I am sorry, I confused your name with somebody else's.
My question for you however is: do you have any objection to having these Wikipedias on a /trial basis/ to see what happens?
Mark
On Fri, 4 Feb 2005 12:54:46 +0800, Sheng Jiong sheng.jiong@gmail.com wrote:
Are there schools being set up to teach written vernaculars as opposed to standard Mandrin, are there novels, dictionaries etc. being published in large numbers, is there a movement. In short, has someone shown a notable and documentable desire to separate dialects from Chinese? My research (posted some time ago) found a case, but not an overwhelming one, for some degree of linguistic separationism in progress.
A very good point indeed. And I also agree with Andrew's view, that Wikipedia's chief aim is to write encyclopedias, not promoting any kind of promoting of languages. If any Chinese dialects any other than Mandarin has received significant attention in the world, and that people have gotten used to writing/reading these languages, there is of course a need to set up a Wikipedia in this language. But the truth is, all Chinese dialects other than Mandarin remain a spoken language, and extremely few books/articles/etc. are published in dialects. In fact we do not even know what writing system we should use should there be a Chinese dialect Wikipedia.
And to Mark: please do note that I speak Shanghainese rather than Min-nan. Therefore among those opposers there is also a native speaker of the language. It is not as you wrote that only those who do not speak the language oppose the proposal. I am still strongly opposed to the set up of any Chinese dialect Wikipedias. And I am not actually glad to see the Min-nan Wikipedia too. I simply doubt if any Min-nan speakers can understand the current Min-nan Wikipedia.
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