Oh, and also, here you seem not to fully understand the complex relationship between Chinese vernaculars, comparing them to "culturally significant English dialects" which according to you are only a little bit less divergent.
Chinese vernaculars are extremely, extremely divergent from one another. When written in Han characters, they're still divergent, but not as much (since in han characters, all that shows is vocabulary and grammar, not pronunciation).
The "desire" to "unite" fangyan (languages, dialects, regional speech) with Baihua is mostly one felt by the government of the Mainland. Very few actual speakers of these languages feel strongly about trying to use a united written form, and if they do, they usually feel strongly against it.
We have Wikipedias in languages now where there are a very very small number of books published in them annually only, we have at least a couple of Wikipedias in languages which many would argue are dialects. Cantonese has a stronger claim to separate literature than most of these, both Cantonese and Wu have a stronger claim to number of speakers.
If a reader doesn't want to view a particular Wikipedia, and neither does the next one, there is always one that will. There is no way to tell what the interest will be, and it would be a bad decision, I think, to say "no" just because only 5% or 10% (this is just a scenario - for all I know, 99.9999% or 0.0001% are actually interested) are interested when even they number in the hundreds of thousands on their own.
Mark
On Thu, 3 Feb 2005 12:52:42 -0500, Stirling Newberry stirling.newberry@xigenics.net wrote:
On Feb 3, 2005, at 12:41 PM, Alex Kwan wrote:
Hello,
Stirling Newberry wrote:
I thought the question is what the *readers* want.
We don't have the resources to find out (I mean, do we do an Internet poll to find out, what?), so we'll probably have to stick with what the writers are willing to contribute.
I don't think an argument from ignorance works here. Is there a large body of readers who want wikipedias in vernaculars that diverge from Mandrin? This should be something which is documentable. 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. However, a stronger case could be made for a desire to incorporate vernacular idioms into standard mandrin, or as an important cultural dialect within the whole, as there are many culturally significant dialects in English which, never the less, are not under going the process of linguistic separation.
This resource is here to provide readers with information, those of us who write for it have our own motivations, of course, but it must be the readers interest, to the extent we can document it, which ought to be the final criterion for making decisions.
Instead of arguing with each other about what "we" would like, it seems better to spend time finding out what the readers want, and then finding a means to provide that.
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