[Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia in Chinese dialects

[Felix Wan]

Dear all:

Finally I have found my way here where the discussion takes place. There has not been much in meta. I have read arguments from both sides here, and I would like to contribute my ideas to the question we have.

Let me first introduce my language background. My parents' native language is actually Shanghainese, so I know it. I was born and raised in Hong Kong, so I am most fluent in Cantonese. My elementary school used Mandarin as the language of instruction, so I am also fluent in Mandarin. My education later was more and more in English, so I also know the British English dialect. Then I went to USA and became fluent in American English. I also know a little Japanese.

It is very interesting but not surprising to see that the strongest opposition against setting up Wikipedia in Chinese dialects came from Chinese speakers. Yes, we are educated to believe that Chinese is one language and that Qin Shihuang has unified the written language thousands of years ago. One user correctly pointed out that the unified writing system was Classical Chinese (Wenyanwen). Today's Xiandai Hanyu / Baihuawen is actually based on the Mandarin vernacular. People not speaking Mandarin Chinese suddenly became illiterate when they first encountered Baihuawen but education has successfully established the Mandarin vernacular as the new standard of Chinese writing.

Cantonese Chinese : Mandarin Chinese :: British English : American English?

One user has correctly pointed out that the analogy is improper. All linguists agree that the first two dialects are not mutually intelligible but the last two dialects are. The reason that Mandarin speakers can understand writing by people from Hong Kong is that formal education requires students to writing in Mandarin vocabulary and Mandarin grammar. Many students are unaware of the fact just because they do not speak Mandarin. That fact is that every literate Cantonese speaker can understand text written in the Mandarin vernacular. That is why some users argued that text written in Cantonese may not be needed.

Colloquial vs. Vernacular

There could be some misunderstanding that I have to make clear. Standard written Chinese is not in colloquial Mandarin but in vernacular Mandarin. There should be a sense of formality in written literature, and the vocabulary should be standardized, but it should sound natural and grammatical like it is spoken everyday. Standard written Chinese does not sound like Cantonese when every character is pronounced in Cantonese. I must say that the literary vernacular Cantonese standard is not as developed as Mandarin, but as many users has stated, there are people creating Cantonese literature. Although writing a Cantonese encyclopedia will be unprecedented, I supported the idea because I already found Wikipedia in minority languages and fictional languages. I thought: why not give major dialects of China a try?

As an illustration, the language I am writing in is vernacular English. Colloquial English will be like this: http://www.langmaker.com/db/bbl_englishcolloquial.htm

I found that later in the discussion, the opposition started to get focused on the real issue that got my attention: If I am writing the encyclopedia in vernacular Cantonese using traditional Chinese script, how much will it be different from the existing ZH Wikipedia? We can only try it out to see. So far linguistic studies concentrated only on the spoken varieties of Chinese.

Proposal

I propose that we agree on some policies on setting up a Wikipedia in a new language. Since a new Wikipedia will need some good articles to start with anyway, we may ask people who propose new Wikipedia to pick some topics from the 1000 essential articles and write say at least 3 good articles of moderate length and 20 good stubs in the proposed script. A possible location without new setup for those experimental articles will be on meta by using pages with prefixes like "Wikipedia:New/zh-yue-han/", "Wikipedia:New/zh-wuu-han/", "Wikipedia:New/zh-guoyu-pinyin/". (By the way, I support Pinyin Wikipedia. If there is a "Simple English" version, why not a pinyin version for people to learn Chinese?)

That is just a thought. How feasible is the idea? Please fill me in on the technical issues. I hope that further discussions here can work on the details formalize the procedure so that every language/dialect can have a fair chance to start a new Wikipedia and have a reasonably good foundation if started.

As for the doubt on how much time I will spend on the Wu Wikipedia? I don’t know. How much commitment is required to support an issue on Wikimedia? Is there a policy? The reason I am only active in EN is because I want not only to edit, but to participate in the community. I prefer spending more time on one community first. I have already made some edits on ZH, and I will contribute more.

Felix Wan