Hey hey hey... hold it.

Quenya, not having an official supporting organisation like Klingon or Lojban, deserves to at least be considered, although it should probably be relegated to the same second-class status currently afforded to the Klingon and sometimes Lojban Wikipedias.

However, the fact that the proposer speaks only passing Quenya and does not refer to an individual or organisation on whose behalf he presumes to request this language (as I have done, and as has done Pektiong Tan), makes me wary. The Wikipedia should probably not be created until somebody floats along who can claim real fluency in the language, or the requester contacts an organisation to confirm support.

Mark

On Thu, 10 Feb 2005 04:02:50 +0000, Arwel Parry arwel@cartref.demon.co.uk wrote:

In message BAY103-F32839BCEC9810D39BDEA5DDB760@phx.gbl, Ron H aceron99-PkbjNfxxIARBDgjK7y7TUQ@public.gmane.org writes

...

I would like to request adding Quenya to the list of languages on Wikimedia. Quenya is the language of the elves in the works of Tolkien. Other fictional languages, such as Klingon, already exist on Wikipedia. speak passing Quenya. I have already prepared several articles, including one on constellations, and would like to add them to a quenya-language wiki.

Firsfron on Wikipedia.

Oh, please no. We had an enormous argument about Klingon and even now there's only 50 articles on tlh.

Is there really a user community large enough to sustain a Quenya wikipedia? What would the language code be? And can MediaWiki handle Tengwar fonts?

Genuine languages like Ossetian are finding it difficult enough to get the developer resources to set themselves up. I don't think this is something that should be rushed into.

-- Arwel Parry http://www.cartref.demon.co.uk/ _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l

Mark Williamson wrote:

Hey hey hey... hold it.

Quenya, not having an official supporting organisation like Klingon or Lojban, deserves to at least be considered, although it should probably be relegated to the same second-class status currently afforded to the Klingon and sometimes Lojban Wikipedias.

However, the fact that the proposer speaks only passing Quenya and does not refer to an individual or organisation on whose behalf he presumes to request this language (as I have done, and as has done Pektiong Tan), makes me wary. The Wikipedia should probably not be created until somebody floats along who can claim real fluency in the language, or the requester contacts an organisation to confirm support.

Good points.

I think the most important criterion, though, should probably be this: Will there be people interested in researching in the language?

I strongly suspect this is why the Klingon Wikipedia is a marginal failure. As a concept, it sounds great, and it's true that there are some fluent and literate speakers of Klingon, but when the chips are down even the Klingon speakers will be doing their research in English, or French, or German, or whatever other language they use in their day-to-day lives to get by in the world.

Interest and fluency aren't really enough for a successful reference work. You also need it to be useful, or it won't sustain and increase its pool of interest.

Personally, I'd rather see the various Elvish languages of Middle-Earth in Wikipedia than Klingon, and I'd be more likely to use it than Ossetian, but frankly I think Ossetian might have a place in Wikipedia at the present time, and Quenya really doesn't (in my estimation).

Then again, maybe that's just me.

-- Chad

Kaixo!

On Thu, Feb 10, 2005 at 01:24:41AM -0700, Mark Williamson wrote:

Tengwar, like Klingon, is not in the Unicode standard, although it is a part of the conscript registry. Spaces used by the conscript registry for Tengwar are used by diffferent fonts for different characters - I have one that uses it for Chinese characters, and another one that uses the Klingon space for Arabic calligraphic forms.

Conscript space should be avoided indeed. It was mostly useful whe ncomputers couldn't handle real unicode (which isn't limited to BMP).

Tengwar is alwo encoded on plane 17 (I think) in a space that is guaranteed to not conflict with other writtings; there are fonts supporting it. So that should be the used encoding.

And there is always the possibility to convert from one encoding to the other, like in the Chinese wikipedia.

A wiki were people could write in tengwar would indeed be a good thing; but it shouldn't be a wikipedia. It should be a different project (even if using the same software).

On Wed, 9 Feb 2005 23:55:05 -0500, Stephen Forrest

...

It seems to me to be a reasonable thing to insist that a language must have at one time been a native tongue of some human population in order for it to be granted a wikipedia.

No! With that criterium the Esperanto wikipedia would have been denied.

The focus shouldn't be on the language itself on a linguistic level (that would be vain, as all languages are linguistically equal); but on the sociologic level, focus on the speakers community and what they want to do. If there is a real will to write an encyclopedia, then it should be accepted, whatever the language; but if there isn't a will to write an encyclopedia of human knowledge, then it shouldn't (and I insist on *human* knowledge; while an encyclopedia on the world of the Middle Earth would be a very nice project, it doesn't fit Wikipedia).

On Thu, 10 Feb 2005 12:56:54 +0100, Pablo Saratxaga wrote:

...

On Wed, 9 Feb 2005 23:55:05 -0500, Stephen Forrest

...

It seems to me to be a reasonable thing to insist that a language must have at one time been a native tongue of some human population in order for it to be granted a wikipedia.

No! With that criterium the Esperanto wikipedia would have been denied.

According to independent sources (as ethnologue.com), the number of native speakers of Esperanto is about 200 to 2000. I presume, the number is underestimated: there are at least four "denaskuloj" (native speakers of Esperanto) only among my close friends.

Thank you all for mentioning Ossetian! :) At the moment we use MediaWiki at http://vicerveza.homeunix.net/osetio/ to collect community, to ellaborate better terms for technical things and just to practice before getting to real work.

Sincerely, Slavik Ivanov, Russia

Mark Williamson (node.ue@gmail.com) [050211 11:41]:

On Thu, 10 Feb 2005 20:29:04 +1100, David Gerard fun@thingy.apana.org.au wrote:

...

Ron H (aceron99@hotmail.com) [050210 13:09]:

...

...

I would like to request adding Quenya to the list of languages on Wikimedia. Quenya is the language of the elves in the works of Tolkien. Other fictional languages, such as Klingon, already exist on Wikipedia. I speak passing Quenya. I have already prepared several articles, including one on constellations, and would like to add them to a quenya-language wiki.

...

I think we can all agree that Quenya should be created before we even consider Cantonese. ... no?

I'm pretty sure you're being sarcastic, and if you are, it's funny. But I just want to make sure... are you?

I cite the above as evidence of Commonwealth English being mutually unintelligible with American English. For further proof, I will show transcripts of British English users arguing politics with American libertarians on #wikipedia. No way either can understand anything the other is saying.

- d.

...

Wikipedia Foundation money I hope it will be used to cover the languages of living humans in preference to languages of interest only to fans, (...)

Do you mean wikipedias like the latin one should not to exist?

IMHO, Latin is stil lused, e.g., for regular radio broadcasts by the Vatican.

Skriptor [[de:Benutzer:Skriptor]]

...

IMHO, Latin is stil lused, e.g., for regular radio broadcasts by the Vatican.

The Vatican isn't exactly short of cash. It could well afford a Latin Wikipedia of its own.

The Tolkien estate also is unlikely to be short of cash, same as the producers of Star Trek... ;-)

Skriptor

[[de:Benutzer:Skriptor]]

Ribamar Santarosa de Sousa said:

...

(...) Wikipedia Foundation money I hope it will be used to cover the languages of living humans in preference to languages of interest only to fans, (...)

Do you mean wikipedias like the latin one should not to exist?

It's a borderline case. It's well over a century since scientific papers were commonly written in Latin, and about forty years since the Second Vatican Council recommended the abolition of the tridentine mass, which was predominately Latin. I studied the language at school but my children did not. If the choice today were between Latin and a language with living native speakers and a strong written culture I would choose the latter. But I do not rule out Latin, Klingon, Quenya or Sindarin, but I hope we'll not place such marginal entities above real people. Of course if nobody is prepared to work on a Wikipedia in a given language, the question does not arise.

So sorry, well, i believe only "living humans" can write articles, so, i knew i should not make a literal interpretating on what you said. Trying to understand you, certainly I made a wrong presuming on what you meant. (But now I guess I understand you: Regular radio broadcasts by the Vatican are made by living humans; people writing the Quenyan wikipedia wouldn't be living humans).

Sorry, I guess I did not manage to correctly convey what I wanted to get across: Latin is not a 'dead' language, in the sense that it is still used today by actual people to communicate information (as opposed to being used because the speakers find the use of the language itself interesting, cool or whatever positive feeling they get). In other words: It is used by people in the same way that you and me are using English.

Skriptor [[de:Benutzer:Skriptor]]

Lars Aronsson wrote:

Jan Henning wrote:

...

Sorry, I guess I did not manage to correctly convey what I wanted to get across: Latin is not a 'dead' language, in the sense that it is still used today by actual people to communicate information (as

There actually is an entry [[en:dead language]] that redirects to [[en:extinct language]], and the common definition does include Latin, since practically no children are brought up speaking this as their first and native language. Now, there is nothing wrong in a language being "dead". But Latin is about as dead as it gets. Hebrew was de facto dead (according to the article), but has been revived.

Maybe "historical language" would be a better term. Sanskrit would be another, perhaps even proto-indo-european. It is most important to distinguish these (whether or not resurrected) from those intended to satisfy someone's intellectual ideals or fictitious environment.

Ec

Tony Sidaway a écrit: I don't have any objection in principle to groups producing

their own encyclopedias in any language, but when it comes to spending Wikipedia Foundation money I hope it will be used to cover the languages of living humans in preference to languages of interest only to fans, hobbyists and linguists.

Quite true... but note that these projects usually do not grow much, and do not have much visitors, so they do not cost much ;-)

ant

David Gerard said:

If we have a precedent that zh: can block the existence of a Cantonese Wikipedia, can en: block Quenya? Please?

I hope we have no such precedent. Allowing the speakers of a rival language to veto the production of a Wikipedia would not be right. Their observations (and I've seen some potentially persuasive arguments on either side in the Chinese Wikipedia discussion though I have not investigated it closely) should not be dismissed as irrelevant, but they shouldn't be allowed to block an otherwise viable Wikipedia.

David Gerard said:

But let's start a Quenya Wikipedia instead. Hell, that's not grossly insulting! At all!

That Aussie^H^H^H^H^H^HBritish sarcasm gets me every time. :)

Neil Harris (usenet@tonal.clara.co.uk) [050211 02:48]:

Here's a compromise proposal: the Chinese Wikipedia should be regarded as having succeeded beyond doubt when it has reached an article count of N articles, where N might be, say, 50,000. At that point, the barrier to creating other Chinese-language should be dropped. At the current rate of growth, that will probably be sometime next year. Here's the nice, counter-intuitive consequence to this proposal: it provides an incentive to alternative-Chinese-language proponents to add content to the mainstream-Chinese Wikipedia, and recruit more people to do so, so that it will grow as rapidly as possible. When the 50,000 target is reached, it is probable that many of these new editors will start to concentrate on their own local language versions; however, many of them will, I imagine, also continue to work on the main Chinese Wikipedia, and there will be a major incentive for content to flow in translation between the different Chinese Wikipedias. So it's a win-win proposal.

It's a fairly easy proposal to argue against: zh: has already reached critical mass and will keep growing, barring the vicissitues of the Chinese government (which is a force orthogonal to this argument).

Further argument against: it's a "compromise" with a position that is untenable to start with - trying to take volunteers who've come forward for a different idea to work on your own project rather than that one.

Further argument against: there is no natural reason why someone whose interest is captured by a Cantonese wikipedia should be forced to work on a Mandarin one first.

- d.

Neil Harris (usenet@tonal.clara.co.uk) [050211 03:18]:

Just as with politics, there are many actual positions hidden behind people's ostensible positions. At the moment, we have a position where "yes, but only when we are happy", or even "yes, real soon now" actually mean "never". The key here is _breaking the deadlock_ of _indefinite_ opposition to other Chinese language Wikipedias, by making supporters on both sides commit in advance to a value of N, and automatically triggering the change in policy when N is reached. Making people make _objective_ choices always clarifies their positions.

The thing is you're still presupposing that an existing wikipedia has a right to block the existence of a new Wikipedia.

I ask the Board: is this the case?

- d.

On Thu, February 10, 2005 11:14 am, Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales said:

David Gerard wrote:

...

The thing is you're still presupposing that an existing wikipedia has a right to block the existence of a new Wikipedia.

I ask the Board: is this the case?

Not speaking here for the board, but only offering my own tentative opinion, the answer to this is "no" in the general case, but that such factors can be a part of the overall decision.

Nice to hear that. I have never taken the resource argument seriously, and no one here should. But I do take the similarity argument very seriously.

I am told repeatedly by many people that while Mandarian and Cantonese are mutually unintelligible in the spoken form, in written form they are the same. This is pretty compelling for me.

I don't know how to convince you, but even the written forms are not the same. They are just similar, perhaps 80%-90% intelligible, depending on the subject matter. The written form eliminates phonetic differences, leaving only differences in vocabulary and grammar. Who told you that they are the same?

If there is a significant population of people who can not read/write standard written Chinese, but *can* read/write Cantonese in some writing system that is different, then I want to learn about that, because that would be a very compelling factor in the other direction.

The fact is, every literate Cantonese speaker can read standard written Chinese, because that is what is taught in schools, not because written Cantonese and written Mandarin are the same.

Do we want to set a language policy to disallow a Wikipedia if almost all the literate speakers of that regional speech can read the written form of another prestiged regional speech? I am OK with that. That may be good for Wikipedias to limit the number of versions. We just need to make it clear and apply it consistently.

That policy will disallow Ebonics (African American Vernacular English) and Singlish (Singaporean English) even though some linguists classify them as creoles, but will not disallow Tok Pisin (we do have tpi:), which is a creole with a distinct writing system.

I am not familiar with the European languages. I remember I heard about Catalan and three versions of Dutch, or something else. Can other people fill me in on how the language policy is applied to other regional speeches?

