article themselves?

Usually, the most of Internet users who read English without problems
won't use any other edition of Wikipedia for such purposes (current
events), except the English one. Those who are not fluent in any
foreign language and don't have such happiness to be born in some
large culture (German, French, Russian, Spanish, Chinese...), would
read about current events on professional media in their languages,
not on Wikipedia. So, then, why to write encyclopedia in any other
language?

But, article about Han or Qin dynasty and their times in Classical
Chinese may be very useful for a lot of East Asians. AFAIK, one
average Japanese is not able to read even Traditional Chinese (my
friend told me that he is able just to suppose what some character
means; so mistakes like reading a character for "dentist" as a
"physician" is usual level of understanding), while, as Aphaia said,
is able to read Classical Chinese. I may imagine that the similar
situation is in Korea and maybe in some countries of South-East Asia.

The point here is that a number of non-linguists are trying to make
some tautologies from linguistics; which is completely impossible.
There are a number of social variables which makes one language
valuable. And there are a number of other social variable which makes
one language worth of efforts to help them.

BTW, note that a lot of languages with small number of speakers are
not able to write an article about, let's say, nuclear chemistry. And
more languages are not able to express almost anything about computer
technology in their standards; and if they are able, it is usually
better to read it in English because texts in standards are more
foreign than English text is.

There is a very small specter of languages which, AFAIK, shouldn't
have separate projects: stupidities (cf. Siberian Wikipedia), hobbyist
languages (Klingon, Tengvar) and ancient languages used exclusively
for research of language and cultural history (Sumerian, Phoenician).
Other languages should pass careful analysis: are they useful? do they
deserve needed amount of our time and energy? Also, some Wikimedia
projects are more useful for some languages: Wiktionary and
Wikisource, are, by default, much more useful for any language than it
is, let's say, Wikinews. So, even ancient languages should get their
Wiktionaries and Wikisources; but I really don't see a need for Old
Church Slavonic Wikinews (while even Wikiversities may have some
sense).

And to conclude: We need some more sensible rules. (And, so, I fully
agree with Tim's changes.)