Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Oriental languages

This page is an archive of the discussion surrounding the proposed deletion of a page entitled Oriental languages.

• There is no such classification. As well 'These use pictograms' is incorrect... actually the page as a whole is pretty content-freeZviGilbert 17:52, 24 Nov 2003 (UTC)
  • agreed. delete - its confusing and incorrect to group languages into western and non western (which is what this article seems to be trying to do). There is no such term as 'oriental languages'. Secretlondon 17:59, Nov 24, 2003 (UTC)
    • Disagree, there are about 23,000 hits on Google for "Oriental languages". Some universities devote considerable attention to this classification as an academic topic. --Uncle Ed 19:55, 24 Nov 2003 (UTC)
  • Delete. Ditto, plus it is hopelessly uninformative and superficial. --Kaihsu Tai 18:01, 24 Nov 2003 (UTC)
  • Make into a redirect for CJK. Morwen 20:01, 24 Nov 2003 (UTC)
  • Delete! Not make sense to redirect CJK. --wshun 21:54, 24 Nov 2003 (UTC)
  • Delete; it's garbage. --Jiang
  • What do all languages spoken by Oriental ethnic groups have in common? Using Chinese characters/kanji? And the ichi, ni, san, etc. names for numbers? That could be redirected to CJK (and I see Morwen also got that idea). Wiwaxia 06:20, 25 Nov 2003 (UTC)
  • Needs work, but absolutely do not delete. A list of languages spoken by Oriental ethnic groups would be useful. See European languages for an example of a similarly-useful list. (I had never heard of Asturian, so it taught me something.) Anjouli 13:46, 25 Nov 2003 (UTC)
  • There is no linguistic property that the languages spoken by "Oriental ethnic groups" have in common other than being human languages. They aren't all in the same language family, nor do they all use the same method of writing: Chinese uses ideograms, Japanese uses a mixture of systems, Vietnamese uses a variant form of the Latin alphabet...that's just off the top of my non-expert head. That's aside from the problems with using "ethnic groups" as shorthand for "peoples living in this region": there are plenty of people who would be counted as ethnically East Asian who are in fact monolingual in English or French (and probably other Indo-European languages).
  • It might be worth writing a brief stub explaining that this is not a linguistically sound classification, but exists for historical reasons (like "non-Indo-European") and is used in thus-and-such ways, followed by links to the pages on the relevant languages and language families.Vicki Rosenzweig 22:44, 25 Nov 2003 (UTC)
  • So far only one article links to it and I have just rewritten that article. So oriental language is now an orphan page. Delete! -wshun 23:08, 25 Nov 2003 (UTC)
  • Already covered by Asian languages? Anjouli 12:48, 26 Nov 2003 (UTC)
• I revamped this from my original attempt to fix a phantom link- decide for yourselves. - Litefantastic 00:59, 29 Nov 2003 (UTC)
  • Just noticed: It's been made into a redirect to Asian languages, which serves the purpose I was going for in the beginning. - Litefantastic 01:01, 29 Nov 2003 (UTC)