On Thu, February 3, 2005 3:41 am, Mark Williamson said:
Hi Felix,
I also noticed what you said in Meta about not supporting having a separate edition for Penkyamp and a separate edition for romanized Wu. I think this point is important to emphasize.
Actually, if someone propose a romanized Cantonese or Wu edition, I will consider each proposal on its own merits. My main concern in Meta was to stick to what the section title says, and that when people need to make a decision, they know exactly who support what.
I myself am not an advocate of literature in Cantonese or Wu, but I want to present a picture of what is going on, as accurately as I can do, and if some people are willing to try, I want to support their effort.
I don't see why these separate editions are nessecary. The difference is only between scripts, and Han characters can be converted to Penkyamp or a Wu romanization system by computer with great accuracy.
I have not considered that. It will not be straight forward though. The complexity should be larger than the conversion between traditional and simplified Han scripts in the existing ZH Wikipedia.
Moreover, if a Chinese dialect is not written in Han script but in Latin script, it may result in a different literary standard. For example, a Latin script will discourage play of words using homophones. Try creating a Wikipedia using Hanyu Pinyin, following all the official orthographic rules, and we will discover the difficulty in automatic translation. Translation in the other way round need even more artificial intelligence.
Having separate editions for Chinese vernaculars is in my view a good thing, but as you said it may be a little bit hard to gather support at first. Imagine how much harder it will be if it is divided across 3 entirely separate Wikipedias for different scripts?
I think we should all start out using the Han script, and from there we can develop conversion technology if nessecary.
What I think is most important here however is this:
The board needs to make an ultimate decision on whether groups of native speakers should be allowed their own Wikipedia when they request it amid objections from a group of speakers of a different language.
IE, should a Cantonese and Wu Wikipedia be created with the full support of people like Felix Wan and Nishishei and Pangguanzhe, and the tentative support of people like Alex, all of whom actually speak these languages, as well as the support of some non-speakers (Pektiong, MilchFlasche, Kaihsu, and encouraging words from a few other zh.wikipedians who don't actually know any of these languages), against the strong wills of non-speakers such as Andrew Lih, Sheng Jiong (who, it should be noted, does speak Minnan), Shizhao, and such?
What I think is particularly compelling about this particular case is that no Cantonese or Wu speakers have come out yet to say outright "No", even skeptical native speakers like Toytoy have not given such a strong opinion.
I also think a decision should be made in the near future so this issue can stop being argued over in slow motion.
Mark
Please notice that Shizhao said he will not oppose ZH-YUE or ZH-WUU if they are written in Latin scripts, as ZH-MIN-NAN currently is. His concern was that the difference between written Mandarin and written Cantonese may not be different enough to need a new encyclopdia. That concern was also shared by Toytoy. It was their concern that motivated me to suggest writing experimental pages for each proposed new Wikipedia project. I believe that can address their concern.
People support or oppose the same thing for very different reasons. We can still use some discussion to understand each other better.
Felix Wan