Perhaps this is a good time for us to set a fair and workable language policy. We want our decision to set a good precedent, not a bad one.

Felix Wan

On Thu, February 10, 2005 4:30 pm, Mark Williamson said:

This policy, Felix, would also disallow prestigious languages, such as Catalan and Frisian, which although they have many speakers are spoken almost exclusively by bilinguals, and I would remind everybody to keep in mind that Cantonese and Wu have far more speakers than either Catalan or Frisian.

If you raise the similarity argument, this would be a blow against our having separate Punjabi, Hindi, and Urdu Wikipedias, against separate Danish, Swedish, and Bokmål Wikipedias, and against separate Bosnian, Serbian, and Croatian Wikipedias.

The difference with Singlish and Ebonics -> English and Cantonese and Wu -> Mandarin is that there is decidedly a continuum between Singlish and Ebonics -> "Standard" English, but not between Cantonese and Wu -> Mandarin, and that Singlish and Ebonics have no widely agreed-upon written form and that nobody would want to write a Singlish Wikipedia anyways (it is very low prestige and thanks to gov't campaigning it is regarded by most Singaporeans as poor English although experts disagree). [an exception is that Singlish is often used in instant messages and internet postings, but even tabloids don't use it and it has a relatively small number of native speakers when compared to Cantonese and Wu].

This is not to say that if somebody proposes and Ebonics or a Singlish Wikipedia I will be totally opposed, but I do not feel that the case is as strong as with Cantonese and Wu.

I do not see why we need a restrictive language policy when in the past our policy has been any and all - if the speakers of a speech variety want a separate Wikipedia, they are granted it, no matter how similar the two are, with the general exception of conlangs with few speakers. Our policy so far has worked fine.

The perception that it hasn't worked derives from the fact that critics of the current policy, who have little justification for their criticism, are still very vocal.

I personally don't see what would be wrong with allowing speakers of Ebonics or Singlish their own Wikipedia, as long as we could be certain it wasn't simply desired because the parties involved wanted to be able to insert their POV into articles.

I hope that people will take this e-mail at least somewhat seriously instead of saying "We do not value anything Mark says even though others have expressed similar concerns and nothing he is saying is very outrageous".

Mark

Thank Mark for your information and your support. I know it is an uphill battle to fight for a Wikipedia in a Chinese regional speech. I expect opposition not only from Mandarin speakers who know no other regional varieties, but also from speakers of those regional varieties. Because we are taught to believe that they are substandard. That is why I use examples of Ebonics and Singlish on purpose.

What I do not expect is that Jimbo believes that the two are the *same* when written despite our effort to demonstrate their difference. If that is an issue of trust, then our effort is futile, not matter how many examples and citations we quote. I was a little disappointed when I wrote my reply but not as angry as you are. ^_^

Now I know from your examples on European languages that the similarity argument and the bilingual argument do not hold. The only difference was that there was no opposition, or that the decision makers know about those languages, but have to trust their limited sources for Chinese regional speeches.

Unfortunately the myth of Hanzi is so widespread. Why would people believe two writing systems to be the same just because they both use Hanzi? Such a claim is never found in Latin based systems. Well, perhaps if the Paupa New Guineans write "you me talk talk" instead of "yumi tok tok", that will be English.

As long as the decision is not final, and the experiment on Cantonese articles is not banned, I will continue to work on it.

Felix Wan

What I think the problem here is is that you are asking the same few individuals.

It is my feeling that the individuals you ask are Mandarin speakers, just as somebody told me that the people you asked originally for an initial opinion about separate vs unified script zh: were all from the Mainland.

Perhaps you have unsubscribed from wikipedia-l, but recently there has been a coming-out of support from native speakers of Cantonese, including respected zh-wikipedians, for the proposal of a separate Cantonese Wikipedia.

It angers me very much that you don't take this into consideration but keep trying to use a stick as a wheel asking the same people over and over when their opinion really doesn't matter much in this situation.

I have quoted experts, as has Stirling Newberry, in telling you that what you're hearing is just plain wrong. You have not trusted me because you have some problem with me, even though I have quoted experts and provided solid examples, and you have not commented on Stirling Newberry's fact-finding post, although this message suggests strongly that for some reason you are discarding his citations as well as a sign that you trust non-expert opinion from speakers of a related language over quotes from expert works which in all cases were written by fluent speakers of Cantonese or Wu.

What's even more infuriating is that you still continue to believe these common Mandarin-speakers over not only the opinion of Cantonese-speaking experts, but over the DIRECT TESTIMONIAL OF MULTIPLE CANTONESE SPEAKERS.

I really used to respect you a lot, but this is like the straw that broke the horse's back.

Mark

On Thu, 10 Feb 2005 11:14:33 -0800, Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:

David Gerard wrote:

...

The thing is you're still presupposing that an existing wikipedia has a right to block the existence of a new Wikipedia.

I ask the Board: is this the case?

Not speaking here for the board, but only offering my own tentative opinion, the answer to this is "no" in the general case, but that such factors can be a part of the overall decision.

I am told repeatedly by many people that while Mandarian and Cantonese are mutually unintelligible in the spoken form, in written form they are the same. This is pretty compelling for me.

If there is a significant population of people who can not read/write standard written Chinese, but *can* read/write Cantonese in some writing system that is different, then I want to learn about that, because that would be a very compelling factor in the other direction.

--Jimbo _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l

...

It angers me very much that you don't take this into consideration

Mark, woah, come down, unplug the computer and take a walk around the building or something.

I don't think Jimbo is siding one way or another. I suggest that you contact a chinese linguistics professor at some fancy university and get his expert advice. I know Jimbo listens to the voice of reason, and getting all emotional is not the path.

As I noted in my previous e-mail, both myself and Stirling Newberry have quoted experts, and I have suggested reading materials.

I also think that there has not been a hard and fast rule made. Thigs are still in discovery mode.

It's not the decision that irritates me, it's the reasoning and what appears, at least to me, to be ignorance.

Mark

On Thu, 10 Feb 2005 18:06:23 -0800 (PST), Christopher Mahan chris_mahan@yahoo.com wrote:

--- Mark Williamson node.ue@gmail.com wrote:

...

...

...

It angers me very much that you don't take this into

consideration

...

Mark, woah, come down, unplug the computer and take a walk around

the

...

building or something.

I don't think Jimbo is siding one way or another. I suggest that

you

...

contact a chinese linguistics professor at some fancy university

and

...

get his expert advice. I know Jimbo listens to the voice of

reason,

...

and getting all emotional is not the path.

As I noted in my previous e-mail, both myself and Stirling Newberry have quoted experts, and I have suggested reading materials.

Obviously not expert enough. Ask the Chinese embassy for an official statement.

The Chinese embassy will tell you many things, including "There is only one Chinese language" and "Taiwan is a province of China". They may both be true in the mind of PRC and the UN, but they're certainly not based on reality.

...

...

I also think that there has not been a hard and fast rule made.

Thigs

...

are still in discovery mode.

It's not the decision that irritates me, it's the reasoning and what appears, at least to me, to be ignorance.

Get off your high horse and pony up half a million dollars and 5000 man hours for wikipedia and then we'll talk about ignorance.

I said ignorance, not lack of generosity. I would not hesitate to call Mother Teresa ignorant if I found out that she had done something I perceived to be ignorant.

Chinese wikipedia will sort itself out. Like they say: "Under the Manchus for 500 years, can wait 10 more."

Yes, it will sort itself out because eventually under increasing pressure from linguistic imperialists like Andrew, local Chinese vernaculars will be gone completely.

Mark

Hello,

Christopher Mahan wrote:

Obviously not expert enough. Ask the Chinese embassy for an official statement.

I wouldn't trust the Chinese embassy for a neutral and fair answer. It's the last place I would ask.

Get off your high horse and pony up half a million dollars and 5000 man hours for wikipedia and then we'll talk about ignorance.

Just because one is willing to volunteer his/her time and money doesn't mean one isn't ignorant and vice versa. The two have no correlation, afaik.

Chinese wikipedia will sort itself out. Like they say: "Under the Manchus for 500 years, can wait 10 more."

LOL, even the most fatalistic of we Chinese will eventually become proactive sometimes.

little Alex

As far as I understand, the current Wikipedia is supposed to be a _Chinese_ one, not a _Mandarin_ one.

Andre Engels

Further argument against: there is no natural reason why someone whose interest is captured by a Cantonese wikipedia should be forced to work on a Mandarin one first.

On Fri, 11 Feb 2005 12:03:45 -0800 (PST), Felix Wan felixwiki@earthsphere.org wrote:

Even though I support the creation of a Cantonese Wikipedia, I will oppose writing Cantonese in zh: for the obvious pragmatic reason: every literate Cantonese speaker can read written Mandarin (standard Chinese), but the reverse is not true. Unfair, but that is the fact of life.

My primary concern is that everyone here understand the facts before making the decision. We live in a real world. We may deny Cantonese Wikipedia due to political, public relation, or pragmatic reasons, but let's be honest and state the reason. If we pretend that it is just because the two writing systems are the same, people will come again and again to demonstrate that they are different.

The community should nurture folks starting a new Wikipedia in a different dialect/language, as long as there is a critical mass of people, articles and interface translation. Again, my main concern has always been that a wiki with one person can be a lonely place. For example around SE Asia, I've been evangelizing for the smaller Wikipedias. Some have been successful, such as Malay, but sadly others have not, like Khmer (Cambodia).

Let's reframe this discussion not as the desire to "deny" a Wikipedia, but rather a way to be good stewards of new Wikipedias and launch them in good stead. The problem I have is in language enthusiasts (ie. Mark) encouraging the creation of new Wikipedias left-and-right just to get another notch on the post without regard to sustainability. Remember this is not an either/or proposition - folks can work on zh: and work on a dialect-specific version as well.

The honest dialogue is welcome given the bizarre sensational comments such as "eventually under increasing pressure from linguistic imperialists like Andrew, local Chinese vernaculars will be gone completely."

As there are five Chinese dialects represented among my immediate relatives, I got a chuckle out of it.

-Andrew (User:Fuzheado)

On Fri, 11 Feb 2005 14:31:09 -0700, Mark Williamson node.ue@gmail.com wrote:

So this means you believe a Cantonese Wikipedia will have no users and will not be sustainable?

You're sure changing your tune fast. A minute ago, it was "My pet project will lose resources!!!", but when you saw that didn't go over too well with anybody you change it to "I feel deeply for these people, and my primary concern is that they'll be lonely and I think their minds are being controlled by Mark."

As usual, wild exaggerations by Mark. Please find a quote or a pointer to anything I've said that resembles "My pet project will lose resources!!!" It's getting tired.

If I recall correctly, zh.wikipedia's history does not involve having the interface translated and a critical mass of people and articles /before/ the creation of the subdomain, and even when articles started to be created this was hardly true at first.

I think it was a pretty safe bet that the language of 1 billion speakers would be started sooner than later. Also, zh: was started in October 2002 by Mountain who drove the development of Unicode support in Wikipedia. So this is beyond critical mass - it was leadership in the whole WP project.

And just because you have relatives who speak five Chinese dialects doesn't mean you can't be a linguistic imperialist.

<groan>

Stalin, the master of linguistic imperialism, came from a Georgian-speaking family.

You're on the verge of realizing Godwin's Law.

-Andrew (User:Fuzheado)

Hello Felix

Out of curiosity, do we know how many editors would currently actively work on the cantonese langage ?

Ant

Felix Wan a écrit:

On Fri, February 11, 2005 9:41 am, Andre Engels said:

...

As far as I understand, the current Wikipedia is supposed to be a _Chinese_ one, not a _Mandarin_ one.

Andre Engels

...

Further argument against: there is no natural reason why someone whose interest is captured by a Cantonese wikipedia should be forced to work on a Mandarin one first.

Long story...

Suggested readings: [[en:Chinese language]] [[en:Chinese written language]] [[en:Vernacular Chinese]] [[en:Cantonese (linguistics)]]

In short, "standard written Chinese" has always been based on the Mandarin vernacular. Now there is a request to set up an encyclopedia based on the Cantonese vernacular. Although the latter has no official status, it has a de facto writing system popular among Cantonese speakers in Hong Kong, and is gaining popularity in Guangdong.

It is not possible to mix Cantonese and Mandarin writing in zh: like American and British English in en: because those two regional speeches of China do not enjoy equal status. Written Cantonese will be considered as substandard and corrected to conform with the vocabulary and grammar of Mandarin, which some people call "standard and proper Chinese".

Even though I support the creation of a Cantonese Wikipedia, I will oppose writing Cantonese in zh: for the obvious pragmatic reason: every literate Cantonese speaker can read written Mandarin (standard Chinese), but the reverse is not true. Unfair, but that is the fact of life.

My primary concern is that everyone here understand the facts before making the decision. We live in a real world. We may deny Cantonese Wikipedia due to political, public relation, or pragmatic reasons, but let's be honest and state the reason. If we pretend that it is just because the two writing systems are the same, people will come again and again to demonstrate that they are different.

Felix Wan

Felix Wan a écrit:

You may also want to review the thread "Wikipedia in Chinese dialects", where I proposed writing 3 good articles of medium length and 20 good stubs in any new language. They will also serve to test the hypothesis that written Mandarin and written Cantonese are the same, or are too similar to deserve a separate project.

People may still disagree, but at least that will be better than arguments without any backup.

Felix Wan

This seems an interesting idea to me...

So "Alex" could be "Alexandria"? :wink:

On Wed, 16 Feb 2005 15:44:17 +0800, Alex Y. Kwan litalex@gmail.com wrote:

Hello,

Felix Wan wrote:

...

