[Foundation-l] Re: [Wikipedia-l] Re: Quenya language request, and Chinese Wikipedia again

[Mark Williamson]

What I think the problem here is is that you are asking the same few
individuals.

It is my feeling that the individuals you ask are Mandarin speakers,
just as somebody told me that the people you asked originally for an
initial opinion about separate vs unified script zh: were all from the
Mainland.

Perhaps you have unsubscribed from wikipedia-l, but recently there has
been a coming-out of support from native speakers of Cantonese,
including respected zh-wikipedians, for the proposal of a separate
Cantonese Wikipedia.

It angers me very much that you don't take this into consideration but
keep trying to use a stick as a wheel asking the same people over and
over when their opinion really doesn't matter much in this situation.

I have quoted experts, as has Stirling Newberry, in telling you that
what you're hearing is just plain wrong. You have not trusted me
because you have some problem with me, even though I have quoted
experts and provided solid examples, and you have not commented on
Stirling Newberry's fact-finding post, although this message suggests
strongly that for some reason you are discarding his citations as well
as a sign that you trust non-expert opinion from speakers of a related
language over quotes from expert works which in all cases were written
by fluent speakers of Cantonese or Wu.

What's even more infuriating is that you still continue to believe
these common Mandarin-speakers over not only the opinion of
Cantonese-speaking experts, but over the DIRECT TESTIMONIAL OF
MULTIPLE CANTONESE SPEAKERS.

I really used to respect you a lot, but this is like the straw that
broke the horse's back.

Mark

On Thu, 10 Feb 2005 11:14:33 -0800, Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales
<jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> David Gerard wrote:
> > The thing is you're still presupposing that an existing wikipedia has a
> > right to block the existence of a new Wikipedia.
> >
> > I ask the Board: is this the case?
> 
> Not speaking here for the board, but only offering my own tentative
> opinion, the answer to this is "no" in the general case, but that such
> factors can be a part of the overall decision.
> 
> I am told repeatedly by many people that while Mandarian and Cantonese
> are mutually unintelligible in the spoken form, in written form they
> are the same.  This is pretty compelling for me.
> 
> If there is a significant population of people who can not read/write
> standard written Chinese, but *can* read/write Cantonese in some
> writing system that is different, then I want to learn about that,
> because that would be a very compelling factor in the other direction.
> 
> --Jimbo
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