[Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia in Chinese dialects

[Mark Williamson]

Oh, and also, here you seem not to fully understand the complex
relationship between Chinese vernaculars, comparing them to
"culturally significant English dialects" which according to you are
only a little bit less divergent.

Chinese vernaculars are extremely, extremely divergent from one
another. When written in Han characters, they're still divergent, but
not as much (since in han characters, all that shows is vocabulary and
grammar, not pronunciation).

The "desire" to "unite" fangyan (languages, dialects, regional speech)
with Baihua is mostly one felt by the government of the Mainland. Very
few actual speakers of these languages feel strongly about trying to
use a united written form, and if they do, they usually feel strongly
against it.

We have Wikipedias in languages now where there are a very very small
number of books published in them annually only, we have at least a
couple of Wikipedias in languages which many would argue are dialects.
Cantonese has a stronger claim to separate literature than most of
these, both Cantonese and Wu have a stronger claim to number of
speakers.

If a reader doesn't want to view a particular Wikipedia, and neither
does the next one, there is always one that will. There is no way to
tell what the interest will be, and it would be a bad decision, I
think, to say "no" just because only 5% or 10% (this is just a
scenario - for all I know, 99.9999% or 0.0001% are actually
interested) are interested when even they number in the hundreds of
thousands on their own.

Mark

On Thu, 3 Feb 2005 12:52:42 -0500, Stirling Newberry
<stirling.newberry at xigenics.net> wrote:
> 
> On Feb 3, 2005, at 12:41 PM, Alex Kwan wrote:
> 
> > Hello,
> >
> > Stirling Newberry wrote:
> >> I thought the question is what the *readers* want.
> >
> > We don't have the resources to find out (I mean, do we do an Internet
> > poll to find out, what?), so we'll probably have to stick with what
> > the writers are willing to contribute.
> 
> I don't think an argument from ignorance works here. Is there a large
> body of readers who want wikipedias in vernaculars that diverge from
> Mandrin? This should be something which is documentable. Are there
> schools being set up to teach written vernaculars as opposed to
> standard Mandrin, are there novels, dictionaries etc. being published
> in large numbers, is there a movement. In short, has someone shown a
> notable and documentable desire to separate dialects from Chinese? My
> research (posted some time ago) found a case, but not an overwhelming
> one, for some degree of linguistic separationism in progress. However,
> a stronger case could be made for a desire to incorporate vernacular
> idioms into standard mandrin, or as an important cultural dialect
> within the whole, as there are many culturally significant dialects in
> English which, never the less, are not under going the process of
> linguistic separation.
> 
> This resource is here to provide readers with information, those of us
> who write for it have our own motivations, of course, but it must be
> the readers interest, to the extent we can document it, which ought to
> be the final criterion for making decisions.
> 
> Instead of arguing with each other about what "we" would like, it seems
> better to spend time finding out what the readers want, and then
> finding a means to provide that.
> 
> 
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