Someone signed on Meta. There are some support beside opposition in the mailing list. Alex Kwan on this list edited my introduction to the test site: <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Test-WP/zh-yue > with an anonymous IP. We can expect him to contribute more when he is back from vacation.

I am back and *cough* am female.

...

People may still disagree, but at least that will be better than arguments without any backup.

Yep.

little Alex

---

Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l

Hello,

Mark Williamson wrote:

Or Alexis, or Alexandra. Although in recent times it may just be "Alex", especially in Hong Kong and Singapore.

"Alex" in HK is definitely a boy's name. I actually hate it when people use nicknames as their legal names, especially when it's because they don't know any better. But that's my problem and no one else's.

little Alex

Alex Y. Kwan wrote:

My primary school teacher tried to give me "Sandra" as a nickname. Argh. I actually like the "Lexa" that my friend came up with, except I don't want to be linked with Lex Luthor, however much I like him in "Smallville".

Lex Luthor did not, in any way, begin to occur to me when I read "Lexa". I doubt I'm alone in that.

-- Chad

On Tue, February 15, 2005 11:44 pm, Alex Y. Kwan said:

Hello,

Felix Wan wrote:

...

Someone signed on Meta. There are some support beside opposition in the mailing list. Alex Kwan on this list edited my introduction to the test site: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Test-WP/zh-yue with an anonymous IP. We can expect him to contribute more when he is back from vacation.

I am back and *cough* am female.

Welcome back. I really like the Cantonese "koei5", the genderless third person pronoun... ^_^; Written Mandarin has made unnecessarily distinct writings of the word "ta1". Let's not make the same mistake, and let's never try that for Cantonese "nei5"/Mandarin "ni3".

Meanwhile, I am trying to recruit new volunteers for the project: http://www.cantonese.org.cn/bbsxp/ShowForum.htm?forumid=6

Let's see the response. Also, go ahead to edit anything on the test site: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Test-WP/zh-yue

...

People may still disagree, but at least that will be better than arguments without any backup.

Yep.

little Alex

On Wed, February 16, 2005 4:50 pm, Mark Williamson said:

Hi Felix,

I think one thing that would help would be to add more to the list of topics. This would make it easier for incoming users, and there would be a wider range. Include perhaps links to famous people from Gwangdung and Hongkong and Macao, specific locales within Hongkong and Gwangchao, (ie, famous neighbourhood, districts, buildings, and landmarks, maybe also suburbs, nearby mountains, rivers, bays, ...)

Good idea. I will work on it.

I would do this myself but I'm not sure so much on famous things, and I don't know if there's a difference between the Guanhua-Baihuawen names for people and places and things and the Cantonese name for things.

Never mind trying. If you make a mistake, other people will correct it. Alex K is back. *She* will surely help a lot. ^_^

Another issue is do we want to include extremely divergences like Toishanwa, or do they need even a separate Wikipedia?

Let's see how divergent it is if someone really writes in Toishanwa. There is already much opposition to the one written in Standard Cantonese. Let's worry about those things later.

Felix Wan

On Thu, February 17, 2005 3:15 am, MilchFlasche瑋平 said:

On Wed, 16 Feb 2005 15:45:53 -0800 (PST), Felix Wan felixwiki@earthsphere.org wrote:

...

Meanwhile, I am trying to recruit new volunteers for the project: http://www.cantonese.org.cn/bbsxp/ShowForum.htm?forumid=6

We really need contributors. I pray that more people who types Cantonese hanzi everyday should join the testing.

For your information, I posted a message at another forum and received much opposition. The reasons are similar to the opposition here: http://www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk/phorum/read.php?1,34242

Felix Wan

On Thu, February 17, 2005 12:30 pm, Mark Williamson said:

Hi Felix,

Many of the responses there anger me because they almost go so far as to say that Cantonese is worthless as a language.

What about the guy who said something like "You will hardly get 50 characters in without wondering why Cantonese has so much 'junks'"?

Or the people who said "Cantonese should only be used for informal things." without giving a valid reason?

[snipped]

That is what I have said: I expect fierce opposition from Chinese, even native Cantonese speakers. It is not easy to unlearn. ^_^ Compared to those responses, people here are quite enlightened and respecting.

However, also look at the brighter side. If there was not such a debate, I may not have done so much research and found this group of enthusiasts: http://www.cantonese.org.cn/

There are some excellent articles on why we should encourage Cantonese speakers to write their own speeches: http://www.cantonese.org.cn/ungoo/article/writemyhand.htm http://www.cantonese.org.cn/ungoo/article/poorcantonese.htm The first one is written in Cantonese, the second in standard Chinese (Mandarin).

They have even compiled a list of Cantonese specific words, with references, and they stated on the web site to release the following two pages to the public domain: http://www.cantonese.org.cn/ungoo/master/dictionary1.htm http://www.cantonese.org.cn/ungoo/master/dictionary2.htm

Those can be a good starting point for the orthography of the potential Cantonese Wikipedia.

Felix Wan

On Thu, 17 Feb 2005 17:37:41 -0800 (PST), Felix Wan felixwiki@earthsphere.org wrote:

...

On Thu, February 17, 2005 12:30 pm, Mark Williamson said:

...

Hi Felix,

Many of the responses there anger me because they almost go so far as to say that Cantonese is worthless as a language.

What about the guy who said something like "You will hardly get 50 characters in without wondering why Cantonese has so much 'junks'"?

Or the people who said "Cantonese should only be used for informal things." without giving a valid reason?

[snipped]

That is what I have said: I expect fierce opposition from Chinese, even native Cantonese speakers. It is not easy to unlearn. ^_^ Compared to those responses, people here are quite enlightened and respecting.

If I may venture to speculate, it seems likely that the source of the Cantonese wikipedia push comes, not from the desire of a large number of Cantonese speakers to have Cantonese as a separate written language, but in a social problem involving the attitude of the writers of the "standard" dialect of a language towards others who use culturally important, but not formally approved of, versions of the language. People whose home dialect is close to the standard dialect often display this attitude, and because of the educational and professional incentives on the mainland, speaking the official version of the language - essentially a formalized version of the Beijing dialect - has a tremendous cultural cachet. The response is, often, for users of the culturally significant vernacular to declare that they are a separate formal language, even if this is not entirely supportable. In some cases this is enough to split the language, but usually it is not.

While this is not to discourage the people trying to start a cantonese wikipedia, it suggests that even if it works, it does not address the root problem of a cultural/language clash involving usage on the chinese wikipedia. This would indicate, therefore, that regardless of the outcome of the cantonese wikipedia, that some measures should be taken to reduce the strain on the chinese wikipedia in some fashion.

Perhaps this will make people reconsider my call for dialectical support in wikipedia - where people can choose not only their own language, but the dialect of it, and it would be possible to add markup information which would allow for differences in what is displayed based on dialect of the viewer. I feel that in the case of cantonese, this ability would be sufficient to reach a resolution - where cantonese speakers could enrich the content of the chinese wikipedia with cantonese native words and usage, without triggering the ire of the beijing dialect users.

On Feb 18, 2005, at 2:30 AM, MilchFlasche�|ƽ wrote:

Hi Striling,

I was a little shock seeing you still speculating that Cantonese is merely a "dialect" of "Chinese".

I'm a little shocked that you are confusing Cantonese's status as a written dialect and a spoken language. I'm a little shocked that you take a lecturing tone, and a little shocked that you seem to want to make this an adversarial relationship.

Hi Stirling and Cathy,

I will respond separately.

Cathy, these are all good and fine issues you raise.

The answers vary but in sum, none of us have ever written anything in full Cantonese in the context of article-writing. Contrary to what you may believe, it is actually hard to write in full-Cantonese without mixing in formal Chinese in a passage. But on an interpersonal level - that is much easier and we do write short memos an notes to one another in Cantonese.

This has been experienced by many a language in the past. For example, the O'odham language local to where I live had some issues at first where people thought English should be used in all formal contexts and O'odham should only be used for interpersonal communication and the like.

People found it difficult to write O'odham because they had been taught to write English in school.

However, with a little bit of effort on the part of everybody, these people decided it was worth it to use their native language in /all/ realms of life with only one exception, communication with people who do not know O'odham at all.

At first it was difficult - people kept substituting English words when there was a perfectly suitable O'odham equivalent, at least in formal writing - but in a short while people really got the hang of it and it was even fun for them.

Now there is radio, minor newspapers, road signs, local government, utility bills, business, and school all operating entirely in O'odham (with the exception of the schools which are bilingual - if they didn't teach English as their first language they would get hate mail from all over the country and pressure from the federal government to cease), and it has really experienced a wonderful blossoming (still no novels or post secondary education - that may have to wait).

What I'm saying here is that the reason it is difficult for you and your friends and colleagues to write long passages in Cantonese is because you don't have a lot of experience with writing Cantonese. That is to say, you may have experience writing messages like "Please have the papers ready for me in 5 minutes", but you don't have experience writing longer passages with content more like "It was my idea originally, but to Connie it was so intriguing that I let her fly with it. The results were more successful than we could imagine, they have increased the net worth of the division 150%. It's amazing nobody had thought of it before".

I don't know for sure but I am willing to hazard a guess that people like those at cantonese.org.cn can write longer passages in Cantonese relatively easily, purely, and fluently because it is something they do often.

As far as the Hong Kong vs Guangdong thing, I think a lot of this arises from terms that would be more used in daily conversation than informative speech, if you are talking semi-formally about Germany I think there would be very few problems compared to if you are talking informally about your family or especially about "extreme colloquialised" topics such as romantic relationships.

The differences between written HK Cantonese and GD Cantonese are very, very small when compared to those between written HK Cantonese and Baihuawen - the character used for negation in Cantonese means "to bite" in Baihuawen (this is partially because the etymologically correct character was phased out of colloquial Cantonese writing some time ago, and replaced with the more recent idea to use the current character).

Stirling,

We have already discussed between you and I what you are currently suggesting.

I do not want to argue with you about it so I only ask one thing.

Is it or is it not full-blown machine translation? It requires not only conversion of minor vocabulary differences, but grammatical, syntactic, and many other changes.

Mark

On Fri, 18 Feb 2005 00:26:05 -0500, Stirling Newberry stirling.newberry@xigenics.net wrote:

...

On Thu, 17 Feb 2005 17:37:41 -0800 (PST), Felix Wan felixwiki@earthsphere.org wrote:

...

On Thu, February 17, 2005 12:30 pm, Mark Williamson said:

...

Hi Felix,

Many of the responses there anger me because they almost go so far as to say that Cantonese is worthless as a language.

What about the guy who said something like "You will hardly get 50 characters in without wondering why Cantonese has so much 'junks'"?

Or the people who said "Cantonese should only be used for informal things." without giving a valid reason?

[snipped]

That is what I have said: I expect fierce opposition from Chinese, even native Cantonese speakers. It is not easy to unlearn. ^_^ Compared to those responses, people here are quite enlightened and respecting.

If I may venture to speculate, it seems likely that the source of the Cantonese wikipedia push comes, not from the desire of a large number of Cantonese speakers to have Cantonese as a separate written language, but in a social problem involving the attitude of the writers of the "standard" dialect of a language towards others who use culturally important, but not formally approved of, versions of the language. People whose home dialect is close to the standard dialect often display this attitude, and because of the educational and professional incentives on the mainland, speaking the official version of the language - essentially a formalized version of the Beijing dialect - has a tremendous cultural cachet. The response is, often, for users of the culturally significant vernacular to declare that they are a separate formal language, even if this is not entirely supportable. In some cases this is enough to split the language, but usually it is not.

While this is not to discourage the people trying to start a cantonese wikipedia, it suggests that even if it works, it does not address the root problem of a cultural/language clash involving usage on the chinese wikipedia. This would indicate, therefore, that regardless of the outcome of the cantonese wikipedia, that some measures should be taken to reduce the strain on the chinese wikipedia in some fashion.

Perhaps this will make people reconsider my call for dialectical support in wikipedia - where people can choose not only their own language, but the dialect of it, and it would be possible to add markup information which would allow for differences in what is displayed based on dialect of the viewer. I feel that in the case of cantonese, this ability would be sufficient to reach a resolution - where cantonese speakers could enrich the content of the chinese wikipedia with cantonese native words and usage, without triggering the ire of the beijing dialect users.

---

Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l

Unnecessary and irrelevant.

As for the length and number of the testing articles, since it has just begun, I suggest that we try not to express our outstraight doubt so early. If Mr. Sheng Jiong should continue assuming that Chinese vernacular versions lack necessity, I also suggest that he put more argument to discuss with. Yes, we do need more helpful discussion, especially after that people who are pros have said so much. As for the vote, I haven't heard that Wikimedia foundation has held any vote to decide whether a version should be built. Did we asked for all the community's consent when so many other languages were built? So who care most whether Cantonese or other vernaculars should have their own? Probably only the Chinese Wikipedia community. And why would they block? Because some people still confuse "Chinese" with "China", and forget that what we call "Chinese language" is actually only Mandarin, the common vernacular but not the only language spoken in China. And why should people from Chinese Wikipedia have a say to influence the establishment of Cantonese or Min-nan? I don't know! If you ask a Castilian or a German whether Catalan, Asturianu, or Plattduutsch version should exist, I wouldn't know how he would respond, but the fact is that they are there now, without much dispute! So I just need to be taught that why Chinese users should think otherwise.

On Fri, 18 Feb 2005 18:18:47 +0800, Sheng Jiong sheng.jiong@gmail.com wrote:

Guys, I do admire your passion and your enthusiasm (although I have no idea how long will that last). I am not against you having a try on writing serious things in Cantonese (which you have not yet quite started, as far as I know, since till now all you have written are just stubs less than even 200 characters). I still hold my opinion that there is not a necissity for a Cantonese Wikipedia(or any other Chinese dialect Wikipedias) to exist, but I encourage helpful discussions and even a vote if necessary should you decide to formally propose setting up one. What I do not want to see is the set up of a Cantonese Wikipedia without the consent of the entire Wikipedia community, especially the Chinese Wikipedia community (as in the case of Ming-nan Wikipedia).

