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(a)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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