Mark, you are right about Võro (South Estonian). It has quite old separate literary tradition (First New Testamant 1686, last 1926, ABC-books and newspapers from 19. century) and many people write in Võro. Now it is taught in 26 schools to children and in Tartu University to students. Linguistically it is maybe the oldest and most peculiar language in Baltic Finnic language branch. But many Estonian authorities and linguistst are used to think that Võro is a dialect of Estonian. Ethnologue got their info from them. This info is out of date, I beleave it will be soon refreshed.
I wish good luck to Wikipedias in Chinese "dialects". Of course they should be created!
Sulev
20.02.2005 12:14:00, Mark Williamson node.ue@gmail.com kirot':
Ethnologue considers Voro to be a dialect of Estonian, as do many linguists. But the mutual intelligibility with standard Estonian when written is not above 90% (I don't believe), many people write in Voro, and it has entirely separate literature.
Platt is perhaps more comparable here. It was similarly said then, that standard German text can be read as regional pronunciation. But it meets these 3 criteria: Quite a few people (not the majority though) write often in Platt; when written its mutual intelligibility is below 90%, and there is some desires for a separate literature which is already emerging.
This case is similar here. I estimate pure written Cantonese at between 70 and 89% intelligibility with Guanhua-Baihuawen depending on specific instance (maybe 85% on average). This is /casual/ mutual intelligibility, that you can read it without having to stop over and over to guess what words might mean. I'm much less sure about Wu but I think it is in the same range, especially when etymologically correct hanzi are used rather than using etymologically incorrect hanzi for their Baihuawen meaning. (the hanzi that means "run" in Minnan for example, means "walk" in Baihuawen, but often it is used for "walk" in Minnan because of uneducation of etymology)
It makes no sense regularly to say "Bite is", but "m-sik" is Cantonese for "isn't" and the way it is written means "bite is" in Baihuawen/Mandarin which is the same.
Mark
On Sun, 20 Feb 2005 17:50:26 +0800, Sheng Jiong sheng.jiong@gmail.com wrote:
You are squarely wrong about Singlish. It is not a dialect of English, it is an English-based creole. The difference between the way you write that sentence and the way I write it is this: I write it "yu kan go o no'" but you write it "You can go or not?", this is because you use an English-based orthography that doesn't reflect extreme phonetic differences
Everybody speaks English differently. Should we all "reflect extreme phonetic differences" rather than using proper spellings?
I wouldn't support a Wikipedia for colloquial English because it is the exact same language as written English. A Wikipedia for Scots or AAVE or Singlish, I would support, but just normal colloquial English, I would not. Nor would I support separate Wikipedias for Mandarin and Baihuawen - they are one and the same.
So now we have a person supporting Singlish Wikipedia. I think Wikipedia will soon grow into an encyclopedia with 1 million languages, rather than articles.
And anyway you cannot split between Mandarin and Baihuawen: one is spoken, one is written, how do you split?
Also there is much differences in Shanghainese too, if you want I can maybe type some examples later.
Pray show me something I have never learnt about my own mother tongue.
I have a story to tell you Mr Sheng Jiong. Sit back and read please.
有一趟、北風搭太陽辣辣海爭啥人個本事大。爭法爭法來勒一個過道人、身浪穿仔一件厚袍子。伊拉兩家頭就王東道、講好啥人能夠先叫迭個過道人拿伊個夠子脫下來、就算
啥人本事大。北風〓足仔勁窮吹八吹。不過吹得越結棍、埃個人拿袍子裹得越緊。後首來北風無沒勁勤、只好就算勤。過一息太陽出來一曬、埃個過道人馬上就拿袍子脫脫。所以北 風勿得勿承認、還是太陽比伊本事大。
The moral of the story is that nobody likes the sun and nobody likes the north wind either. But they both like to write in colloquial Wu. Very much.
You are just using "extreme phonetic differences" to express. If it is written in baihuawen, Shanghainese can still understand and read out in Shanghainese.
So now I begin to realise the difference between you and me: you think there is a need to set up Wikipedias to "reflect extreme phonetic differences" between a standard language and a not so standard spoken language. But I want just to have 1 Wikipedia in the standard language, and let the reader to read it in any different ways they want. To me that is the most sensible thing to do because everybody else do this: after all we created language to communicate, not to "reflect extreme phonetic differences".
formulax
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