(Someone mentioned about Bible translated into Algerian Arabic. I just wonder: is there any Cantonese translations of Bible, and if there is, is anybody still uses this version?)

[[User:Formulax]] _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l

If I recall correctly there was never a consensus in zh.wikipedia that a Minnan Wikipedia should be created.

That is why it has made Minnan Wikipedia a big joke. Extremely few Minnan speakers (even in Taiwan) can understand what the hack these guys are writing about in their Minnan Wikipedia. Because Minnan simply do not yet have a standardised writing system (despite Taiwanese government's effort to establish one, most grown-ups in Taiwan sitll cannot comprehend written Minnan, and there is no Minnan newspaper, only one TV channel)

Its original creation was as an entirely separate project "Holopedia" due to extreme community opposition from zh.wikipedia and the probability that people like Jimbo would at the time have been unwilling to consider it if his anonymous Chinese advisors said "閩南話與白話文是統一語言".

And Holopedia does not grow too.

As it was eventually turned into a small Wikipedia with a small number of articles (rather than 0), the general Wikipedia community accepted it somewhat hesitatingly although on zh.wikipedia it was widely disputed as to whether it should exist.

Because people choose to igonore it, and because it is just so small and it is almost non-existent. But I am not prepared to accept another Cantonese Wikipedia, and then Shanghainese, and then whatsoever trash.

Especially different in this case is use of Cantonese characters instead of Whites' languages' characters.

There are not standard. No one has formalised these "characters", not the Hong Kong government (both before and after 1997), not the Guangdong government, not any governments in the world. There is also not a standard developed by any influential non-government organizations.

Some people will ask "What is the difference?" but many of these people are the same people who would "correct" vernacular content posted to zh.wikipedia itself, showing that there really is a difference (I tried it once - it kept being reverted to the "correct" grammar ie baihuawen).

Your edit is reverted because you used these non-standard characters. But put characters aside, the grammar is the same for Cantonese and Chinese.

This is the issue of self-determination of this community of people writing colloquial Cantonese, it is not fair to let others decide to make them choose between writing Baihuawen or not write at all.

We are now seeing a small portion of Cantonese speakers who believe that there should be something as a Cantonese Wikipedia. But for most Cantonese speakers (even if you just limit that to Hong Kongers), most people object such proposals because most people know that Cantonese is NOT a written language. Again I want you to show me evidence that Cantonese IS a written language (do not tell me X books are written in Cantonese, because these are just 1 or 2 exceptions. What I want to see is 1) has any school began teaching WRITTEN CANTONESE; 2) has any newspapers/magazines started writing in Cantonese)

[[User:Formualx]]

As for the bible in Cantonese, yes there are, and they are still used.

There are also versions in Hakka (kejiahua), Wu, Minnan, and all other Chinese vernaculars. Most of them use hanzi, but some use Whites' languages' characters, and some use a mixture (representing only some functions words with the roman letters).

I daresay that most of these aren't widely used but this is for the alternative reason that Christianity is, for various reasons, not well tolerated in China (except in ethnic minorities), and outside the mainland most Chinese speak Cantonese, Minnan, and Hakka besides Mandarin. Thusly Minnan and Hakka bibles are used by some peoples in Taiwan, and Cantonese and Hakka bibles is used by some people in Hongkong and maybe Macao.

This delves into the debate on whether the Bible should be written in an extra formal literary language that is difficult to imagine happening (in most of the widely-used English translations, it's difficult to imagine real people in real situations speaking that way), or to use a colloquial style that is easier for people to understand and relate to.

I, not being religious (and what religion I do have is an amalgamy of Judaism and Christianity but with more Atheism than either), don't have a preference, but in Bible translation it is always a consideration.

Some Arabic churches prefer to read the Bible with God's speech in a formal manner, while others use local colloquial forms because it is easy to imagine people saying the words, in real life, although I think most Arab churches use vernacular versions (the exception would be churches where there is populations from many different dialects - it would be difficult to read vernacular Bibles in a church which is 25% Algerian, 25% Yemeni, 25% Lebanese, and 25% Bahraini, you would need 4 different bibles)

Mark

On Fri, 18 Feb 2005 18:18:47 +0800, Sheng Jiong sheng.jiong@gmail.com wrote:

...

Guys, I do admire your passion and your enthusiasm (although I have no idea how long will that last). I am not against you having a try on writing serious things in Cantonese (which you have not yet quite started, as far as I know, since till now all you have written are just stubs less than even 200 characters). I still hold my opinion that there is not a necissity for a Cantonese Wikipedia(or any other Chinese dialect Wikipedias) to exist, but I encourage helpful discussions and even a vote if necessary should you decide to formally propose setting up one. What I do not want to see is the set up of a Cantonese Wikipedia without the consent of the entire Wikipedia community, especially the Chinese Wikipedia community (as in the case of Ming-nan Wikipedia).

(Someone mentioned about Bible translated into Algerian Arabic. I just wonder: is there any Cantonese translations of Bible, and if there is, is anybody still uses this version?)

[[User:Formulax]]

---

Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l

Sheng Jiong wrote:

And lastly I just want to clarity Wikipedia's policy on setting up a new Wikipedia: if a group of native speakers want to set up a Wikipedia despite the fact that majority of the speakers of that language do not wish to do so, should we allow them to have a new Wikipedia? As in the case of Cantonese, even Hong Kongers are generally opposed to the idea, and should we still allow few advocates to have it?

I think the problem is that we need to define what the language is before we can determine whether the majority of the language's writers are in favor of it. For Wikipedia's purposes, only written languages are relevant, and it would seem that a majority of people who write in what they call "written Cantonese" are in favor of the encyclopedia. What people who *speak* Cantonese but write "standard Chinese" think isn't the issue, since Wikipedia is a written encyclopedia. Of course, the entire debate is over whether "written Cantonese" exists as a real language in the first place. That I don't know enough about to comment on, but it would help if anybody had any information on just how common this writing system is in Hong Kong, and how many people would be interested in writing on such a Wikipedia.

It might be worth noting that we had a similar argument over German earlier. There are many spoken German dialects, but most people who speak any of the dialects read and write in "standard German". However, recently some people have started writing in written forms of some of the dialects, and some wanted to create a Wikipedia for those dialects separate from the main German Wikipedia.

(The longstanding linguistic flamewar over "dialect" versus "language" looks to be a regular spillover into Wikipedia-l.)

-Mark

Hello,

Sheng Jiong wrote:

All serious newspapers in Hong Kong write in Chinese that can be universally understood by everybody who knows Chinese.

http://trading-edge.tripod.com/cgi-bin/Tsoi/u_diary.cgi

I think this is the best example of something in a serious paper written with Cantonese. Cho Yan Chiu (sp?) is the managing editor (I think) of the Hong Kong Economic Journal, one of the most respected newspapers in Hong Kong. It's a "quirk" of his to write in Cantonese when he wants to make a point. But what it does say is that you can definitely write about serious subjects in Cantonese.

Extrememly few Hong Kongers have ever come across with materials that are entirely written in Cantonese written language, if there is ever such a thing.

And you presume to speak for all of us HKers? I assume from your claim about books from all over the world that you've been to Hong Kong, but have you live there? How many HKers have you talked to? And did you demand that they speak Mandarin and/or write in baihuawen for your benefit when you talk to them?

No guidelines have been introduced or widely accepted by the general public on writing in Cantonese language.

I would discourage anyone to make such wide-swept statements without any substantial proof.

All Hong Kong students(except those who choose to learn English as their first language) learn to write in the standard Chinese in schools.

And you suddenly become the expert in the HK education system...when?

little Alex

Hi Formulax,

I enjoy your tactic of "act conciliatory buay conciliatory" as they say in s'pore.

In one e-mail you act so nice, like "I don't want to discourage", then after a response you say a different sort of tone, more like "You are wrong, I fight you this to the death".

It has testimony from native speakers such as Felix Wan and Alex Kwan, and quotes from experts by myself, that there is more differences than these "non-standard characters", it has the difference of grammar too.

You confuse "Chinese" and "Baihuawen". "Baihuawen", based on Mandarin grammar, vocabulary, and suches. Is not like Wen Yan, which is more similar to Cantonese or Hakka's grammar and vocabulary, it takes many new characters and discards the widely accepted ones for example your Mandarin loving character 的 which replaces perfectly good already used character with even less strokes by far, still used often in writing Minnan in Hanzi.

There IS SCHOOL TEACHING in WRITTEN CANTONESE. It is not primary school, no, but there is course at a Hong Kongs university about how to write in "colloquial cantonese", and expectation that when it finishes the courses series it can write long articles even books in colloquial cantonese and have some small experts knowledge about it.

There IS NEWSPAPERS writing in Cantonese (wait - you says that "Standard Chinese" is can be read as Cantonese? What are we talking here!!?). I do'nt know about these dailys, but it is for sure tabloid newspaper and some teenager and womens magazine which writes completely or largely in the Cantonese colloquial writing.

The Minnan Wikipedia has support on Livejournal from Taiwanese user who says they don't read Peh-oe-ji from school instead from readiong Wikipedia just, if ask you get a link to its post.

Mark

On Sat, 19 Feb 2005 10:22:00 +0800, Sheng Jiong sheng.jiong@gmail.com wrote:

...

If I recall correctly there was never a consensus in zh.wikipedia that a Minnan Wikipedia should be created.

That is why it has made Minnan Wikipedia a big joke. Extremely few Minnan speakers (even in Taiwan) can understand what the hack these guys are writing about in their Minnan Wikipedia. Because Minnan simply do not yet have a standardised writing system (despite Taiwanese government's effort to establish one, most grown-ups in Taiwan sitll cannot comprehend written Minnan, and there is no Minnan newspaper, only one TV channel)

...

Its original creation was as an entirely separate project "Holopedia" due to extreme community opposition from zh.wikipedia and the probability that people like Jimbo would at the time have been unwilling to consider it if his anonymous Chinese advisors said "閩南話與白話文是統一語言".

And Holopedia does not grow too.

...

As it was eventually turned into a small Wikipedia with a small number of articles (rather than 0), the general Wikipedia community accepted it somewhat hesitatingly although on zh.wikipedia it was widely disputed as to whether it should exist.

Because people choose to igonore it, and because it is just so small and it is almost non-existent. But I am not prepared to accept another Cantonese Wikipedia, and then Shanghainese, and then whatsoever trash.

...

Especially different in this case is use of Cantonese characters instead of Whites' languages' characters.

There are not standard. No one has formalised these "characters", not the Hong Kong government (both before and after 1997), not the Guangdong government, not any governments in the world. There is also not a standard developed by any influential non-government organizations.

...

Some people will ask "What is the difference?" but many of these people are the same people who would "correct" vernacular content posted to zh.wikipedia itself, showing that there really is a difference (I tried it once - it kept being reverted to the "correct" grammar ie baihuawen).

Your edit is reverted because you used these non-standard characters. But put characters aside, the grammar is the same for Cantonese and Chinese.

...

This is the issue of self-determination of this community of people writing colloquial Cantonese, it is not fair to let others decide to make them choose between writing Baihuawen or not write at all.

We are now seeing a small portion of Cantonese speakers who believe that there should be something as a Cantonese Wikipedia. But for most Cantonese speakers (even if you just limit that to Hong Kongers), most people object such proposals because most people know that Cantonese is NOT a written language. Again I want you to show me evidence that Cantonese IS a written language (do not tell me X books are written in Cantonese, because these are just 1 or 2 exceptions. What I want to see is 1) has any school began teaching WRITTEN CANTONESE; 2) has any newspapers/magazines started writing in Cantonese)

[[User:Formualx]]

...

As for the bible in Cantonese, yes there are, and they are still used.

There are also versions in Hakka (kejiahua), Wu, Minnan, and all other Chinese vernaculars. Most of them use hanzi, but some use Whites' languages' characters, and some use a mixture (representing only some functions words with the roman letters).

I daresay that most of these aren't widely used but this is for the alternative reason that Christianity is, for various reasons, not well tolerated in China (except in ethnic minorities), and outside the mainland most Chinese speak Cantonese, Minnan, and Hakka besides Mandarin. Thusly Minnan and Hakka bibles are used by some peoples in Taiwan, and Cantonese and Hakka bibles is used by some people in Hongkong and maybe Macao.

This delves into the debate on whether the Bible should be written in an extra formal literary language that is difficult to imagine happening (in most of the widely-used English translations, it's difficult to imagine real people in real situations speaking that way), or to use a colloquial style that is easier for people to understand and relate to.

I, not being religious (and what religion I do have is an amalgamy of Judaism and Christianity but with more Atheism than either), don't have a preference, but in Bible translation it is always a consideration.

Some Arabic churches prefer to read the Bible with God's speech in a formal manner, while others use local colloquial forms because it is easy to imagine people saying the words, in real life, although I think most Arab churches use vernacular versions (the exception would be churches where there is populations from many different dialects - it would be difficult to read vernacular Bibles in a church which is 25% Algerian, 25% Yemeni, 25% Lebanese, and 25% Bahraini, you would need 4 different bibles)

Mark

On Fri, 18 Feb 2005 18:18:47 +0800, Sheng Jiong sheng.jiong@gmail.com wrote:

...

