On Sat, 11 Sep 2004 17:11:11 -0700, Mark Williamson node.ue@gmail.com wrote:
"most of the Chinese-speaking people"? You mean yuanml, shizhao, fuzheado? All primarily users of Simplified.
It's obvious you've not spent time on ZH, otherwise you would know I am not a simplified Chinese user. My user page there since February 2004 has a message in traditional characters, my system of choice. Shizhao (yuanml) has been very patient to explain things so far, and I have held off writing any response to you other than "Dialogue with the ZH community," hoping you'd engage in friendly cooperation. I hope you will.
- There appears to be an automated technical way to translate from one
system to the other, albeit one that occasionally mucks things up.
The same can be said for machine translation between any two given languages.
Wikipedia is a human-oriented wiki. The task at hand is different than purely automated machine translation. That should be clear by now that this allows a different approach to the problem.
...who has voiced their opinion on this list thus far. And it *does* appear we have some Chinese speakers on this list at least who are wanting to stay neutral but have said things in my favour.
Not exactly what I'd call "support" for the cause. Most users in the ZH community see the value of keeping the critical mass together, at least for now, given its small size.
Nationalistic/patriotic reasons? These languages use TWO DIFFERENT WRITING SYSTEMS.
This is incorrect. Both simplified and traditional use the same logogrpahic "writing system", the differences are an issue of glyphs. As others have said, a relatively small subset of characters have been changed to make writing and learning simpler, and there are problems with many-to-one mappings. However, let's make this clear:
Traditional vs. simplified is one issue. Another whole issue is vocabulary, idioms and usage in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, United States, PRC (and provinces within), etc. They are largely orthogonal. They are more alike than dissimilar, so there is value in keeping them together, and finding a technical solution for managing the differences using methods that are less disruptive than a full fork.
Node, there is no doubt you are a smart guy, and your schooling has served you well. But consider this a case of learning how to work with others and the community, something that is much harder to learn. Thanks.
-Andrew (User:Fuzheado)