On Thu, 17 Feb 2005 17:37:41 -0800 (PST), Felix Wan felixwiki@earthsphere.org wrote:
On Thu, February 17, 2005 12:30 pm, Mark Williamson said:
Hi Felix,
Many of the responses there anger me because they almost go so far as to say that Cantonese is worthless as a language.
What about the guy who said something like "You will hardly get 50 characters in without wondering why Cantonese has so much 'junks'"?
Or the people who said "Cantonese should only be used for informal things." without giving a valid reason?
[snipped]
That is what I have said: I expect fierce opposition from Chinese, even native Cantonese speakers. It is not easy to unlearn. ^_^ Compared to those responses, people here are quite enlightened and respecting.
If I may venture to speculate, it seems likely that the source of the Cantonese wikipedia push comes, not from the desire of a large number of Cantonese speakers to have Cantonese as a separate written language, but in a social problem involving the attitude of the writers of the "standard" dialect of a language towards others who use culturally important, but not formally approved of, versions of the language. People whose home dialect is close to the standard dialect often display this attitude, and because of the educational and professional incentives on the mainland, speaking the official version of the language - essentially a formalized version of the Beijing dialect - has a tremendous cultural cachet. The response is, often, for users of the culturally significant vernacular to declare that they are a separate formal language, even if this is not entirely supportable. In some cases this is enough to split the language, but usually it is not.
While this is not to discourage the people trying to start a cantonese wikipedia, it suggests that even if it works, it does not address the root problem of a cultural/language clash involving usage on the chinese wikipedia. This would indicate, therefore, that regardless of the outcome of the cantonese wikipedia, that some measures should be taken to reduce the strain on the chinese wikipedia in some fashion.
Perhaps this will make people reconsider my call for dialectical support in wikipedia - where people can choose not only their own language, but the dialect of it, and it would be possible to add markup information which would allow for differences in what is displayed based on dialect of the viewer. I feel that in the case of cantonese, this ability would be sufficient to reach a resolution - where cantonese speakers could enrich the content of the chinese wikipedia with cantonese native words and usage, without triggering the ire of the beijing dialect users.