Guys, I do admire your passion and your enthusiasm (although I have no idea how long will that last). I am not against you having a try on writing serious things in Cantonese (which you have not yet quite started, as far as I know, since till now all you have written are just stubs less than even 200 characters). I still hold my opinion that there is not a necissity for a Cantonese Wikipedia(or any other Chinese dialect Wikipedias) to exist, but I encourage helpful discussions and even a vote if necessary should you decide to formally propose setting up one. What I do not want to see is the set up of a Cantonese Wikipedia without the consent of the entire Wikipedia community, especially the Chinese Wikipedia community (as in the case of Ming-nan Wikipedia).

(Someone mentioned about Bible translated into Algerian Arabic. I just wonder: is there any Cantonese translations of Bible, and if there is, is anybody still uses this version?)

[[User:Formulax]]

---

Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l

Bonjour,

On Sat, 19 Feb 2005 18:48:13 +0800, Sheng Jiong sheng.jiong@gmail.com wrote:

You have argued that Cantonese is a written language, using the differences between Cantonese and Mandarin as evidence. But as I have suggested both Mandarin and Cantonese are just spoken languages, but when it comes to writing everyboy today in China, Hong Kong or Macau uses the same written language: Baihuawen.

formulax

However, the fact is that you can't never make a clear cut between spoken and written language so simply --- although this could be fulfilled in the case of Classic Chinese (Wenyan). Which tongue do you use to read Baihuawen out loud? Do you use your Wu pronunciation to read them and communicate with others? What would such utterance become? Nothing, I guess. We just don't use vernacular way to read Baihuawen. So what's behind it? We all use the same written language Baihuawen, because it came with the same common spoken language: Mandarin. But this has nothing to do with other spoken languages, and neither with the fact that there is Cantonese in written forms on the web everywhere. In Taiwan forums, opinions written in Cantonese are not so unfamiliar, and people are often asked politely to translate them in Mandarin, or even such texts are banned. Now, if there are only FEW people writing Cantonese, then where do these people come from? Links of two major Taiwanese forums are given below: http://forum.moztw.org/viewtopic.php?t=4286 (the official Mozilla forum of Taiwan) discussing whether written Cantonese should be banned. http://forum.palmislife.com/viewthread.php?tid=9277&fpage=1 (the largest Palm PDA site in Taiwan) especially this sentence:"香港朋友也盡可能使用普通話參予討論", asking HongKongers discussing in Mandarin.

Examples are plenty and not hard to find.

Sheng Jiong, you have lied about speaking Shanghainese as your native language. I know this because there are large grammatical differences between Shanghainese and Baihuawen that you seem to overlook, suggesting you don't know it at all.

Well, it is extremely impertient of you accusing others of lying when you do not have any proof. I am a native Shanghainese, I was born in Shanghai, both of my parents are Shanghainese, we speak Shanghainese at home.

One example is the existance in Wu of the particle "teuq7" meaning "with", that doesn't exist in Mandarin. There is a character to write it, I have seen it before, but I cannot remember it.

Yes, but that is not a "grammatical difference". It is only a different use of a word. Grammatical difference means there is an entirely different sentence structure. But Shanghainese has almost the same sentence structure as written Chinese. If you take out a book written in Chinese, it is perfectly possible for one to read it out in Shanghainese and be understood by another person who can speak Shanghainese.

Interesting example would be a story I heard: one Taiwan-born Shanghainese(who obviously speak only Shanghainese at home, as Shanghainese always find it more natural to speak Shanghainese than Mandarin with someone close to them) only use Shanghainese to read the novellas by Zhang Ailing, a popular writer who writes a lot about Shanghai in the 1930s and 40s.

Some examples of Cantonese grammar differences:

Mandarin/Baihua: 他給我三本書. Cantonese: 佢俾三本書我. (notice position of "我")

Mandarin/Baihua: 我先上界買東西. Cantonese: 我去界買冶先. (notice position of "先" and use of 去 vs 上, and vocabulary difference of monosyllabic Cantonese word for "things" vs disyllabic Mandarin word)

Mandarin/Baihua: 他比我高. Cantonese: 佢高過我. (notice use of "過" vs "比", entirely different sentence order)

Mandarin/Baihua: 把他叫來 Cantonese: 噭佢來.

Mandarin/Baihua: 我上北京去. Cantonese: 我去北京.

Mandarin/Baihua: 看不見. Cantonese: 唔睇得見.

Mandarin/Baihua: 你吃不吃飯? Cantonese: 你吃飯唔吃?

Yes, I know that Cantonese has slight differences in the order of words compared with Mandarin. But again you are mixing Mandarin with Baihuawen. Hong Kongers speak only Cantonese, but they write in Baihuawen. So whatever the difference there are between Baihuawen and Cantonese, that's the difference between spoken and written language. Many colloquial English is also different from standard, formal English (Take Singapore English as a best example: "Would you be able to attend?" in English would become "You can go or not?" in Singlish. Totally different grammar, but is Singlish a written language? No. It is still a dialect in English). Does that mean we need to have an Colloquial English Wikipedia?

Also there is much differences in Shanghainese too, if you want I can maybe type some examples later.

Pray show me something I have never learnt about my own mother tongue.

formulax

Sheng Jiong wrote:

...

Yes, I know that Cantonese has slight differences in the order of words compared with Mandarin.

That's like saying English has slight differences in the order of words compared with Latin. That's part of the grammatical difference. It *is* a different sentence structure.

Yes, but as I have said, Singlish has much bigger grammatical difference with standard English, compared with Cantonese and baihuawen. Shall we have a Singlish Wikipedia?

...

But again you are mixing Mandarin with Baihuawen.

Baihuawen is more or less the Mandarin vernacular, the grammar, the syntax, sentence structure, etc. are based on the Mandarin vernacular.

Yes, but Hong Kong still accepts it, don't they?

...

Hong Kongers speak only Cantonese, but they write in Baihuawen.

a) Many HKers also speak a smattering of Mandarin (and English) and we *do* write in Cantonese for memos and for online BBS, etc. The common is practice is use baihuawen for serious/complicated articles, but that's because it was considered proper. Just because it's a long-held tradition doesn't mean it's inherently right.

Same thing with Singlish. People love using Singlish in BBS, but you get an immediate F if you write your thesis in Singlish. So should we have a Singlish Wikipedia?

...

English (Take Singapore English as a best example: "Would you be able to attend?" in English would become "You can go or not?" in Singlish. Totally different grammar, but is Singlish a written language? No. It is still a dialect in English).

I doubt "Singlish" and English is the best analogy.

Why? What makes Cantonese or Singlish suddenly so special?

formulax

I see no particular reason not to, if it's the case (which I don't know) that a significant number of people communicate largely in Singlish and find it more natural than "standard English". We already have a ht.wikipedia.org for the Haitian creole, which is basically a French dialect with significant influences from a number of African languages. For a long time it was considered basically "improper French", and people spoke it but didn't write it---indeed, writing in it would earn you an F on your essay in school. More recently, that's been recognized as a sort of cultural elitism, and it's becoming recognized as an acceptable language to write in, and in fact the standard language of Haiti.

It might be worth pointing out that "standard English" for Wikipedia's purposes is itself already different from what your English teacher might say is standard. We tend to avoid (for the most part) not only local dialects that are "improper" but also avoid "proper English" that is not commonly used, or is only used in some regions of the world.

This is in some sense basically the [[en:Prescription and description]] debate. Should we be enforcing handed-down rules of "correct language", whatever that might mean, or should we merely be documenting language as it is actually used by real people?

(Of course, whether written Cantonese and Singlish are used by many people or not is another issue. I'm just arguing that the fact that the Chinese and Singaporean governments dislike them and consider them "improper" shouldn't be the deciding factor.)

I cannot agree with you. I agree that we should not use "proper English" that no one today understands. But if we accept languages that are not commonly used in formal writings, we bear a danger of undermining the credibility of Wikipedia, and credibility is one of the most important considerations for readers.

Wikipedia has long been doubted for its credibility. I personally do not agree with the view that Wikipedia cannot be trusted because everybody can edit. I have this trust in Wikipedia because since I discovered Wikipedia I have always seen it as a serious effort to build an encyclopedia, despite its unconventional way to writing it. But if I am told today, that Wikipedia has a version written in Singlish or Cantonese or other spoken languages that are rarely or even never used in formal writings and academic discussions, I will begin to doubt if the aim of the Wikipedia is serious and its goal is to build a trustworthy encyclopedia. And this in turn will undermine my confidence in the credibility of Wikipedia.

Singlish, like Cantonese, are widely used in informal dialogues and writings. But it not "natural" for Singaporeans or Hong Kongers to write formal essays using Singlish or Cantonese, and neither are they accustomed to read any formal written works (such as an encyclopedia) that are published in languages that they think should only occur in daily conversations.

formulax

Baihua itself is a transcription of modern Mandarin, which not long ago was considered by people like Sheng Jiong to not be worth writing down to use Wenyan instead.

Mark

On Mon, 21 Feb 2005 05:21:27 -0500, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:

Sheng Jiong wrote:

...

Singlish, like Cantonese, are widely used in informal dialogues and writings. But it not "natural" for Singaporeans or Hong Kongers to write formal essays using Singlish or Cantonese, and neither are they accustomed to read any formal written works (such as an encyclopedia) that are published in languages that they think should only occur in daily conversations.

While this is true, several other languages and language dialects for which it's also true are very recently being used in formal settings. For example, the Scottish Parliament has a version of its webpage translated into Scots [1], which is to a first approximation a phonetic way of writing English spoken with a Scottish accent, plus some modified grammar and vocabulary. Similarly, Northern Ireland distributes election materials written in Ulster Scots [2]. If anything, Singlish is less mutually intelligible with "standard English" than either Scots or Ulster Scots are. The main difference seems to be that, while the Scottish government wishes to promote the use of Scots as a legitimate language, the Singaporean government takes the opposite view of Singlish.

Other, more creole-like examples are the Haitian mentioned earlier, and even modern Greek, which until the 1970s was considered an informal language not worth writing down, and all formal communication was written in an official standard Greek that few people actually spoke in daily life.

I guess this brings up the question of how we distinguish between these. Should we care what the relevant governments think?

-Mark

[1] http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/vli/language/scots/index.htm [2] http://www.aboutmyvote.co.uk/languages/ulsterscots.cfm _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l

On Tue, 22 Feb 2005 15:44:10 +0800, Sheng Jiong sheng.jiong@gmail.com wrote:

...

If anything, Singlish is less mutually intelligible with "standard English" than either Scots or Ulster Scots are. The main difference seems to be that, while the Scottish government wishes to promote the use of Scots as a legitimate language, the Singaporean government takes the opposite view of Singlish.

I do not think that it is entirely due to the view of the government. There is also strong opposition within the country, among the ordinary speakers of the language. People have gotten used to the thinking that "when I write, I should use standard English; when I speak to a fellow Singaporean, there is no need to be so formal". Before they begin to change their mindsets and decide to write in the way they usually talk (as China experienced in 1910s and 20s, and many other countries too. And I personally see it as a result of the increasing nationalistic feelings), should Wikipedia recognise the language so fast? The potential danger is the undermining of our credibility.

Well, for Wikipedia, I think beside of the factor of such "credibility" (although for myself, I could never imagine how allowing versions less written could reduce people's confidence in the whole project; I'd guess that such crisis of confidence occurs when people have their own despise and discrimination towards such languages), "freedon" and "toleration" are also what make it different and revolutionary from "traditional" encyclopediae. While the incredibility and doubt of some people (in fact most people don't even knew that there ARE significant distinction among Chinese languages in both verbal and text form; they just need to be educated and most of the time would listen and recognize, unless they were too stubborn to admit.) may make them view Wikipedia "lower" and "less credible", but Wikipedia would also benefit from hosting and sponsoring these versions. If they work, MORE THAN HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of people WILL be grateful to the Wikimedia foundation. Don't only look upon the presence (especially when the presence is not so pessimistic as have been described), think about the future development and the spirit of Wikipedia.

...

I guess this brings up the question of how we distinguish between these. Should we care what the relevant governments think?

Indeed. Wikipedia used to take ISO 639 as a guideline for the setting up of Wikipedias. But now this has apparently been abandoned, and it becomes harder for us to determine really a written language does exist.

formulax _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l

So, Mr Formulax, now do you claim to speak for these Singaporeans and Hong Kongers? I find this extremely insulting.

Baihua itself is a transcription of modern Mandarin, which not long ago was considered by people like Sheng Jiong to not be worth writing down to use Wenyan instead.

I do not particularly care one way or the other about the introduction of Cantonese and other Chinese-language Wikipedias. It would, however, gladden my heart if fewer comments were made about the persons discussing the issue and more about the facts under discussion.

Thanks everybody Skriptor

On Sun, 20 Feb 2005 12:16:53 +0800, Sheng Jiong sheng.jiong@gmail.com wrote:

...

Sheng Jiong, you have lied about speaking Shanghainese as your native language. I know this because there are large grammatical differences between Shanghainese and Baihuawen that you seem to overlook, suggesting you don't know it at all.

Well, it is extremely impertient of you accusing others of lying when you do not have any proof. I am a native Shanghainese, I was born in Shanghai, both of my parents are Shanghainese, we speak Shanghainese at home.

...

One example is the existance in Wu of the particle "teuq7" meaning "with", that doesn't exist in Mandarin. There is a character to write it, I have seen it before, but I cannot remember it.

Yes, but that is not a "grammatical difference". It is only a different use of a word. Grammatical difference means there is an entirely different sentence structure. But Shanghainese has almost the same sentence structure as written Chinese. If you take out a book written in Chinese, it is perfectly possible for one to read it out in Shanghainese and be understood by another person who can speak Shanghainese.

