Dear all:
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.
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.
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