Re: [Wikipedia-l] About Cantonese Wikipedia

Hi Mountain, I think I should respond to a couple of points. 1) This is because of baihua, which is used by Cantonese speakers and Mandarin speakers alike although it is based firstly on Mandarin. I think the issue here is "colloquial Cantonese" which has some different grammar and a lot of different words. (the issue is very very very complex unfortunately) 2) Exactly, however there is the possibility to use the hanzi for writing the "colloquial Cantonese", which is difficult to understand for readers who don't speak Cantonese. I'm not sure what you mean about Cantonese not being able to finish the list of articles - if you mean there aren't enough people who use the romanisation to be able to finish it, then yes, that is true, and perhaps to use roman letters is a bad idea. But if hanzi (including Cantonese "fangyanzi", writing colloquial Cantonese instead of standard written baihua which is shared with Cantonese and Mandarin) is used, there are surely enough people who can write such a list, although not all people who can speak Cantonese colloquial know how to write it (since not all characters are part of Mandarin-based "baihua", and some have different meanings). I think that if this isn't just one user who wants to start a separate Wikipedia, but a small group, even if other Cantonese speakers are opposed, we should let them start their Wikipedia on a "trial basis" to see how things work. I think this is usually best strategy in such a situation, and later if it isn't good it can be closed or moved to different servers. Mark On Sat, 25 Dec 2004 03:00:16 +0800, yuanml <yuanml(a)pku.org.cn> wrote: