If these are only phonetic differences, then how on earth is it different from a Baihuawen equivalent of the same story?
I don't feel right now like lecturing you on linguistic human rights (re Singlish), if it's really nessecary somebody else can jump in for me.
Mark
On Sun, 20 Feb 2005 17:50:26 +0800, Sheng Jiong sheng.jiong@gmail.com wrote:
You are squarely wrong about Singlish. It is not a dialect of English, it is an English-based creole. The difference between the way you write that sentence and the way I write it is this: I write it "yu kan go o no'" but you write it "You can go or not?", this is because you use an English-based orthography that doesn't reflect extreme phonetic differences
Everybody speaks English differently. Should we all "reflect extreme phonetic differences" rather than using proper spellings?
I wouldn't support a Wikipedia for colloquial English because it is the exact same language as written English. A Wikipedia for Scots or AAVE or Singlish, I would support, but just normal colloquial English, I would not. Nor would I support separate Wikipedias for Mandarin and Baihuawen - they are one and the same.
So now we have a person supporting Singlish Wikipedia. I think Wikipedia will soon grow into an encyclopedia with 1 million languages, rather than articles.
And anyway you cannot split between Mandarin and Baihuawen: one is spoken, one is written, how do you split?
Also there is much differences in Shanghainese too, if you want I can maybe type some examples later.
Pray show me something I have never learnt about my own mother tongue.
I have a story to tell you Mr Sheng Jiong. Sit back and read please.
有一趟、北風搭太陽辣辣海爭啥人個本事大。爭法爭法來勒一個過道人、身浪穿仔一件厚袍子。伊拉兩家頭就王東道、講好啥人能夠先叫迭個過道人拿伊個夠子脫下來、就算啥人本事大。北風〓足仔勁窮吹八吹。不過吹得越結棍、埃個人拿袍子裹得越緊。後首來北風無沒勁勤、只好就算勤。過一息太陽出來一曬、埃個過道人馬上就拿袍子脫脫。所以北風勿得勿承認、還是太陽比伊本事大。
The moral of the story is that nobody likes the sun and nobody likes the north wind either. But they both like to write in colloquial Wu. Very much.
You are just using "extreme phonetic differences" to express. If it is written in baihuawen, Shanghainese can still understand and read out in Shanghainese.
So now I begin to realise the difference between you and me: you think there is a need to set up Wikipedias to "reflect extreme phonetic differences" between a standard language and a not so standard spoken language. But I want just to have 1 Wikipedia in the standard language, and let the reader to read it in any different ways they want. To me that is the most sensible thing to do because everybody else do this: after all we created language to communicate, not to "reflect extreme phonetic differences".
formulax