Jiaqing, the thing is I am not talking about formal writing, I am talking about colloquial speech. "有一次,北風同太陽?度拗緊邊個叻啲.佢哋啱啱睇到有個人行過,哩個人着住件大褸." does that readily make sense to you? (the question mark in the sentence is where I couldn't even find a character, even after all sorts of search). I am not the one who has made this Minnan Wikipedia. Do not blame me for it. I don't see why you are so bitter to it, if it has such little use as you claim and nobody visits it at all as you say, then how does it "drain" from normal zh.wikipedia? I think perhaps you should learn the principle "live and let live". Mark On Fri, 24 Dec 2004 22:41:37 +0800, Jiaqing Bao <jbao.itl91g(a)nctu.edu.tw> wrote:

Written colloquial Yue is a distinct written language from written standard Chinese, it has a literature, a body of readers who are not necessarily literate in standard Chinese. The Guangzhou dialect of Yue Chinese has literature which includes opera texts, poetry, novels and historical material dating back to the Ming dynasty. Since World War II it has increased in usage and popularity, particularly with its use to join together Chinese communities through out both the Pacific Rim and in North America, as well as its role in economically open Hong Kong. It however does not have a standardized form, thought the Hong Kong government has produced a standardized set of characters. According to Chan, "it has never been the subject of perscriptive reforms", which is to say, there is no standardization process towards a single written language. There will be strong opposition from those who want to see Chinese remain a system of languages with a standardized written form, at the same time, the use of Colloquial Written Yue is a documentable fact, needing only the desire to create a standardized form which all users of Cantonese can recognize. However, this is not currently the case - there is a major dialectical division within Yue itself, which produces spoken forms which are not mutually intelligible - not uncommon for languages with large illiterate populations - but which are grammatically unified. However, the main reason for CWY is to represent sounds of words. This is a different case from the Western Colloquial Arabic: there is a written language for Yue, but one which has several written "dialects", some of which are confusing to the other users of it. There is, as of yet, no single "authoritative" source for what "written" Cantonese looks like. However, it is close - there are classes which require written fluency in Cantonese taught at Universities, and there has been an explosion of linguistic research. There are wide areas of common usage, including pronouns, for example. This is a pure judgment call, how close to having a standardized “language” is close enough? Is the growth of CWY an artifact of Hong Kong being separate from the mainland? Or is it the result of a long culture centered around an economically vibrant area which has often been separate from, or at odds with, the central government(s). A wiktionary and wikipedia would almost certainly be part of the process of study of the language, and might well be followed by linguists interested in the process itself. Chan, Thomas "Orthographic Change: Yue Chinese Dialect Characters in the 19th and 20th Centuries" Matthews, Stephen and Yip, Virginia _Cantonese: A Comprehensive Grammar_, Routledge, 1994 Snow, Donald _Cantonese as Written Language_, Honk Kong University Press, 2004. Zheng, Dingou _Jinri Yueyu_ (Today's Cantonese), Jinan University Press