What I think the problem here is is that you are asking the same few individuals.
It is my feeling that the individuals you ask are Mandarin speakers, just as somebody told me that the people you asked originally for an initial opinion about separate vs unified script zh: were all from the Mainland.
Perhaps you have unsubscribed from wikipedia-l, but recently there has been a coming-out of support from native speakers of Cantonese, including respected zh-wikipedians, for the proposal of a separate Cantonese Wikipedia.
It angers me very much that you don't take this into consideration but keep trying to use a stick as a wheel asking the same people over and over when their opinion really doesn't matter much in this situation.
I have quoted experts, as has Stirling Newberry, in telling you that what you're hearing is just plain wrong. You have not trusted me because you have some problem with me, even though I have quoted experts and provided solid examples, and you have not commented on Stirling Newberry's fact-finding post, although this message suggests strongly that for some reason you are discarding his citations as well as a sign that you trust non-expert opinion from speakers of a related language over quotes from expert works which in all cases were written by fluent speakers of Cantonese or Wu.
What's even more infuriating is that you still continue to believe these common Mandarin-speakers over not only the opinion of Cantonese-speaking experts, but over the DIRECT TESTIMONIAL OF MULTIPLE CANTONESE SPEAKERS.
I really used to respect you a lot, but this is like the straw that broke the horse's back.
Mark
On Thu, 10 Feb 2005 11:14:33 -0800, Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
David Gerard wrote:
The thing is you're still presupposing that an existing wikipedia has a right to block the existence of a new Wikipedia.
I ask the Board: is this the case?
Not speaking here for the board, but only offering my own tentative opinion, the answer to this is "no" in the general case, but that such factors can be a part of the overall decision.
I am told repeatedly by many people that while Mandarian and Cantonese are mutually unintelligible in the spoken form, in written form they are the same. This is pretty compelling for me.
If there is a significant population of people who can not read/write standard written Chinese, but *can* read/write Cantonese in some writing system that is different, then I want to learn about that, because that would be a very compelling factor in the other direction.
--Jimbo _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l