Hi Felix,
Many of the responses there anger me because they almost go so far as to say that Cantonese is worthless as a language.
What about the guy who said something like "You will hardly get 50 characters in without wondering why Cantonese has so much 'junks'"?
Or the people who said "Cantonese should only be used for informal things." without giving a valid reason?
The people who say Cantonese speakers can already use zh.wikipedia, this is of course true but the same is true for Basque, Catalan, Galician, Asturian, or Aragonese speakers using es.wikipedia, or Sicilian speakers using the Italian Wikipedia, or Frisian or Limburgish speakers using the Dutch Wikipedia, and so on and so forth.
Nearly every single one of the people who speaks these languages is bilingual, but there is still seen a need for an encyclopedia in the less formal local vernacular for almost the same reason bibles are published in Algerian Arabic (vs fusha) but serious literature is not - the desire to reach more people overrides in those cases the desire to be prissy and use languages imposed on us by outsiders.
I wonder a few things about the people at that forum, first of all how many of the people who answered were native Cantonese speakers? Many of the things they said sounded exactly like something I would hear from a monolingual person from Beijing but not a native speaker of Cantonese from Guangzhou. Second of all how many of the people who answered were from the mainland vs hongkong/macao/overseas? The Mainland government has been telling people for years and years that "Your language is illegitimate, you must use this Mandarin-based language for all your writing instead because it promotes national unity! NATIONAL UNITY! NATIONAL UNITY!!!", and only recently are many people questioning that (some of the posts I see more recently from native speakers say "I have believed unquestioningly for many years that Baihuawen really was somehow superior to the local vernacular, but a year or two ago I asked myself 'why?' and none of the answers I could give were logical", or "I have used Baihuawen for writing all my life until my son asked me why we don't write all the time in the vernacular, like the kids do in SMS, and when I had no good answer I decided to try it myself"), but in Hong Kong / Macao / Overseas the attitude towards the local vernacular is much more open and relaxed although there is even there some of the anti-vernacular attitude.
Mark
On Thu, 17 Feb 2005 11:37:40 -0800 (PST), Felix Wan felixwiki@earthsphere.org wrote:
On Thu, February 17, 2005 3:15 am, MilchFlascheç'‹å¹³ said:
On Wed, 16 Feb 2005 15:45:53 -0800 (PST), Felix Wan felixwiki@earthsphere.org wrote:
Meanwhile, I am trying to recruit new volunteers for the project: http://www.cantonese.org.cn/bbsxp/ShowForum.htm?forumid=6
We really need contributors. I pray that more people who types Cantonese hanzi everyday should join the testing.
For your information, I posted a message at another forum and received much opposition. The reasons are similar to the opposition here: http://www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk/phorum/read.php?1,34242
Felix Wan
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