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

[MilchFlasche瑋平]

Hi Striling,

I was a little shock seeing you still speculating that Cantonese is
merely a "dialect" of "Chinese". Argh. How many times did those
witnesses talk about how different other vernaculars are from
Mandarin? Believe me, if Cantonese is merely "splitting the language",
then all Catalans or Bretons should have been hanged for treachery for
thousands of times. "Close to the standard dialect?" I'd like to ask
you to click all the sound files in this page:
http://www.ctlwmp.cityu.edu.hk/dialects/prolist.htm
The same story "North Wind and the Sun", different vernaculars from
Beijing, Shanghai, Canton, Chaozhou, Minnan and Hakka. Only after that
could we discuss how different these "dialects" are.

Yes, these IS such a problem that in China most speakers of the
vernaculars are not used to written forms, but this phenomenon is
never able to deny how foreign they sound to each other. And the
vernaculars were not written because they are long excluded from
national education. In pre-modern times, low literacy rate meant that
mostly it were the scholar-officials who would learn writing, and to
write in classic Chinese, not even the standard vernacular. Even in
this time, there WERE indeed written forms of Cantonese, Minnan, and
Wu. Unfortunately, when modern nation-building came, both nationalist
and communist government promoted almost exclusively Mandarin, and
standardized hanzi only for it, rather than let the vernaculars
develop their own written form freely, saying that it was for the sake
of "national unity". Too long have these vernaculars been
misunderstood, too long have they been deprived the freedom of
expressing. I hope people who are not familiar with such fact could
reconsider all the messages discussed before. Otherwise the responeses
could be so frustrating.

Thanks. Best regards,

[[zh:User:MilchFlasche]]

-- 
2005, make signs happen!