Re: New Wikipedia article "Japanese language classification"

"Bart Mathias" <mathias@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:0fCdnRhyZ5UMIajZnZ2dnUVZ_vSdnZ2d@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Ben Bullock wrote:
Someone split off a new article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_language_classification

The author, Godfrey Daniel, seems to know what he's talking about. I
wonder how long he'll last on Wikipedia. Two months at most?

I see nothing that needs editing, but are you suggesting that some kooks
will edit the article out of existence?

No, I'd suggest the kooks will stress Godfrey until he doesn't want to contribute any more. I don't know what will happen to the article.

One of the things that happened to me on Wikipedia was that someone called "Exploding Boy" kept changing an article to say that the romaji taught in Japanese elementary schools is the Hepburn system, rather than the Kunrei one. Now my older son has recently started his fourth year of school, so just now I found his kokugo book, published in 2005, and scanned in the romaji table:

http://www.sljfaq.org/w/Image:Romaji_table_from_kokugo_book.jpg

which, as you can see, is the Kunrei system, but I didn't have it last year so I had to suffer a very foolish argument. This kind of thing happened a lot. I also encountered a farmer who thought he knew all about typography, and a computer programmer who created some very basic mistakes in some physics articles. Wikipedia is a nice idea but unfortunately "anyone can edit".

My records indicate that Charles Beckwith never took a course from me,
but (or should I say "proving") he was a pretty bright guy. I don't
know how he ever came up the the Chinese-Japanese hypothesis. But I
once owned the published form of a Tokyo U. dissertation demonstrating
the relationship!

I think it says Christopher Beckwith in the article; I tried looking for Charles Beckwith and got someone to do with the Vietnam war.

By the way, it says somewhere on a Wikipedia talk page that "Godfrey Daniel" has a PhD in Japanese from the University of Hawaii. Also User:Squidley said Bart Mathias was one of his professors, so I'm guessing Squidley and Godfrey are the same individual, and possibly someone you know.

As for where Japanese comes from, unfortunately I have nothing to contribute to that debate, although some Korean people I've talked to mentioned that Japanese is similar to their language.

--
sci.lang.japan FAQ: http://www.sljfaq.org/afaq/afaq.html

.

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