On Mar 2, 2005, at 7:09 AM, abc_root wrote:
I hope in the kanbun wikipedia simplified Chinese(China) does not appear. Obviously those deviate a lot from the normal characters and only spoil the beauty of kanbun.
As for phonetic transliteration, I personally prefer not to create any new words from transliteration using kanji. (I'll live with those that are in common use.) The ancient people did this because they did not think of creating an alphabet and that caused a lot of confusion in trancribing foreign words when speakers of different languages follow their own pronunciation. But now we have quite a few choices of alphabets to use and there is no need to do that again. If someone still prefers to do that, I can only suggest he note down the original word, too.
For the procedure of starting a new wikipedia, I'm still not very sure and hope to hear suggestions from you guys.
Precedent would indicate that this should be allowed based on other languages which have no native speakers (e.g. Anglo-Saxon).
While it is true that this proposed wikipedia could be blocked based on some requirement of number of project members, given the nature of the proposal, it would not be hard to accumulate any arbitrary number fairly quickly. However, it would also allow the de facto sepearation of traditional and simplified, as traditional users could capsize this wikipedia relatively quickly if they so desired.
It is perhaps time to consider creating some category for "languages with no native speakers" and placing all wikipedias in them.
Personally I believe there is a value to these kinds of project - because it gets people to write in old languages, which is an essential element of fluency and scholarship. However, the purpose of these projects is, necessarily, different from existing languages, which have a reader base looking for primary information.
Moreover, there is something that these projects detract from, which needs help - namely wikisource. For every Latinist trying to figure out how to write about the java programming language, there is one less latinist to work on creating a wikisource version of latin texts, and so on. It seems to me if there is all this energy for languages that exist as source text, then there should be some way of making wikisource a more attractive outlet for people's energy.