About a month ago, Shizhao requested that the wiki at minnan.wikipedia.org be moved to poj.wikipedia.org, because the writing there is Taiwanese, and not representative of Min Nan as a whole:
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2004-July/011003.html
Kaishu Tai ridiculed the POJ term as "meaningless", and requested that the wiki be moved to zh-min-nan.wikipedia.org instead.
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2004-July/011013.html
I didn't know who to believe, and although I made some attempt to make sense out of it, the end result was the status quo.
Just today, I did some reading of my own on the subject. The best reference I found was this:
http://www.de-han.org/taiwan/chuliau/pehoeji-v.pdf
Other information sources are: http://203.64.42.21/iug/ungian/POJ/siausit/2002/2002POJGTH/lunbun%5CK2-kloet... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwanese_%28linguistics%29
Contrary to what Shizhao said, it seems that the Peh-oe-ji orthography, as seen on minnan.wikipedia.org, is not even representative of Taiwanese, let alone Min Nan. In fact it is only used by a small minority. Now I have every respect for the goals of those who promote Peh-oe-ji, but I don't think Wikipedia should assign subdomains which support one political viewpoint over another.
Currently the predominant form of writing in Taiwan is "Traditional Chinese", given the code zh-tw. Writing of this form is commonly used on zh.wikipedia.org. The Taiwanese people who write in zh.wikipedia.org speak the exact same language as those who write on minnan.wikipedia.org. That language is a form of Min Nan, referred to in Taiwan as Ho-lo-oe.
Based on the information I have now, I would like to move minnan.wikipedia.org to peh-oe-ji.wikipedia.org. I'm expecting objections to this from the users of that wiki, who seem to be keen promoters of the Peh-oe-ji orthography. All the same, I'd like to hear any comments or objections anyone has.
-- Tim Starling
Tim Starling wrote:
All the same, I'd like to hear any comments or objections anyone has.
I might not have anything helpful to say that will bring the matter closer to resolution, but I'd just like to state here that I'm very impressed with your research, and the dedication you put into it. I didn't even know you were interested in Taiwanese linguistics. :)
It's nice to know that someone is taking care of the smaller wikis that have outstanding issues. Thanks, Tim!
Timwi
I wrote:
The Taiwanese people who write in zh.wikipedia.org speak the exact same language as those who write on minnan.wikipedia.org. That language is a form of Min Nan, referred to in Taiwan as Ho-lo-oe.
Kaishu let me know on the wiki that this statement was misleading, so here is a clarification. There are several linguistic groups on Taiwan, including:
* Speakers of Ho-lo-oe * Speakers of Mandarin * Speakers of aboriginal languages and other dialects of Chinese
Of the speakers of Ho-lo-oe, most write using what we would call Traditional Chinese, a script which historically was promoted throughout East Asia by Chinese conquest and influence. A small minority of Ho-lo-oe speakers promote the use of latin-based orthographies, which follow phonetically from the spoken language. Such orthographies are referred to as "Peh-oe-ji", which means vernacular. The point I was trying to make with the quoted paragraph was that Ho-lo-oe speakers contribute to both zh.wikipedia.org and minnan.wikipedia.org.
-- Tim Starling
On Mon, 9 Aug 2004, Tim Starling wrote:
Of the speakers of Ho-lo-oe, most write using what we would call Traditional Chinese, a script which historically was promoted throughout East Asia by Chinese conquest and influence. A small minority of Ho-lo-oe speakers promote the use of latin-based orthographies, which follow phonetically from the spoken language. Such orthographies are referred to as "Peh-oe-ji", which means vernacular. The point I was trying to make with the quoted paragraph was that Ho-lo-oe speakers contribute to both zh.wikipedia.org and minnan.wikipedia.org.
-- Tim Starling
Sorry, but what is the point? Ho-lo-oe speakers may contribute to zh.wikipedia.org because she/he is multilingual and understand written Mandarin and choose to contribute to zh.wikipedia.org. She/he can also contribute to other wikipedias if she/he can write in those languages.
-- Pektiong
Pochung(Pektiong) Chen(Tan) wrote:
Sorry, but what is the point? Ho-lo-oe speakers may contribute to zh.wikipedia.org because she/he is multilingual and understand written Mandarin and choose to contribute to zh.wikipedia.org. She/he can also contribute to other wikipedias if she/he can write in those languages.