Interesting example would be a story I heard: one Taiwan-born Shanghainese(who obviously speak only Shanghainese at home, as Shanghainese always find it more natural to speak Shanghainese than Mandarin with someone close to them) only use Shanghainese to read the novellas by Zhang Ailing, a popular writer who writes a lot about Shanghai in the 1930s and 40s.

And what is your point? Just because it can be understood, doesn't mean it's natural.

...

Some examples of Cantonese grammar differences:

Mandarin/Baihua: 他給我三本書. Cantonese: 佢俾三本書我. (notice position of "我")

Mandarin/Baihua: 我先上界買東西. Cantonese: 我去界買冶先. (notice position of "先" and use of 去 vs 上, and vocabulary difference of monosyllabic Cantonese word for "things" vs disyllabic Mandarin word)

Mandarin/Baihua: 他比我高. Cantonese: 佢高過我. (notice use of "過" vs "比", entirely different sentence order)

Mandarin/Baihua: 把他叫來 Cantonese: 噭佢來.

Mandarin/Baihua: 我上北京去. Cantonese: 我去北京.

Mandarin/Baihua: 看不見. Cantonese: 唔睇得見.

Mandarin/Baihua: 你吃不吃飯? Cantonese: 你吃飯唔吃?

Yes, I know that Cantonese has slight differences in the order of words compared with Mandarin. But again you are mixing Mandarin with Baihuawen. Hong Kongers speak only Cantonese, but they write in Baihuawen. So whatever the difference there are between Baihuawen and Cantonese, that's the difference between spoken and written language. Many colloquial English is also different from standard, formal English (Take Singapore English as a best example: "Would you be able to attend?" in English would become "You can go or not?" in Singlish. Totally different grammar, but is Singlish a written language? No. It is still a dialect in English). Does that mean we need to have an Colloquial English Wikipedia?

Now, you are just being an octopus. Baihuawen IS Mandarin. It is colloquial written form of Mandarin. Its grammar and sentence structure is 100% identical to Mandarin but differs from other dialects/languages. I wonder why... MAYBE IT'S BECAUSE BAIHUAWEN WAS STRUCTURED AFTER MANDARIN COLLOQUIAL SPEECH!?!?!?!!!!!!!? That's why I don't distinction between them. There is same grammar and same vocabulary between Putonghua/Mandarin and Baihuawen, for the obvious reason, but there is differences elsewhere.

You are squarely wrong about Singlish. It is not a dialect of English, it is an English-based creole. The difference between the way you write that sentence and the way I write it is this: I write it "yu kan go o no'" but you write it "You can go or not?", this is because you use an English-based orthography that doesn't reflect extreme phonetic differences ie pronouncing "children" as if it were Mandarin "qiu-ren" (not exact, but similar) which your English-based orthography doesn't convey. It's similar to people who used to advocate a non-phonetic French-based orthography for Haitian Creole, it was good intelligibility with French but difficult for schoolchildren to learn. Similarly if you use an English-based orthography for Tok Pisin it looks similar somewhat to English and at one time its detractors called it "bad english" or "colloquial English of New guinea" but now it is widely recognised as own language and has its own Wikipedia even. The richness of the Singlish idiom is definitely not adequately expressed by the English-based orthography as it doesn't make distinctions between minimal pairs in some cases - Singlish particles are tonal, but in the English-based orthography it is ambiguous, like Tibetan writing, except the difference that it conveys entire feeling of a phrase.

I wouldn't support a Wikipedia for colloquial English because it is the exact same language as written English. A Wikipedia for Scots or AAVE or Singlish, I would support, but just normal colloquial English, I would not. Nor would I support separate Wikipedias for Mandarin and Baihuawen - they are one and the same.

...

Also there is much differences in Shanghainese too, if you want I can maybe type some examples later.

Pray show me something I have never learnt about my own mother tongue.

I have a story to tell you Mr Sheng Jiong. Sit back and read please.

有一趟、北風搭太陽辣辣海爭啥人個本事大。爭法爭法來勒一個過道人、身浪穿仔一件厚袍子。伊拉兩家頭就王東道、講好啥人能夠先叫迭個過道人拿伊個夠子脫下來、就算啥人本事大。北風〓足仔勁窮吹八吹。不過吹得越結棍、埃個人拿袍子裹得越緊。後首來北風無沒勁勤、只好就算勤。過一息太陽出來一曬、埃個過道人馬上就拿袍子脫脫。所以北風勿得勿承認、還是太陽比伊本事大。

The moral of the story is that nobody likes the sun and nobody likes the north wind either. But they both like to write in colloquial Wu. Very much.

Mark

If these are only phonetic differences, then how on earth is it different from a Baihuawen equivalent of the same story?

I don't feel right now like lecturing you on linguistic human rights (re Singlish), if it's really nessecary somebody else can jump in for me.

Mark

On Sun, 20 Feb 2005 17:50:26 +0800, Sheng Jiong sheng.jiong@gmail.com wrote:

...

You are squarely wrong about Singlish. It is not a dialect of English, it is an English-based creole. The difference between the way you write that sentence and the way I write it is this: I write it "yu kan go o no'" but you write it "You can go or not?", this is because you use an English-based orthography that doesn't reflect extreme phonetic differences

Everybody speaks English differently. Should we all "reflect extreme phonetic differences" rather than using proper spellings?

...

I wouldn't support a Wikipedia for colloquial English because it is the exact same language as written English. A Wikipedia for Scots or AAVE or Singlish, I would support, but just normal colloquial English, I would not. Nor would I support separate Wikipedias for Mandarin and Baihuawen - they are one and the same.

So now we have a person supporting Singlish Wikipedia. I think Wikipedia will soon grow into an encyclopedia with 1 million languages, rather than articles.

And anyway you cannot split between Mandarin and Baihuawen: one is spoken, one is written, how do you split?

...

...

...

Also there is much differences in Shanghainese too, if you want I can maybe type some examples later.

Pray show me something I have never learnt about my own mother tongue.

I have a story to tell you Mr Sheng Jiong. Sit back and read please.

有一趟、北風搭太陽辣辣海爭啥人個本事大。爭法爭法來勒一個過道人、身浪穿仔一件厚袍子。伊拉兩家頭就王東道、講好啥人能夠先叫迭個過道人拿伊個夠子脫下來、就算啥人本事大。北風〓足仔勁窮吹八吹。不過吹得越結棍、埃個人拿袍子裹得越緊。後首來北風無沒勁勤、只好就算勤。過一息太陽出來一曬、埃個過道人馬上就拿袍子脫脫。所以北風勿得勿承認、還是太陽比伊本事大。

The moral of the story is that nobody likes the sun and nobody likes the north wind either. But they both like to write in colloquial Wu. Very much.

You are just using "extreme phonetic differences" to express. If it is written in baihuawen, Shanghainese can still understand and read out in Shanghainese.

So now I begin to realise the difference between you and me: you think there is a need to set up Wikipedias to "reflect extreme phonetic differences" between a standard language and a not so standard spoken language. But I want just to have 1 Wikipedia in the standard language, and let the reader to read it in any different ways they want. To me that is the most sensible thing to do because everybody else do this: after all we created language to communicate, not to "reflect extreme phonetic differences".

formulax

Oh, and I think there won't be 1 million Wikipedias.

Most dialects, or closely intelligible varieties, are 100% happy sharing the Wikipedia. So far nobody has requested a Singlish Wikipedia, so it isn't even a case to consider.

If a native speaker requests a Wikipedia in what is not considered by all to be an independent language, some criteria should be considered:

1. Does ANYBODY (not the majority, just anybody) write in the dialect/language often, ie beyond SMS and such? 2. What is mutual intelligibility of it and existing Wikipedia's language, when written? 3. Is there any desire, among even a small community, for some small seperation in literature?

Ethnologue considers Voro to be a dialect of Estonian, as do many linguists. But the mutual intelligibility with standard Estonian when written is not above 90% (I don't believe), many people write in Voro, and it has entirely separate literature.

Platt is perhaps more comparable here. It was similarly said then, that standard German text can be read as regional pronunciation. But it meets these 3 criteria: Quite a few people (not the majority though) write often in Platt; when written its mutual intelligibility is below 90%, and there is some desires for a separate literature which is already emerging.

This case is similar here. I estimate pure written Cantonese at between 70 and 89% intelligibility with Guanhua-Baihuawen depending on specific instance (maybe 85% on average). This is /casual/ mutual intelligibility, that you can read it without having to stop over and over to guess what words might mean. I'm much less sure about Wu but I think it is in the same range, especially when etymologically correct hanzi are used rather than using etymologically incorrect hanzi for their Baihuawen meaning. (the hanzi that means "run" in Minnan for example, means "walk" in Baihuawen, but often it is used for "walk" in Minnan because of uneducation of etymology)

It makes no sense regularly to say "Bite is", but "m-sik" is Cantonese for "isn't" and the way it is written means "bite is" in Baihuawen/Mandarin which is the same.

Mark

On Sun, 20 Feb 2005 17:50:26 +0800, Sheng Jiong sheng.jiong@gmail.com wrote:

...

You are squarely wrong about Singlish. It is not a dialect of English, it is an English-based creole. The difference between the way you write that sentence and the way I write it is this: I write it "yu kan go o no'" but you write it "You can go or not?", this is because you use an English-based orthography that doesn't reflect extreme phonetic differences

Everybody speaks English differently. Should we all "reflect extreme phonetic differences" rather than using proper spellings?

...

I wouldn't support a Wikipedia for colloquial English because it is the exact same language as written English. A Wikipedia for Scots or AAVE or Singlish, I would support, but just normal colloquial English, I would not. Nor would I support separate Wikipedias for Mandarin and Baihuawen - they are one and the same.

So now we have a person supporting Singlish Wikipedia. I think Wikipedia will soon grow into an encyclopedia with 1 million languages, rather than articles.

And anyway you cannot split between Mandarin and Baihuawen: one is spoken, one is written, how do you split?

...

...

...

Also there is much differences in Shanghainese too, if you want I can maybe type some examples later.

Pray show me something I have never learnt about my own mother tongue.

I have a story to tell you Mr Sheng Jiong. Sit back and read please.

有一趟、北風搭太陽辣辣海爭啥人個本事大。爭法爭法來勒一個過道人、身浪穿仔一件厚袍子。伊拉兩家頭就王東道、講好啥人能夠先叫迭個過道人拿伊個夠子脫下來、就算啥人本事大。北風〓足仔勁窮吹八吹。不過吹得越結棍、埃個人拿袍子裹得越緊。後首來北風無沒勁勤、只好就算勤。過一息太陽出來一曬、埃個過道人馬上就拿袍子脫脫。所以北風勿得勿承認、還是太陽比伊本事大。

The moral of the story is that nobody likes the sun and nobody likes the north wind either. But they both like to write in colloquial Wu. Very much.

You are just using "extreme phonetic differences" to express. If it is written in baihuawen, Shanghainese can still understand and read out in Shanghainese.

So now I begin to realise the difference between you and me: you think there is a need to set up Wikipedias to "reflect extreme phonetic differences" between a standard language and a not so standard spoken language. But I want just to have 1 Wikipedia in the standard language, and let the reader to read it in any different ways they want. To me that is the most sensible thing to do because everybody else do this: after all we created language to communicate, not to "reflect extreme phonetic differences".

formulax

After not replying to most of the things you have said for obvious reason that you ignore my truths, I have still some question for you.

It is: How do you know majority of Chinese cannot read Minnan Wikipedia? I invite your evidences.

Mark

On Sat, 19 Feb 2005 18:48:13 +0800, Sheng Jiong sheng.jiong@gmail.com wrote:

...

"Baihuawen", based on Mandarin grammar, vocabulary, and suches. Is not like Wen Yan, which is more similar to Cantonese or Hakka's grammar and vocabulary, it takes many new characters and discards the widely accepted ones for example your Mandarin loving character 的 which replaces perfectly good already used character with even less strokes by far, still used often in writing Minnan in Hanzi.

Is Baihuawen not the standard Chinese? It was created after the May Fourth Movement in 1919, and has already been widely accepted in Chinese society before 1949. Are not newspapers in Hong Kong write in Baihuawen too?

You are deliberately associating the concept of "standard Chinese" with classic Chinese (Wen Yan), which is actually not the standard Chinese today (for it is neither taugt in schools as a way of writing, and neither is it used in most publications).

...

There IS SCHOOL TEACHING in WRITTEN CANTONESE. It is not primary school, no, but there is course at a Hong Kongs university about how to write in "colloquial cantonese", and expectation that when it finishes the courses series it can write long articles even books in colloquial cantonese and have some small experts knowledge about it.

So? You have missed my point entirely. The reason of my asking if there is any school teaching Cantonese is to question if written Cantonese has been widely accepted. Teaching in writing "colloquial Cantonese" is irrelevent in this argument because only a handful have ever attended the course and learnt to write. And just for my own personal interest, please tell me which Hong Kong university has this course.

...

There IS NEWSPAPERS writing in Cantonese

Which newspaper? Which magazine? Do specify.

...

(wait - you says that "Standard Chinese" is can be read as Cantonese? What are we talking here!!?).

Do you deny that most (if not all, as you insist) Hong Kong newspapers are written in standard Chinese(baihuawen)? Then what do you call the language they uses?

...

I do'nt know about these dailys, but it is for sure tabloid newspaper and some teenager and womens magazine which writes completely or largely in the Cantonese colloquial writing.

Take a look at EasyFinder(http://easyfinder.atnext.com/template/ef/front.cfm), one of the most read Hong Kong tabloids. Among the six headlines in their main page, only one uses Cantonese characters; and if you read the articles, all of them are written in baihuawen (if you prefer using this term and purposely confusing it with classic Chinese).

...

The Minnan Wikipedia has support on Livejournal from Taiwanese user who says they don't read Peh-oe-ji from school instead from readiong Wikipedia just, if ask you get a link to its post.

