Dear all:
Finally I have found my way here where the discussion takes place. There has not been much
in meta. I have read arguments from both sides here, and I would like to contribute my
ideas to the question we have.
Let me first introduce my language background. My parents' native language is actually
Shanghainese, so I know it. I was born and raised in Hong Kong, so I am most fluent in
Cantonese. My elementary school used Mandarin as the language of instruction, so I am also
fluent in Mandarin. My education later was more and more in English, so I also know the
British English dialect. Then I went to USA and became fluent in American English. I also
know a little Japanese.
It is very interesting but not surprising to see that the strongest opposition against
setting up Wikipedia in Chinese dialects came from Chinese speakers. Yes, we are educated
to believe that Chinese is one language and that Qin Shihuang has unified the written
language thousands of years ago. One user correctly pointed out that the unified writing
system was Classical Chinese (Wenyanwen). Today's Xiandai Hanyu / Baihuawen is
actually based on the Mandarin vernacular. People not speaking Mandarin Chinese suddenly
became illiterate when they first encountered Baihuawen but education has successfully
established the Mandarin vernacular as the new standard of Chinese writing.
Cantonese Chinese : Mandarin Chinese :: British English : American English?
One user has correctly pointed out that the analogy is improper. All linguists agree that
the first two dialects are not mutually intelligible but the last two dialects are. The
reason that Mandarin speakers can understand writing by people from Hong Kong is that
formal education requires students to writing in Mandarin vocabulary and Mandarin grammar.
Many students are unaware of the fact just because they do not speak Mandarin. That fact
is that every literate Cantonese speaker can understand text written in the Mandarin
vernacular. That is why some users argued that text written in Cantonese may not be
needed.
Colloquial vs. Vernacular
There could be some misunderstanding that I have to make clear. Standard written Chinese
is not in colloquial Mandarin but in vernacular Mandarin. There should be a sense of
formality in written literature, and the vocabulary should be standardized, but it should
sound natural and grammatical like it is spoken everyday. Standard written Chinese does
not sound like Cantonese when every character is pronounced in Cantonese. I must say that
the literary vernacular Cantonese standard is not as developed as Mandarin, but as many
users has stated, there are people creating Cantonese literature. Although writing a
Cantonese encyclopedia will be unprecedented, I supported the idea because I already found
Wikipedia in minority languages and fictional languages. I thought: why not give major
dialects of China a try?
As an illustration, the language I am writing in is vernacular English. Colloquial English
will be like this:
http://www.langmaker.com/db/bbl_englishcolloquial.htm
I found that later in the discussion, the opposition started to get focused on the real
issue that got my attention: If I am writing the encyclopedia in vernacular Cantonese
using traditional Chinese script, how much will it be different from the existing ZH
Wikipedia? We can only try it out to see. So far linguistic studies concentrated only on
the spoken varieties of Chinese.
Proposal
I propose that we agree on some policies on setting up a Wikipedia in a new language.
Since a new Wikipedia will need some good articles to start with anyway, we may ask people
who propose new Wikipedia to pick some topics from the 1000 essential articles and write
say at least 3 good articles of moderate length and 20 good stubs in the proposed script.
A possible location without new setup for those experimental articles will be on meta by
using pages with prefixes like "Wikipedia:New/zh-yue-han/",
"Wikipedia:New/zh-wuu-han/", "Wikipedia:New/zh-guoyu-pinyin/". (By the
way, I support Pinyin Wikipedia. If there is a "Simple English" version, why not
a pinyin version for people to learn Chinese?)
That is just a thought. How feasible is the idea? Please fill me in on the technical
issues. I hope that further discussions here can work on the details formalize the
procedure so that every language/dialect can have a fair chance to start a new Wikipedia
and have a reasonably good foundation if started.
As for the doubt on how much time I will spend on the Wu Wikipedia? I dont know. How much
commitment is required to support an issue on Wikimedia? Is there a policy? The reason I
am only active in EN is because I want not only to edit, but to participate in the
community. I prefer spending more time on one community first. I have already made some
edits on ZH, and I will contribute more.
Felix Wan