Tim Starling wrote:
The point is that Peh-oe-ji is not representative of
Min Nan. There are
millions of Min Nan speakers who do not use a romanised script,
hopefully I am speaking for their interests.
I was also puzzled by your juxtaposing zh and minnan, as if the latter
must necessarily follow from the former in terms of how a language is
written. People who happen to speak Minnan contribute whichever
Wikipedia they happen to be interested in (hopefully with proficiency).
Now, more to the point, your claim that "millions of Min Nan speakers"
don't know a romanized script is *absurdly* true. But that does not
mean knowing a Chinese script (be it Traditional, Simplified) -- which
is taught for Mandarin -- means these speakers are a community of Min
Nan readers/writers. As an analogy, knowing your ABCs does not mean you
know how to spell English or French. Most Min Nan speakers do not write
Min Nan, have never been taught how to write Min Nan. Among those who
do -- and that still leaves tens of thousands by my unscientific
estimate -- some have come to Wikipedia.
Is that a surprise? Look at the many dozens of Wikipedia language
subdomain names reserved for all those languages. Why are they vacant,
seemingly dead? Undoubtedly there are many reasons:
material/technological hurdles, economics (expense), educational,
political, few speakers to begin with, etc. I submit that a major
reason is that speakers of some of those languages, for political,
cultural, or economic reasons, are illiterate. The writing system may
also not be standardized. But at some time during the course of a
language's development, *some*, perhaps only a few, speakers must start
to read and write that language to get things going. That is what we
Min Nan editors have been doing. If what we do, as literate
reader/writers of Min Nan, fail to match your expectation, that is not
our fault. We did not *invent* POJ, which has been around for 150
years. Nor are we *reviving* POJ, which has never stop being used
(though governments have tried to suppress it) and thus needs no
reviving. Nor is POJ a Taiwanese particularity (we have non-Taiwanese
editors). In a sense we are *promoting* it through Wikipedia, but that
is what every Wikipedia does implicitly by writing in a language.
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