But how many possible pages could there be on such a Wiki?
You could divide it into pages for grammatical features, dialects, and even phonology. But even then it would be really small.
And Sheng Jiong: Second-language learners rarely preserve endangered languages. (Cantonese isn't exactly "endangered" though). The only proven effective method to revive dying languages is the kohanga reo/punana leo method - a pre-kindergarten immersion program, usually followed by bilingual primary school and often secondary and post-secondary school as well.
To maintain languages which seem to be on the downtrend but are still taught to most children, the best strategy is to increase the wealth of content available /in/ the language, rather than about it - the people who are responsible the most for the maintenance of any language are its own native speakers, and a speaker of a language has no use for lessons in their language and seldom has use for grammatical information in their language.
While for Cantonese, at present visual and auditory material is definitely most helpful in maintenance (movies, songs, etc) there is already a wealth of this and currently the area the language is most lacking and which seems the most questionable part of its future and legacy, is literature and other written material. There exists some, but it is a very small amount and is NOT proportional to the visual and auditory matierals.
I am surprised that you introduce a new reason for not creating a Cantonese Wikipedia - it's "too big of a step" for the speakers of this language. That is not a decision for you, a monolingual speaker of Mandarin, to make!
Mark
On Sat, 26 Feb 2005 12:02:11 +0800, Sheng Jiong sheng.jiong@gmail.com wrote:
Now I think that is a much more sensible idea. An encyclopedia would be too big a step to take at the moment, but a wiki introducing Cantonese or other smaller languages would certainly help maintain and preserve the languages.
I like the idea and I certainly support the project.
formulax
After browsing the wonderful Wikicities for some time, I have a different idea. We do not need to be bound by the format of an encyclopedia. Why not start a wiki about Cantonese, written mainly in standard English and/or standard Chinese? I believe that wiki will be very useful, will attract contributors and readers, and should not be opposed.
Since that will be a different project, I would like to do a quick popularity survey here. Who will support that project? Who will contribute?
If the Quenya people are still on the list, let me tell you that I would like to see a wiki about Quenya written in English too. Of course, there is no restriction on writing example articles in Quenya.
Felix Wan
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