How many of them are there? Majority of the Taiwanese still cannot read.

And pray do reply my previous summary of my opinions as a whole. So far you still chooses to avoid directly answering my central thesis: 1)Not even Cantonese native speakers can understand an article entirely written in Cantonese written language, if it concerns encyclopediac topics; 2)Few people have written in Cantonese; 3)Wikipedia should not advocate the use of Cantonese written language. Instead we should only allow it when it has already been accepted by the society.

You have argued that Cantonese is a written language, using the differences between Cantonese and Mandarin as evidence. But as I have suggested both Mandarin and Cantonese are just spoken languages, but when it comes to writing everyboy today in China, Hong Kong or Macau uses the same written language: Baihuawen.

formulax

Without poll of hundreds of native speakers of Minnan, it is rubbish for you to make accusations based on this "common sense".

If you knows Minnan, and Tongyong pinyin as most Taiwanese do, it is not much a strech to read Peh-oe-ji writing.

Despite that the Luxemburgish language is taught in no schools and all newspapers in Luxemburg use German or French, do you have explanation for the Luxemburgish Wikipedia with over 1000 articles???

Mark

On Sun, 20 Feb 2005 12:28:18 +0800, Sheng Jiong sheng.jiong@gmail.com wrote:

...

After not replying to most of the things you have said for obvious reason that you ignore my truths, I have still some question for you.

I cannot make sense of your strange logic.

...

It is: How do you know majority of Chinese cannot read Minnan Wikipedia? I invite your evidences.

I guess you mean why the majority of Taiwanese cannot read Minnan Wikipedia, for it is obvious that all mainland Chinese cannot read, even if he speaks Minnan.

The reason that most Taiwanese cannot read Minnan Wikipedia is:

1. they don't teach this strange Romanization in school (although they

do teach students how to speak Minnan) 2) there is no newspaper or publication in Taiwan that publishes in such romanization

Then the rest is common sense, I hope?

formulax

...

It was created after the May Fourth Movement in 1919,

Was it? I seem to recall many novels and anthologies, etc. written in something similar before the May Fourth movement. I actually think we have a similar situation here. In the old days, the standard Chinese was wenyanwen and baihua was seen as below par and people shouldn't write in baihua because it's "only a spoken language".

The May Fourth movement changed that. And now...

And now you should start another movement and let the public accept it before coming to ask for a Cantonese Wikipedia.

I can't speak for the situation in mainland China today, but it's definitely taught, not as a way of writing, no, but I've seen many people's attempt at writing it and some attempts are good enough to pass. I think many people, especially the older generations in Hong Kong, still write with a smattering of wenyanwen.

And I seem to recall something on the news a couple of years ago about a young man who managed to write an essay completely in wenyanwen in his university entrance exam or some such.

Yes, there was. But majority of the population know only how to read some wenyanwen, but not write.

It's a weekly magazine, I don't know if the headlines I read are the same as those you've read, but I'd say that more than one uses Cantonese characters and the sentence structure/grammar for all of them are in fact Cantonese.

If that is the case, that means the difference is to subtle to tell. And if so, there would be no need to have a separate Wikipedia.

...

1)Not even Cantonese native speakers can understand an article entirely written in Cantonese written language, if it concerns encyclopediac topics;

I think I understood the examples Felix provided just fine, thank you very much. Mind you, my Chinese education ended at Primary 5. So if I can understand it, it's pretty understandable. And as the article is written by a mainland Chinese, I assume there are at least some mainland Chinese people who can understand an article written completely in Cantonese.

His examples are just stubs. And in fact I can read it as well. But how about longer articles? Articles concerning obscure terms? There are only two possible solutions: 1) do not translate these terms into Cantonese, which makes a Cantonese Wikipedia a repetition of Chinese Wikipedia, or 2) translate, and no one understands.

...

3)Wikipedia should not advocate the use of Cantonese written language. Instead we should only allow it when it has already been accepted by the society.

So says the person who keeps insisting that Cantonese can't even be written.

...

But as I have suggested both Mandarin and Cantonese are just spoken languages, but when it comes to writing everyboy today in China, Hong Kong or Macau uses the same written language: Baihuawen.

And baihuawen is based on Mandarin grammar, syntax, etc. So essentially baihuawen *is* Mandarin.

Whatever it is, it is written. Cantonese is not.

formulax

...

His examples are just stubs. And in fact I can read it as well.

His examples from www.cantonese.org.cn?

No, but from the Cantonese test site on meta.

...

are only two possible solutions: 1) do not translate these terms into Cantonese, which makes a Cantonese Wikipedia a repetition of Chinese Wikipedia, or 2) translate, and no one understands.

You just said that written Cantonese is so easy to understand and now you say once a term is translated, no one will understand it?

I mean technical terms can be tricky, because essentially no one knows what one technical term should be translated into Cantonese. And in a topic that is very technical (which does come out often in an encyclopedia), that will make reading and understanding difficult.

formulax

On Wed, 23 Feb 2005 14:29:22 +0800, Sheng Jiong sheng.jiong@gmail.com wrote:

I mean technical terms can be tricky, because essentially no one knows what one technical term should be translated into Cantonese. And in a topic that is very technical (which does come out often in an encyclopedia), that will make reading and understanding difficult.

This is an issue with many small Wikipedias. I suspect that many speakers of African languages would use some European language (often the former colonial one) for discussion of technical topics. Writing about such topics in their own language may be unnatural and require frequent coining of new terms. Yet precedent suggests that this wouldn't be an impediment to granting a Wikipedia to such a language, if it were requested. By extension, it probably shouldn't be an impediment to a Cantonese Wikipedia.

Steve

On Wed, 23 Feb 2005 00:21:40 -0700, Mark Williamson node.ue@gmail.com wrote:

What I find amusing is that he says things about how Cantonese isn't written, and then in the same breath he says something about how _when_ Cantonese is written, it can't be understood.

Mark, let's not be so literal here. You know what Formulax is talking about - in the general case, Cantonese is not widely written. It has a rich spoken tradition especially for film, music, opera, poetry, arts and the like. But in the area of written nonfiction, very little.

And even more interesting is how you act for a moment conciliatory buay conciliatory (I think you'd be more likely to hear "act yong hor buay yong hor") about how you encourage this enthusiasm... but then your true nature rears its ugly head (that's what the "buay yong hor" part is for) and you're back to your snappy, Cantonese-is-not-a-written-language-and-if-it-is-I-dont-like-it self.

Don't punish people for trying to find middle ground.

-Andrew (User:Fuzheado)

Kaixo!

On Wed, Feb 23, 2005 at 06:24:44PM -0800, Felix Wan wrote:

Mark, once again I appreciate your support. I don't think we will get the blessing of the community to start a Cantonese Wikipedia soon, but it does not mean that it cannot be done later.

My advice will be that you (or someone else interested in a Cantonese wikipedia) just get the mediawiki software and install it on a server somewhere to try out, so it can be seen if the project is viable or not; if it is, then moving it to wikipedia servers would be no problem, if it is not, at least we will know.

That is how Min-nan and Walloon wikipedias started; for the Walloon one, I wasn't myself sure it would work or not, that was actually the reason why I tried it on my own machine first; and I had almost given up after 2-3 months, when someone else appeared and revived it. When there were some 1.000 articles moving it to wikipedia was no problem (even in the extreme case were the database couldn't be imported, copying the articles by hand wouldn't be an impossible task either). Yes, the Walloon wikipedia is still small, and will continue to be small, as the total population of speakers is small (about 600.000) and there is absolutely no official support for the language nor any presence on mass media; however, with some 1.000 articles a year it is a valuable source of information, particularly about Walloon and Wallonia related topics (articles about language grammar, personalities, villages, rivers, existing and past litterature, etc), and the number of users is still growing, slowly, but growing, which means there is interest in it.

What I mean is, for a first try, when only limited traffic will happen, even hosting it on a private adsl connection is enough, a small computer with a standard GNU/Linux distribution is able to run the software; so while there is need of somme consensus and approval to be hosted by the wikimedia foundation and use its infrastructure; anybody can start its own wikipedia-like server at home. And then, depending on the results, an official merging with wikipedia could be asked.

Pablo:

Thank you very much for your information. Where can I find the technical details about setting up the mediawiki software?

I also remember that somewhere on the list someone mentioned they started something on Wikicities to test out the feasibility of a new language Wikipedia and then apply to move to the main Wikipedia. What is the policy of Wikicities and how possible is it to test out a project over there? Can anyone help?

Felix Wan

On Thu, February 24, 2005 5:54 am, Pablo Saratxaga said:

Kaixo!

On Wed, Feb 23, 2005 at 06:24:44PM -0800, Felix Wan wrote:

...

Mark, once again I appreciate your support. I don't think we will get the blessing of the community to start a Cantonese Wikipedia soon, but it does not mean that it cannot be done later.

My advice will be that you (or someone else interested in a Cantonese wikipedia) just get the mediawiki software and install it on a server somewhere to try out, so it can be seen if the project is viable or not; if it is, then moving it to wikipedia servers would be no problem, if it is not, at least we will know.

That is how Min-nan and Walloon wikipedias started; for the Walloon one, I wasn't myself sure it would work or not, that was actually the reason why I tried it on my own machine first; and I had almost given up after 2-3 months, when someone else appeared and revived it. When there were some 1.000 articles moving it to wikipedia was no problem (even in the extreme case were the database couldn't be imported, copying the articles by hand wouldn't be an impossible task either). Yes, the Walloon wikipedia is still small, and will continue to be small, as the total population of speakers is small (about 600.000) and there is absolutely no official support for the language nor any presence on mass media; however, with some 1.000 articles a year it is a valuable source of information, particularly about Walloon and Wallonia related topics (articles about language grammar, personalities, villages, rivers, existing and past litterature, etc), and the number of users is still growing, slowly, but growing, which means there is interest in it.

What I mean is, for a first try, when only limited traffic will happen, even hosting it on a private adsl connection is enough, a small computer with a standard GNU/Linux distribution is able to run the software; so while there is need of some consensus and approval to be hosted by the wikimedia foundation and use its infrastructure; anybody can start its own wikipedia-like server at home. And then, depending on the results, an official merging with wikipedia could be asked.

-- Ki ça vos våye bén, Pablo Saratxaga

http://chanae.walon.org/pablo/ PGP Key available, key ID: 0xD9B85466 [you can write me in Walloon, Spanish, French, English, Catalan or Esperanto] [min povas skribi en valona, esperanta, angla aux latinidaj lingvoj]

Angela:

Thank you very much for the quick response. I will go ahead and read the links.

Felix Wan

On Thu, February 24, 2005 2:15 pm, Angela said:

On Thu, 24 Feb 2005 13:50:33 -0800 (PST), Felix Wan felixwiki@earthsphere.org wrote:

...

Thank you very much for your information. Where can I find the technical details about setting up the mediawiki software?

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_FAQ

...

I also remember that somewhere on the list someone mentioned they started something on Wikicities to test out the feasibility of a new language Wikipedia and then apply to move to the main Wikipedia. What is the policy of Wikicities and how possible is it to test out a project over there?

Content in, or about, constructed languages can be added to http://conlang.wikicities.com

Please see http://www.wikicities.com/wiki/Category:Policy first; especially the terms of use at http://www.wikicities.com/wiki/Terms_of_use

Alternatively, there is the scratchpad for trialing potential projects: http://scratchpad.wikicities.com/wiki/Mini_wikis

Angela

On Thu, 24 Feb 2005 15:43:03 -0700, Mark Williamson node.ue@gmail.com wrote:

Unfortunately the conlang part does not apply to Cantonese, although the miniwiki "scratchpad" may, it's not much different from what we have already at Meta.

I only meant this for Quenya. I don't think there would be any advantage to starting a Cantonese encyclopedia at Wikicities.

Angela.

I don't think there is much capacity for such a wiki.

A Wiki on languages in general might generate a lot of articles, but a Wiki about Cantonese specifically would never have much capacity to grow.

If you truly think it's a good idea, or that it will somehow benefit Cantonese and Cantonese speakers, or whatever, then I won't oppose you.

Mark

On Fri, 25 Feb 2005 15:00:43 -0800 (PST), Felix Wan felixwiki@earthsphere.org wrote:

On Thu, February 24, 2005 4:50 pm, Angela said:

...

On Thu, 24 Feb 2005 15:43:03 -0700, Mark Williamson node.ue@gmail.com wrote:

...

Unfortunately the conlang part does not apply to Cantonese, although the miniwiki "scratchpad" may, it's not much different from what we have already at Meta.

I only meant this for Quenya. I don't think there would be any advantage to starting a Cantonese encyclopedia at Wikicities.

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

---

Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l

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

---

Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l

---

Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l

On Fri, 25 Feb 2005 15:00:43 -0800 (PST), Felix Wan felixwiki@earthsphere.org wrote:

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.

Felix, I think it's an excellent idea. In fact I think it's a nice fit for what folks might be searching for in Cantonese - a cultural literacy guide, or something more freeform to capture the flavor and quirkiness of the language as a spoken, adaptive language. I can imagine whole sections on film, Cantopop, slang, literature and colloquialisms/differences in Cantonese found in HK, Guangdong, Southeast Asia, North America, etc.

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?

I think it would be a much more exciting project to Cantonese speakers on the 'net if it was more fun and able to morph to the interests of the community, rather than what would be dictated by a formal encyclopedia.

-Andrew (User:Fuzheado)

On Fri, February 18, 2005 6:22 pm, Sheng Jiong said:

That is why it has made Minnan Wikipedia a big joke. Extremely few Minnan speakers (even in Taiwan) can understand what the hack these guys are writing about in their Minnan Wikipedia. Because Minnan simply do not yet have a standardised writing system (despite Taiwanese government's effort to establish one, most grown-ups in Taiwan sitll cannot comprehend written Minnan, and there is no Minnan newspaper, only one TV channel)

Here, I invite people from zh-min-nan: to speak.

