In fact there are, from what I know, many French "dialects", some of which can be considered separate languages from French (ie Waloon, for which we have a separate Wikipedia, Gallo, etc etc) and others which are only minor regional variations.

Of course its probably best if you ask somebody from France...

On Fri, 10 Sep 2004 20:24:15 +0200, Yann Forget yann@forget-me.net wrote:

Hi,

Le Friday 10 September 2004 17:24, Delirium a écrit :

...

Sort of a tangential issue: Wikipedians should keep in mind here that whatever they do is a positive political and social/cultural act; there is no correct answer to this question.

Whether Chinese should be one language or diverge into multiple languages is somewhat similar to the question 180 years ago over whether the various Greeks spoken throughout the former Ottoman Empire should remain distinct, or be merged into a "common Greek", and perhaps also similar to the eternal disputes in France over the differences between the various regional dialects. If we, for example, say we support having a separate Wikipedia for a particular French dialect (which we do), but we oppose having one for a particular Chinese dialect, then we're making a rather odd political statement. Not that we can't do that, but it should be done on purpose.

Which French dialects are talking about? There are regional languages in France, the main ones being Breton, Basque and Occitan (spelling?), but I don't think there are "French" dialects. You should also note that Basque and Breton are very different from French. Occitan is a roman language, but any French speaker may not understand it better than, say, Italian or Catalan.

...

-Mark

Yann

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Hi,

Le Friday 10 September 2004 20:48, Mark Williamson a écrit :

In fact there are, from what I know, many French "dialects", some of which can be considered separate languages from French (ie Waloon, for which we have a separate Wikipedia, Gallo, etc etc) and others which are only minor regional variations.

Of course its probably best if you ask somebody from France...

I see that you don't know what you are talking about.

I am from France, but I can't read nor understand Walloon, nor any other "French dialects".

Reading the list, the issue with SC and TC is different. They are the same language, but sometime written with in a different way.

Yann

http://www.nettranslation.co.uk/resources_about_language_chinese.htm

Goes into some of the details, but the bottom line is that culturally and in underlying technical architecture, the two writing systems have differences, and more over, Simplified is "lossy" - that is there are characters which represent several characters of Traditional. More over there is, indeed, a political and cultural dimension here, which is no different than many other languages, namely there is a political dimension: from the point of view of a Taiwanese person, this action says that you support unification under the current mainland government, which may not be what you want to say to people.

The other problem not covered here is the most encyclopedia oriented one: looking up material. Names of places and people from traditional are now difficult to look up, since many of them are transliterated differently in simplified versus traditional.

I fear an overly hasty decision was made to stop what seemed like a "maverick" project, when, in fact, there are non-trivial, and non-technical user issues raised by "one or two". My personal preference would be for one: the problems of two character set worlds are a nightmare which are recognized around the world as creating difficulties between the three major sets of chinese characters in use (Simplified, Traditional and Japanese) which have just enough in the way of differences to make life difficult.

The three important technical/user issues to address are:

1. Disambiguation pages are going to be needed in larger numbers, as a reference in simplified which has multiple renderings in traditional. There should be some process which makes tracking down and dealing with such references easier.

2. Where there is a discontinuity in character mapping, the search should be made to work for both. Example: unicode maps "guo" (country) to separate characters between simplified/japanese and traditional. Someone typing in the traditional character would get no article, and be invited to create one.

3. Many sources are originally from "traditional" characters, and their simplified versions, as noted, are "lossy".

My suggestion is that some method of encoding an "alternate" traditional character be made. For example [[[ 干 | 幹 ]]] would say that in this context the simplified 干 should be replaced by 幹.