Uhh... hello, did you read my e-mail? I listed native speakers supporting a Wu Wikipedia.
Mark
On Wed, 26 Jan 2005 14:36:57 +0800, Sheng Jiong sheng.jiong@gmail.com wrote:
It is totally absurd to set up so many Wikipedias for various Chinese dialects. Being a native Shanghainess, my mother tongue is Wu. But I have never seen any books written in the Wu dialect in my entire life, and I have only heard of one book that was written in Wu in the 1930s, and apparently it received very limited attention. Speaking language is very different from the writing system, and in Chinese although there are hundreds of dialects there is however only one writing system. Wikipedia being a *written* encyclopedia would mean that we only need *one* Chinese Wikipedia, written in Chinese characters. Speakers of the different dialects can pronounce each characters in very different ways (A Wu speaker can hardly understand Cantonese or Min-nan, and vice versa), they all have the same grammar and similar ways of expression, after thousands years of cultural integration within the unified country. (And by the way Mandarin also has a long history of being the "offical" spoken language in China: since Qing dynasty in the 1600s it has been adopted as the language spoken in Emperor's palace, and during the Republic of China period it was selected by the parliament as the official spoken language of the government after a democratic voting.)
Different dialects of course have their own distinct cultures: in traditional Shanghainese Opera the actors speak only Wu (just like in Beijing Opera the actors speak in Mandarin); there are also other similar operas for Cantonese or other dialects and these operas still receive much attention today in China. However the writing system of China has been unified since Qing Shihuang's time in around 220BC, for the convenience of the communications among all Chinese. It will be a big joke if today someone want to return to the old days when no one can understand each other.
Interestingly also Mark seem to neglect the fact that really no native speakers of all these dialects support the proposal, knowing that it is a totally unworkable proposal.
[[User:Formulax]]
On Tue, 25 Jan 2005 13:34:36 -0700, Mark Williamson node.ue@gmail.com wrote:
Hi all,
In this e-mail I don't want to personally introduce new arguments but I want people to know that further debate on this topic is continuing at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_new_languages
Some speakers of these languages have lent their support: Steve, Instantnood, and Felix Wan for Yue/Cantonese, and Nishishei, Pangguanzhe, and alaya for Wu/Shanghainese (Wu also includes the varieties of the surrounding areas including for example Suzhou).
Interestingly, on that page, no native speakers have directly condemned the idea (only direct opposition is from Shizhao), although Toytoy, a Cantonese speaker, has some concerns.
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