The point is that Peh-oe-ji is not representative of Min Nan. There are millions of Min Nan speakers who do not use a romanised script, hopefully I am speaking for their interests.
-- Tim Starling
Tim Starling wrote:
The point is that Peh-oe-ji is not representative of Min Nan. There are millions of Min Nan speakers who do not use a romanised script, hopefully I am speaking for their interests.
I was also puzzled by your juxtaposing zh and minnan, as if the latter must necessarily follow from the former in terms of how a language is written. People who happen to speak Minnan contribute whichever Wikipedia they happen to be interested in (hopefully with proficiency).
Now, more to the point, your claim that "millions of Min Nan speakers" don't know a romanized script is *absurdly* true. But that does not mean knowing a Chinese script (be it Traditional, Simplified) -- which is taught for Mandarin -- means these speakers are a community of Min Nan readers/writers. As an analogy, knowing your ABCs does not mean you know how to spell English or French. Most Min Nan speakers do not write Min Nan, have never been taught how to write Min Nan. Among those who do -- and that still leaves tens of thousands by my unscientific estimate -- some have come to Wikipedia.
Is that a surprise? Look at the many dozens of Wikipedia language subdomain names reserved for all those languages. Why are they vacant, seemingly dead? Undoubtedly there are many reasons: material/technological hurdles, economics (expense), educational, political, few speakers to begin with, etc. I submit that a major reason is that speakers of some of those languages, for political, cultural, or economic reasons, are illiterate. The writing system may also not be standardized. But at some time during the course of a language's development, *some*, perhaps only a few, speakers must start to read and write that language to get things going. That is what we Min Nan editors have been doing. If what we do, as literate reader/writers of Min Nan, fail to match your expectation, that is not our fault. We did not *invent* POJ, which has been around for 150 years. Nor are we *reviving* POJ, which has never stop being used (though governments have tried to suppress it) and thus needs no reviving. Nor is POJ a Taiwanese particularity (we have non-Taiwanese editors). In a sense we are *promoting* it through Wikipedia, but that is what every Wikipedia does implicitly by writing in a language.
~~~~
(I'm sorry for the lengthy response below, but I felt it was necessary to supply some historical context in response to a lengthy criticism of how a Wikipedia should be named. Neither the language/dialect nor the Wikipedia, as productive as it has been, is not well-known, particularly to Anglo/European editors.)
Tim Starling wrote:
Contrary to what Shizhao said, it seems that the Peh-oe-ji orthography, as seen on minnan.wikipedia.org, is not even representative of Taiwanese, let alone Min Nan. In fact it is only used by a small minority.
Of course the Peh-oe-ji (hereafter POJ) orthography is used by a "small minority". This is in large part due to the fact that Min Nan everywhere is historically not a written language. In fact historically the vast majority of Min Nan speakers were illiterate. Those elite who could afford to read and write primarily did so in Classical Chinese, albeit pronounced in Literary Min Nan (a form of Vulgar Classical Chinese, if you will). But there were piecemeal and largely non-cumulative attempts to write down the speech, though nothing systematic has come out of it. Historically.
More recent development: In the early part of the 19th century US and later British missionaries started to proselytize in Min Nan speaking regions, starting from the large "expatriate" communities in Southeast Asia, then Amoy (Xiamen), Shantou, eventually Formosa (Taiwan). The orthography used was thus not limited to the Taiwanese population. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Van_Nest_Talmage. I wrote this but feel free to check the sources.) Now of course, as you can imagine, its usage was at first limited only to the Min Nan-speaking Christian population, which had always been small, but the variety of works in this corpus was much broader, and not all of a blatantly religious nature, than anything that had been written in any other scripts including Chinese characters, to this day. Since the end of martial law in Taiwan, school children are no longer punished for speaking Min Nan and although no authority in Min Nan-speaking region anywhere has regulated how Min Nan *ought* to be written, in Taiwan POJ is taught. This could be misconstrued as evidence that POJ is intrinsically "Taiwanese" but that's simply not so.
Also see my previous response to your contention that "[the POJ] writing there [i.e. minnan.wikipedia.org] is thus not representative of min-nan generally":
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2004-July/011024.html
I quote: "To keep discussion short I'll just say, for now, that most variants of Minnan are generally and historically *not* written and when written, generally without reference to a standard (lots of words written inconsistently). The genra have also been limited to songs and other poetic forms. So it's difficult to talk about representativeness in that context. The current Minnan Wikipedia *is* the "state of the art" to the extent that Minnan has been written and read historically."
