[Wikipedia-l] Request for classical Chinese

[Felix Wan]

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