On Dec 25, 2004, at 10:31 AM, John Lee wrote:
Stirling Newberry wrote:
The Cantonese dialect does have unique colorful phrases and a
different linguistic culture that manifests itself in Cantopop, film
and cartoons. Some would seem foreign to "Mandarin" speakers. It
would
be great to have these Cantonese-isms captured in some way that could
be done in a combined ZH Wikipedia.
-Andrew (User:Fuzheado)
I'm again going to suggest that some sort of "dialectical
bracketting" be implemented, which would allow for phrases to be
marked as being in a dialect of the language. Syntax would be
something like [[dialect: base phrase | dialect: dialect phrase |
dialect: dialect phrase]] and then allow users to pick the dialect of
the language they are using. This would allow for everything from the
differences between British and American English, to far more distant
written dialects.
IIRC there was stiff opposition for this last time because it'd
confuse newcomers too much.
John Lee
([[en:User:Johnleemk]])
__
It's a trade off between reader confusiong, from dialectical
inconsistencies, and editor confusion. Of these two, the latter is
easier to solve, because educating editors is within the reach of
Wikimedia, where as changing readers is not. This syntax is no more
difficult than the use of macros, image links and considerably less
complex than tables.