Now I have every respect for the goals of those who promote Peh-oe-ji, but I don't think Wikipedia should assign subdomains which support one political viewpoint over another.
Now I am puzzled by your assertion that using the Peh-oe-ji orthography to write Min Nan constitutes a "political viewpoint". Which viewpoint is that? A Christian viewpoint? A Taiwan-centric Min Nan viewpoint? A pro-alphabet, anti-character viewpoint?
I will say for now that people use the orthography for many reasons. Many like the fact that they are able to write in a consistent manner in an orthography attested by a century-and-half of works. Many are Taoist, Buddhist, atheists, etc. (I am certainly not Christain in case you are wondering -- not that this should be relevant.) If some people would like to politicize a writing system, well, they are feel to do so but that does not necessarily mean their viewpoint has wide currency.
Currently the predominant form of writing in Taiwan is "Traditional Chinese", given the code zh-tw. Writing of this form is commonly used on zh.wikipedia.org.
Traditional Chinese has been widely taught in Taiwan's educational system since the end of WWII, for the purpose of writing the (de facto) official Mandarin language (or dialect, if you will). The ISO code zh-tw specifies the regional variety of the "zh language", which is generally interpreted as meaning Mandarin.
But since the Taiwanese are a multi-ethnic, multi-lingual society, how official Mandarin is written does not dictate how other native languages must be written. The Government certainly does not prescribe that Min Nan in Taiwan should be written in Chinese characters.
The Taiwanese people who write in zh.wikipedia.org speak the exact same language as those who write on minnan.wikipedia.org. That language is a form of Min Nan, referred to in Taiwan as Ho-lo-oe.
Note that Min Nan is not the native language of every Taiwanese and therefore only some Taiwanese speak Min Nan. Other people who are not Taiwanese also speak some form of Min Nan. When those Min Nan speakers (regardless of nationality) participate in an xx-language Wikipedia, they use whatever the dominant writing system is. Thus they do not attempt to, for example, write Japanese in Roumaji (romanization) in ja.wikipedia.org.
Nor is every editor in minnan.wikipedia.org Taiwanese. We also have editors from Amoy, PRC.
I hope you would not try to confuse the issue by implying that since Mandarin speakers write Mandarin in Chinese characters, that they therefore necessarily must write Min Nan similarly. It should not be difficult to understand that related languages, for historical reasons, may well be treated to different scripts. I need not cite the many examples in this category (but I will if requested).
Based on the information I have now, I would like to move minnan.wikipedia.org to peh-oe-ji.wikipedia.org. I'm expecting objections to this from the users of that wiki, who seem to be keen promoters of the Peh-oe-ji orthography. All the same, I'd like to hear any comments or objections anyone has.
In June 2004 you very nicely asked:
How about minnan.wikipedia.org? It's shorter, doesn't conflict with anything, and is easy to remember.
-- Tim Starling
(http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2004-June/010377.html)
But to the surprise of several Min Nan editors, you went ahead without waiting for any feedback, even though you appeared to invite it in a non-rhetorical fashion. Given this experience I have concluded that I, as a Min Nan editor, is powerless to influence whatever you believe, rightly or wrongly, to be the best course of action. I trust your judgement as a developer but I am not convinced by your arguments to the effect that the Minnan Wikipedia, as written, is somehow unrepresentive (even "unauthentic"?). You are of course free to conduct further research and show Min Nan editors works that you regard as representive of Min Nan (or Min Nan Taiwanese) writing.
~~~~
On Sun, 8 Aug 2004, Tim Starling wrote:
Based on the information I have now, I would like to move minnan.wikipedia.org to peh-oe-ji.wikipedia.org. I'm expecting objections to this from the users of that wiki, who seem to be keen promoters of the Peh-oe-ji orthography. All the same, I'd like to hear any comments or objections anyone has.
-- Tim Starling
Peh-oe-ji is a script/orthography, not a language. The peh-oe-ji orthography, with some minor modifications, can and is used to write orther languages such as Hakka and other aboriginal languages in Taiwan.
Historically, wikipedia has been using 'language', not 'orthography' to classify the wikipedia. When a language is wrtten in only one orthography there is no problem. When a language can be written in more than one orthographies, there is a problem. In my opinion, wikipedia doesn't not provide a method to solve this problem.
-- Pektiong
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