Hi Mountain,
I think I should respond to a couple of points.
1) This is because of baihua, which is used by Cantonese speakers and
Mandarin speakers alike although it is based firstly on Mandarin. I
think the issue here is "colloquial Cantonese" which has some
different grammar and a lot of different words. (the issue is very
very very complex unfortunately)
2) Exactly, however there is the possibility to use the hanzi for
writing the "colloquial Cantonese", which is difficult to understand
for readers who don't speak Cantonese.
I'm not sure what you mean about Cantonese not being able to finish
the list of articles - if you mean there aren't enough people who use
the romanisation to be able to finish it, then yes, that is true, and
perhaps to use roman letters is a bad idea. But if hanzi (including
Cantonese "fangyanzi", writing colloquial Cantonese instead of
standard written baihua which is shared with Cantonese and Mandarin)
is used, there are surely enough people who can write such a list,
although not all people who can speak Cantonese colloquial know how to
write it (since not all characters are part of Mandarin-based
"baihua", and some have different meanings).
I think that if this isn't just one user who wants to start a separate
Wikipedia, but a small group, even if other Cantonese speakers are
opposed, we should let them start their Wikipedia on a "trial basis"
to see how things work. I think this is usually best strategy in such
a situation, and later if it isn't good it can be closed or moved to
different servers.
Mark
On Sat, 25 Dec 2004 03:00:16 +0800, yuanml <yuanml(a)pku.org.cn> wrote:
Shizhao post a new thread about Cantonese Wikipedia on
Village pump at Chinese Wikipedia.
I asked many Cantonese to express their opinion, so far most of them showed their
opposition.
please visit here for details:
http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:%E8%81%8A%E5%A4%A9#.E7.B2.A4.E8.AF.A…
I support setting up Cantonese Wikipedia.
User Toytoy debated with me that:
(1) The daily writings of Cantonese is almost the same with Mandarin Users.
(2) Only very few people use romanisation system, they even can't finish the
list of articles all languages should have
(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_articles_all_languages_shoul… )
User Toytoy doubt the value of some small languages that can't finish the list.
This point seems to be reasonable for me.
I just want to ask what is the language policy for Mediawiki projects?
--[[User:Mountain]]
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