Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales ti 2004/12/24 EP 05:17 sia-kong:
André Müller wrote:
I completely agree with Alex Kwan. Having a Wikipedia in both Mandarin/simplified Chinese and Cantonese/traditional Chinese seems redundant to me as well. One could perhaps compare it with setting up extra Wikipedias for British and American English (I doubt that the differences are much bigger; except for the trad/simp issue).
"Redundancy", depending on how it's conceptualized, may well be a valid point. But certainly the linguistic distance between Cantonese and Mandarin is by no means insignificant, as evident by the fact that many quite basic, everday words are non-cognates. On the other hand, British and American English dialects share virtually all basic words ("man", "woman", names of body parts, etc.). There are also, to a lesser extent, grammatical differences.
That is not to say that Cantonese has not developed a tradition of _formal_ writing strongly influenced by early 20th-century Mandarin movement. This is akin to educated English speakers of the past moulding their grammar after Latin ("don't split the infinitive") and preferring Latinate words to native ones. The use of Chinese character further constructs a sense of (formal) Cantonese as "merely Mandarin pronounced differently". At the same time, Cantonese has also developed a colloquial written tradition. While hardly as prestigious, it does serve sociolinguistic functions. Whether that includes writing encyclopedia articles is for the native speakers to decide.
I tend to agree.
Which part?
Node is well known as an activist for forking Chinese into multiple projects, and so his comments should be considered in that full context.
--Jimbo