People who know written Chinese may read this nice article at zh: http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E7%99%BD%E8%A9%B1%E5%AD%97

Of course, even that level of usage will not meet the popularity requirement of Sheng Jiong, so actually I am inviting other people to read and to judge if we can call that a standardized writing system.

There are not standard. No one has formalised these "characters", not the Hong Kong government (both before and after 1997), not the Guangdong government, not any governments in the world. There is also not a standard developed by any influential non-government organizations.

Does the work of respected scholars count? See the reference section of the second link below. The following pages are in Chinese. http://www.cantonese.org.cn/ungoo/master/dictionary1.htm http://www.cantonese.org.cn/ungoo/master/dictionary2.htm

I believe that does not count according to Sheng Jiong's standard, but I invite other people to make a fair judgement.

Your edit is reverted because you used these non-standard characters. But put characters aside, the grammar is the same for Cantonese and Chinese.

Sheng Jiong has ignored all the examples given in this list. They are not the same. Cantonese speakers can testify that for a passage written in Baihuawen, even if we replace all the non-cognate functional words with their equivalent ones, e.g., dik1 with ge3, liu2 with zo2, zoi6 with hai2, etc. The passage still does not sound like natural Cantonese. The statement that "the grammar is the same for Cantonese and Mandarin" is plain wrong.

People who are interested to learn the facts may read this book: Gao Huanian, /Guangzhou Fangyan Yanjiu/, Commerce Press, Hong Kong, 1984 ISBN: 962-07-4003-3 (In Chinese)

(Sorry, my email client does not process Unicode characters correctly, so I will have to stick to Hanyu Pinyin for Mandarin, and Jyutping for Cantonese.)

The stand point of that author was that "Chinese is one language" and "Cantonese is a dialect", but he honestly said that "Guangzhou fangyan he xiandai Hanyu yiji Hanyu de qita fangyan dou you hen da de chabie." (The Cantonese dialect is very different from modern [standard] Chinese and other Chinese dialects.)

That book go on to explain the sound system, grammar and vocabulary of Cantonese. He collected 2400 commonly used words and expressions that are distinct from modern [standard] Chinese. Distinct meant different even when written.

He also acknowledges that most Cantonese specific words has customary written forms in Cantonese communities. Those forms are used in his book.

That book is full of examples, and there are several prolonged passages at the end. The first one is a translation of the first chapter from Lu Xun's novel /Kong yiji/.

We are now seeing a small portion of Cantonese speakers who believe that there should be something as a Cantonese Wikipedia. But for most Cantonese speakers (even if you just limit that to Hong Kongers), most people object such proposals because most people know that Cantonese is NOT a written language. Again I want you to show me evidence that Cantonese IS a written language (do not tell me X books are written in Cantonese, because these are just 1 or 2 exceptions. What I want to see is 1) has any school began teaching WRITTEN CANTONESE; 2) has any newspapers/magazines started writing in Cantonese)

I wonder how Sheng Jiong know that most people from Hong Kong will object such proposals. I believe there are some support and some opposition, but most people are indifferent. We never know unless we can do a scientific poll.

I believe that earlier on Sheng Jiong claimed that there is not even one book written entirely in Cantonese. Now obviously he has raised the bar: even if X books are written in Cantonese, those are exceptions. I don't know how many will be significant.

Even if we can find a school teaching written cantonese, I believe that will be an exception. He may require that it must happen in government sponsored grade schools.

If we can many articles written in Cantonese, he may require a newspaper or magazine written completely in Cantonese. And if there is one, then of course that on newspaper is an exception.

I understand that the main point of Sheng Jiong is that Cantonese has to be widely accepted as a written language before we consider using it to write Wikipedia. However, we all understand that there are different degrees of acceptance. How much acceptance is enough?

Written Cantonese does not have an official status, but it surely exists and is practiced by many. It is not taught in grade schools, but every literate Cantonese speakers can understand it without much training. It is not a prestige written language, so there is always a risk that someone will ridicule Wikimedia foundation if Cantonese Wikipedia is allowed.

To avoid controversy, perhaps Wikimedia should disallow new Wikipedia whenever there is opposition, and set that as a policy. That may not sound good, but that could be a prudent decision. But if that is not the goal, I will invite the board to read all the arguments, learn the facts, weigh the pros and cons, and make the best decision.

Felix Wan

Hello,

Sheng Jiong wrote:

Because people choose to igonore it, and because it is just so small and it is almost non-existent. But I am not prepared to accept another Cantonese Wikipedia, and then Shanghainese, and then whatsoever trash.

I would appreciate it if you can argue using facts and not simply call other people's proposals trash. It's highly disrespectful.

There are not standard. No one has formalised these "characters", not the Hong Kong government (both before and after 1997),

The HK government has a page explaining and giving links to a code that has all the Cantonese/Hong Kong-specific characters that the standard Big5 code might not have. I don't know what is formalising if this isn't.

Here, you can see for yourself: http://www.info.gov.hk/digital21/chi/structure/cli_main.html

But put characters aside, the grammar is the same for Cantonese and Chinese.

That's...incorrect, to say the least.

We are now seeing a small portion of Cantonese speakers who believe that there should be something as a Cantonese Wikipedia. But for most Cantonese speakers (even if you just limit that to Hong Kongers), most people object such proposals because most people know that Cantonese is NOT a written language.

All languages can be written down in one way or another, if the language speakers want to.

And there's no evidence that most Cantonese speakers would object such a proposal. The three Cantonese speakers who had said anything here are Felix, Cathy, and I. I doubt we three are the only Cantonese speakers on this list or on zh.wikipedia.org.

Again I want you to show me evidence that Cantonese IS a written language (do not tell me X books are written in

I'm now beginning to think that showing you the evidence when we find it is pointless, since you seem to be holding onto your stance based on emotions rather than facts. Any time Felix or I try (tries?) to show you something, your reply is the same: oh, that doesn't count, that's just an exception.

little Alex

No, we have shown you examples of schools and newspapers, of books and musics, and every single one you just label as an exception.

Even if the whole world wrote in colloquial Cantonese, I'm shore you will call them all exceptions.

Mark

On Sun, 20 Feb 2005 17:18:29 +0800, Sheng Jiong sheng.jiong@gmail.com wrote:

...

I would appreciate it if you can argue using facts and not simply call other people's proposals trash. It's highly disrespectful.

I have been called talking "crap". I would appreciate if you can argue using facts and not simply call other people's opinions "crap" too.

...

The HK government has a page explaining and giving links to a code that has all the Cantonese/Hong Kong-specific characters that the standard Big5 code might not have. I don't know what is formalising if this isn't.

Here, you can see for yourself: http://www.info.gov.hk/digital21/chi/structure/cli_main.html

...

All languages can be written down in one way or another, if the language speakers want to.

Maybe you can. But has majority of the Hong Kongers start writing Cantonese down?

...

And there's no evidence that most Cantonese speakers would object such a proposal. The three Cantonese speakers who had said anything here are Felix, Cathy, and I. I doubt we three are the only Cantonese speakers on this list or on zh.wikipedia.org.

Well, that I should ask you people. I find myself engaged in a flame war with three persons whose total number of contributions to Wikipedia are less than that of mine alone.

And remind you, if you have not already known, one of Chinese Wikipedia's founding member, [[User:Lorenzarius]], was from Hong Kong. And he was one of the main opposer of splitting Chinese Wikipedia into Simplified and Traditional version before there was a conversion script. And [[User:Tomchiukc]] is still an active Hong Kong Wikipedian.

Chinese Wikipedian community is relatively small(if you count active contributors, I think there are less than 100), and to have 2 very active users from Hong Kong is already an achievement, considering the percentage of Chinese users in Hong Kong in comparison with mainland China.

...

I'm now beginning to think that showing you the evidence when we find it is pointless, since you seem to be holding onto your stance based on emotions rather than facts. Any time Felix or I try (tries?) to show you something, your reply is the same: oh, that doesn't count, that's just an exception.

Because you are showing me exceptions. I am sure your being able to sit here and write means you should be able to understand what is "widely accepted".

formulax _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l

I just made a wonderful table illustrating grammatical aspects of Hakka which set it apart from Baihuawen: the existance of dual pronouns, the trisyllabic nature of dual and plural pronouns, etc.

See the section of http://zh-min-nan.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Node_ue/Tiong-h%C3%B4a_hong-gi%C3%... labelled "kheh-oe"

Mark

On Sun, 20 Feb 2005 18:03:13 +0800, Alex Y. Kwan litalex@gmail.com wrote:

Hello,

Sheng Jiong wrote:

...

I have been called talking "crap". I would appreciate if you can argue using facts and not simply call other people's opinions "crap" too.

I, afaik, have never called your words "crap" and if I have, I apologize. What I object to, however, is your constant attempts to demean other people's entirely sincere efforts in creating another wikipedia. The point I'm trying to bring up isn't if their/our project is viable or not, but that your very attitude of disdain implies that you entered into this discussion merely to ridicule those of us who wish to see our proposal accepted.

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Maybe you can. But has majority of the Hong Kongers start writing Cantonese down?

I don't know; I've never done a poll about it. But if push comes to shove, I'd say yes, of course yes. For fun, for short messages, for memos, for online BBS, whatever, but yes. You've been asking this question repeatedly, and I, along with everyone else, have been giving the same answer.

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Well, that I should ask you people. I find myself engaged in a flame war with three persons whose total number of contributions to Wikipedia are less than that of mine alone.

...You consider this a flame war?! I've been trying to be nothing but perfectly polite. You're the one whom I consider...discourteous.

And how'd you know whether your contributions are more or less than those of us?

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And remind you, if you have not already known, one of Chinese Wikipedia's founding member, [[User:Lorenzarius]], was from Hong Kong. And he was one of the main opposer of splitting Chinese Wikipedia into Simplified and Traditional version before there was a conversion script. And [[User:Tomchiukc]] is still an active Hong Kong Wikipedian.

That's...not relevant to this particular discussion. Good for them, yay Hong Kong.

And I'll refrain myself from any discussion about Traditional vs. Simplified Chinese.

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Chinese Wikipedian community is relatively small(if you count active contributors, I think there are less than 100), and to have 2 very active users from Hong Kong is already an achievement, considering the percentage of Chinese users in Hong Kong in comparison with mainland China.

Now you're implying something about HKers that I don't have the time to discern. I actually don't find it surprising at all that there are so "many" HKers contributing in wikipedia, but to get into the reasons would be...rude to the mainland Chinese.

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Because you are showing me exceptions. I am sure your being able to sit here and write means you should be able to understand what is "widely accepted".

Again, just because we're on different sides of an issue doesn't mean you need to try to insult your opponents.

little Alex

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Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l

Hello,

Cathy Ma wrote:

intense discussion I have been asking my friends around - 'have you ever seen/written an article in full Cantonese?'

The answers vary but in sum, none of us have ever written anything in full Cantonese in the context of article-writing. Contrary to what you may believe, it is actually hard to write in full-Cantonese without mixing in formal Chinese in a passage.

I do agree with Mark that writing an article in Cantonese feels difficult is because we've rarely done so. The closest I've seen is, of course, in entertainment news. I think a certain author in the late 80s/early 90s used to mix in a lot of Cantonese in his novels (But Wah Lau). I think it'll come easier with practice.

On the other hand, in Hong Kong, most subtitles we have on TV or movies are in formal Chinese, which can be another example showing how accustomed we are to converging from Cantonese to formal Chinese and vice versa.

Grown-up movies, very true. Kids movies are almost always dubbed into Cantonese and have Cantonese subtitles. Sometimes I hate it, sometimes it's funnier than the original version. I heard that the "Shrek 2" dub was pretty good (I hate it when Miyazaki is dubbed, though: totally wrong tone).

And btw, mainland Cantonese is not the same as HK Cantonese. We have extra terms that mainland Cantonese wouldn't understand and vice versa.

I've been to Guangzhou a lot the last few months and I'd say the difference is a lot less than you think. The slang is of course much different, but if we keep to article-writing, it should be all right.

What I do notice is that we HKers use a lot more English terms and phrases than the mainlanders. So much so that in one instance, where a salesman is trying to sell an online English learning programme, the words he used were 80% English and 20% Cantonese, but the sentence structure and grammar were purely Cantonese. It was very odd.

So my belief is that unless we are talking about a cultural jamming hub, it will not be too hard to foresee that the Cantonese page will have a hard time in retaining the critical mass in sustaining a viable Cantonese page.

We'd never know until we try. ;)

most of us were written by Cantonese. I am proud of my mother-tongue and at the same time I do not see that having to write in formal-chinese is an insult to us.

I don't see it as an insult; I just think it's "unfair". I probably wouldn't even be joining this discussion if all Chinese people are still writing in wenyanwen, but we aren't. The point of baihuawen was that we should write as how we speak. For us Cantonese, we *aren't* writing as how we speak; we're writing as how the Mandarin speaker would speak. 'Tis all.

Simply because there are some terms in Cantonese we don't even know how to write - Cantonese is a verbal language and we base on the tone to communication.

Hm, I think a lot of Cantonese words can be written if we look up the older dictionaries, since we've kept a lot of the older words (just like we've kept a lot of the older pronunciations) when modern Mandarin has lost a lot of those words.

I mean, many Cantonese scholars have been saying how some of the older poems don't rhyme if you read them in modern Mandarin but still rhyme if you read them in Cantonese because Cantonese has kept a lot of the ancient pronunciations, etc.

little Alex