Hi Stirling and Cathy,
I will respond separately.
Cathy, these are all good and fine issues you raise.
The answers vary but in sum, none of us have ever written anything in full Cantonese in the context of article-writing. Contrary to what you may believe, it is actually hard to write in full-Cantonese without mixing in formal Chinese in a passage. But on an interpersonal level - that is much easier and we do write short memos an notes to one another in Cantonese.
This has been experienced by many a language in the past. For example, the O'odham language local to where I live had some issues at first where people thought English should be used in all formal contexts and O'odham should only be used for interpersonal communication and the like.
People found it difficult to write O'odham because they had been taught to write English in school.
However, with a little bit of effort on the part of everybody, these people decided it was worth it to use their native language in /all/ realms of life with only one exception, communication with people who do not know O'odham at all.
At first it was difficult - people kept substituting English words when there was a perfectly suitable O'odham equivalent, at least in formal writing - but in a short while people really got the hang of it and it was even fun for them.
Now there is radio, minor newspapers, road signs, local government, utility bills, business, and school all operating entirely in O'odham (with the exception of the schools which are bilingual - if they didn't teach English as their first language they would get hate mail from all over the country and pressure from the federal government to cease), and it has really experienced a wonderful blossoming (still no novels or post secondary education - that may have to wait).
What I'm saying here is that the reason it is difficult for you and your friends and colleagues to write long passages in Cantonese is because you don't have a lot of experience with writing Cantonese. That is to say, you may have experience writing messages like "Please have the papers ready for me in 5 minutes", but you don't have experience writing longer passages with content more like "It was my idea originally, but to Connie it was so intriguing that I let her fly with it. The results were more successful than we could imagine, they have increased the net worth of the division 150%. It's amazing nobody had thought of it before".
I don't know for sure but I am willing to hazard a guess that people like those at cantonese.org.cn can write longer passages in Cantonese relatively easily, purely, and fluently because it is something they do often.
As far as the Hong Kong vs Guangdong thing, I think a lot of this arises from terms that would be more used in daily conversation than informative speech, if you are talking semi-formally about Germany I think there would be very few problems compared to if you are talking informally about your family or especially about "extreme colloquialised" topics such as romantic relationships.
The differences between written HK Cantonese and GD Cantonese are very, very small when compared to those between written HK Cantonese and Baihuawen - the character used for negation in Cantonese means "to bite" in Baihuawen (this is partially because the etymologically correct character was phased out of colloquial Cantonese writing some time ago, and replaced with the more recent idea to use the current character).
Stirling,
We have already discussed between you and I what you are currently suggesting.
I do not want to argue with you about it so I only ask one thing.
Is it or is it not full-blown machine translation? It requires not only conversion of minor vocabulary differences, but grammatical, syntactic, and many other changes.
Mark
On Fri, 18 Feb 2005 00:26:05 -0500, Stirling Newberry stirling.newberry@xigenics.net wrote:
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.
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