Hi Jiang (or is it Cantonese reading, Gong?),

I think the best option is to use honzi, for multiple reasons, but including where nessecary "chorfans" (this nessecitates the use of unicode).

I think actually that a Wikipedia in Hakka is more feasible because there are more people (in Taiwan mostly) advocating writing Hakka in roman letters totally, like people sometimes do now for Minnan (see the Minnan Wikipedia), and having totally separate literature for it.

But what is most interesting here is that the SMS (Second most spoken) Chinese is Wu rather than Cantonese (3rd) or Minnan (4th), but that it is paid less attention as a separate language because it is spoken not largely in an overseas community like Hongkong/Macao or Taiwan, with the exception of Singapore/Malaysia but even there it is small: most of its speakers are in Shanghai and there is only one movie in it, only a couple of books (mostly old), most publication or broadcast in it is forbidden or discouraged by government, and only music in it is Shanghai opera style and "punk" music which uses Wu as a way to "give the finger" to the establishment in a subtle way (that is not likely to get them arrested).

Mark

On Sat, 15 Jan 2005 01:10:08 +0800, "江瑋平(Roberto)" robertus@ebtnet.net wrote:

Hello there (to David Chang and other proponents speaking Cantonese mostly),

After the détente of these days (the main focus has seemed to be drawn to the main page of Wikipedia...) --- and I have read most of the discussions exchanged here --- I wonder if you guys are considering how to build up this Cantonese version. Do you have some clear plans of which pages to be written in the first place, and how many committed contributors are there going to be in the beginning? I'm asking this just being conserning, because although there has been numerous messages for or against its establishment, I myself would quite support it. I think that except discussing about "yes, we need it" or "no, it's abundant", maybe some concrete plan is desirable? How are you going to write Cantonese, by which romanization program(s); autoconversion mechanism needed or not; totally with hanzi or a mix-up with roman letters? I'm fond of encouraging producing texts of knowledge in "dialects" (to me, they're really languages unintelligeable with others just as fit as Catalàn is), and hoping that maybe following Cantonese version, there would be a Hakka version (which is spoken by 12% of the population, but quite needs promoting in Taiwan). So I care much about how your issue is ongoing here:)

P. S. This is my first time using this mailing list system, and any toleration of my unintended mistakes is pleaded.

Sincerely,

Hrodeberht von MilchFlasche.

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