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

[Mark Williamson]

Baihua itself is a transcription of modern Mandarin, which not long
ago was considered by people like Sheng Jiong to not be worth writing
down to use Wenyan instead.

Mark

On Mon, 21 Feb 2005 05:21:27 -0500, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
> Sheng Jiong wrote:
> 
> >Singlish, like Cantonese, are widely used in informal dialogues and
> >writings. But it not "natural" for Singaporeans or Hong Kongers to
> >write formal essays using Singlish or Cantonese, and neither are they
> >accustomed to read any formal written works (such as an encyclopedia)
> >that are published in languages that they think should only occur in
> >daily conversations.
> >
> >
> While this is true, several other languages and language dialects for
> which it's also true are very recently being used in formal settings.
> For example, the Scottish Parliament has a version of its webpage
> translated into Scots [1], which is to a first approximation a phonetic
> way of writing English spoken with a Scottish accent, plus some modified
> grammar and vocabulary.  Similarly, Northern Ireland distributes
> election materials written in Ulster Scots [2].  If anything, Singlish
> is less mutually intelligible with "standard English" than either Scots
> or Ulster Scots are.  The main difference seems to be that, while the
> Scottish government wishes to promote the use of Scots as a legitimate
> language, the Singaporean government takes the opposite view of Singlish.
> 
> Other, more creole-like examples are the Haitian mentioned earlier, and
> even modern Greek, which until the 1970s was considered an informal
> language not worth writing down, and all formal communication was
> written in an official standard Greek that few people actually spoke in
> daily life.
> 
> I guess this brings up the question of how we distinguish between
> these.  Should we care what the relevant governments think?
> 
> -Mark
> 
> [1] http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/vli/language/scots/index.htm
> [2] http://www.aboutmyvote.co.uk/languages/ulsterscots.cfm
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