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

Fri Feb 18 07:54:29 UTC 2005

Hi Stirling and Cathy,

I will respond separately.

Cathy, these are all good and fine issues you raise.

>The answers vary but in sum, none of us have ever written anything in
>full Cantonese in the context of article-writing.  Contrary to what
>you may believe, it is actually hard to write in full-Cantonese
>without mixing in formal Chinese in a passage.  But on an
>interpersonal level - that is much easier and we do write short memos
>an notes to one another in Cantonese.

This has been experienced by many a language in the past. For example,
the O'odham language local to where I live had some issues at first
where people thought English should be used in all formal contexts and
O'odham should only be used for interpersonal communication and the
like.

People found it difficult to write O'odham because they had been
taught to write English in school.

However, with a little bit of effort on the part of everybody, these
people decided it was worth it to use their native language in /all/
realms of life with only one exception, communication with people who
do not know O'odham at all.

At first it was difficult - people kept substituting English words
when there was a perfectly suitable O'odham equivalent, at least in
formal writing - but in a short while people really got the hang of it
and it was even fun for them.

Now there is radio, minor newspapers, road signs, local government,
utility bills, business, and school all operating entirely in O'odham
(with the exception of the schools which are bilingual - if they
didn't teach English as their first language they would get hate mail
from all over the country and pressure from the federal government to
cease), and it has really experienced a wonderful blossoming (still no
novels or post secondary education - that may have to wait).

What I'm saying here is that the reason it is difficult for you and
your friends and colleagues to write long passages in Cantonese is
because you don't have a lot of experience with writing Cantonese.
That is to say, you may have experience writing messages like "Please
have the papers ready for me in 5 minutes", but you don't have
experience writing longer passages with content more like "It was my
idea originally, but to Connie it was so intriguing that I let her fly
with it. The results were more successful than we could imagine, they
have increased the net worth of the division 150%. It's amazing nobody
had thought of it before".

I don't know for sure but I am willing to hazard a guess that people
like those at cantonese.org.cn can write longer passages in Cantonese
relatively easily, purely, and fluently because it is something they
do often.

As far as the Hong Kong vs Guangdong thing, I think a lot of this
arises from terms that would be more used in daily conversation than
informative speech, if you are talking semi-formally about Germany I
think there would be very few problems compared to if you are talking
informally about your family or especially about "extreme
colloquialised" topics such as romantic relationships.

The differences between written HK Cantonese and GD Cantonese are
very, very small when compared to those between written HK Cantonese
and Baihuawen - the character used for negation in Cantonese means "to
bite" in Baihuawen (this is partially because the etymologically
correct character was phased out of colloquial Cantonese writing some
time ago, and replaced with the more recent idea to use the current
character).

Stirling,

We have already discussed between you and I what you are currently suggesting.

I do not want to argue with you about it so I only ask one thing.

Is it or is it not full-blown machine translation? It requires not
only conversion of minor vocabulary differences, but grammatical,
syntactic, and many other changes.

Mark

On Fri, 18 Feb 2005 00:26:05 -0500, Stirling Newberry
<stirling.newberry at xigenics.net> wrote:
> > On Thu, 17 Feb 2005 17:37:41 -0800 (PST), Felix Wan
> > <felixwiki at earthsphere.org> wrote:
> >> On Thu, February 17, 2005 12:30 pm, Mark Williamson said:
> >>> Hi Felix,
> >>>
> >>> Many of the responses there anger me because they almost go so far as
> >>> to say that Cantonese is worthless as a language.
> >>>
> >>> What about the guy who said something like "You will hardly get 50
> >>> characters in without wondering why Cantonese has so much 'junks'"?
> >>>
> >>> Or the people who said "Cantonese should only be used for informal
> >>> things." without giving a valid reason?
> >>>
> >> [snipped]
> >>
> >> That is what I have said: I expect fierce opposition from Chinese,
> >> even
> >> native Cantonese speakers.  It is not easy to unlearn. ^_^  Compared
> >> to
> >> those responses, people here are quite enlightened and respecting.
> >>
> 
> If I may venture to speculate, it seems likely that the source of the
> Cantonese wikipedia push comes, not from the desire of a large number
> of Cantonese speakers to have Cantonese as a separate written language,
> but in a social problem involving the attitude of the writers of the
> "standard" dialect of a language towards others who use culturally
> important, but not formally approved of, versions of the language.
> People whose home dialect is close to the standard dialect often
> display this attitude, and because of the educational and professional
> incentives on the mainland, speaking the official version of the
> language - essentially a formalized version of the Beijing dialect -
> has a tremendous cultural cachet. The response is, often, for users of
> the culturally significant vernacular to declare that they are a
> separate formal language, even if this is not entirely supportable. In
> some cases this is enough to split the language, but usually it is not.
> 
> While this is not to discourage the people trying to start a cantonese
> wikipedia, it suggests that even if it works, it does not address the
> root problem of a cultural/language clash involving usage on the
> chinese wikipedia. This would indicate, therefore, that regardless of
> the outcome of the cantonese wikipedia, that some measures should be
> taken to reduce the strain on the chinese wikipedia in some fashion.
> 
> Perhaps this will make people reconsider my call for dialectical
> support in wikipedia - where people can choose not only their own
> language, but the dialect of it, and it would be possible to add markup
> information which would allow for differences in what is displayed
> based on dialect of the viewer. I feel that in the case of cantonese,
> this ability would be sufficient to reach a resolution - where
> cantonese speakers could enrich the content of the chinese wikipedia
> with cantonese native words and usage, without triggering the ire of
> the beijing dialect users.
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Wikipedia-l mailing list
> Wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
>