On Dec 25, 2004, at 10:31 AM, John Lee wrote:
Stirling Newberry wrote:
The Cantonese dialect does have unique colorful phrases and a different linguistic culture that manifests itself in Cantopop, film and cartoons. Some would seem foreign to "Mandarin" speakers. It would be great to have these Cantonese-isms captured in some way that could be done in a combined ZH Wikipedia.
-Andrew (User:Fuzheado)
I'm again going to suggest that some sort of "dialectical bracketting" be implemented, which would allow for phrases to be marked as being in a dialect of the language. Syntax would be something like [[dialect: base phrase | dialect: dialect phrase | dialect: dialect phrase]] and then allow users to pick the dialect of the language they are using. This would allow for everything from the differences between British and American English, to far more distant written dialects.
IIRC there was stiff opposition for this last time because it'd confuse newcomers too much.
John Lee ([[en:User:Johnleemk]]) __
It's a trade off between reader confusiong, from dialectical inconsistencies, and editor confusion. Of these two, the latter is easier to solve, because educating editors is within the reach of Wikimedia, where as changing readers is not. This syntax is no more difficult than the use of macros, image links and considerably less complex than tables.