On Thu, February 3, 2005 3:41 am, Mark Williamson said:
Hi Felix,
I also noticed what you said in Meta about not supporting having a
separate edition for Penkyamp and a separate edition for romanized Wu. I
think this point is important to emphasize.
Actually, if someone propose a romanized Cantonese or Wu edition, I will consider
each proposal on its own merits. My main concern in Meta was to stick to what the section
title says, and that when people need to make a decision, they know exactly who support
what.
I myself am not an advocate of literature in Cantonese or Wu, but I want to present a
picture of what is going on, as accurately as I can do, and if some people are willing to
try, I want to support their effort.
I don't see why these separate editions are
nessecary. The difference
is only between scripts, and Han characters can be converted to Penkyamp
or a Wu romanization system by computer with great accuracy.
I have not considered that. It will not be straight forward though. The complexity
should be larger than the conversion between traditional and simplified Han scripts in the
existing ZH Wikipedia.
Moreover, if a Chinese dialect is not written in Han script but in Latin script, it may
result in a different literary standard. For example, a Latin script will discourage play
of words using homophones. Try creating a Wikipedia using Hanyu Pinyin, following all the
official orthographic rules, and we will discover the difficulty in automatic translation.
Translation in the other way round need even more artificial intelligence.
Having separate editions for Chinese vernaculars is in
my view a good
thing, but as you said it may be a little bit hard to gather support at
first. Imagine how much harder it will be if it is divided across 3
entirely separate Wikipedias for different scripts?
I think we should all start out using the Han script, and from there
we can develop conversion technology if nessecary.
What I think is most important here however is this:
The board needs to make an ultimate decision on whether groups of
native speakers should be allowed their own Wikipedia when they request it
amid objections from a group of speakers of a different language.
IE, should a Cantonese and Wu Wikipedia be created with the full
support of people like Felix Wan and Nishishei and Pangguanzhe, and the
tentative support of people like Alex, all of whom actually speak these
languages, as well as the support of some non-speakers (Pektiong,
MilchFlasche, Kaihsu, and encouraging words from a few
other zh.wikipedians who don't actually know any of these languages),
against the strong wills of non-speakers such as Andrew Lih, Sheng Jiong
(who, it should be noted, does speak Minnan), Shizhao, and such?
What I think is particularly compelling about this particular case is
that no Cantonese or Wu speakers have come out yet to say outright "No",
even skeptical native speakers like Toytoy have not given such a strong
opinion.
I also think a decision should be made in the near future so this
issue can stop being argued over in slow motion.
Mark
Please notice that Shizhao said he will not oppose ZH-YUE or ZH-WUU if they are
written in Latin scripts, as ZH-MIN-NAN currently is. His concern was that the difference
between written Mandarin and written Cantonese may not be different enough to need a new
encyclopdia. That concern was also shared by Toytoy. It was their concern that motivated
me to suggest writing experimental pages for each proposed new Wikipedia project. I
believe that can address their concern.
People support or oppose the same thing for very different reasons. We can still use some
discussion to understand each other better.
Felix Wan