On Feb 4, 2005, at 7:15 PM, Felix Wan wrote:
On Thu, February 3, 2005 8:54 pm, Sheng Jiong said:
Max Weinreich: "A language is a dialect with an army and a navy". If we follow that line of thinking, then yes, since there is no public education in the world that teaches written Cantonese, we should not have an encyclopedia in it.
In our case, a language is a dialect that can support the writing of, and whose readers desire, its own encyclopedia.
I'll leave aside my quarrels with Weinreich's definition of language. That was a long time ago, in a different professional incarnation.