I am replying to Sheng Jiong's opposition to the proposals for various Chinese vernaculars.
Quoting Sheng Jiong sheng.jiong@gmail.com:
It is totally absurd to set up so many Wikipedias for various Chinese dialects. Being a native Shanghainess, my mother tongue is Wu. But I have never seen any books written in the Wu dialect in my entire life, and I have only heard of one book that was written in Wu in the 1930s, and apparently it received very limited attention.
There are many novels written in Wu since the late 1800's and they were quite popular and highly acclaimed; if you are not aware of them, then selective education has played a big part in your misconceptions. Their popularity only faded with the singular promotion of vernacular Mandarin by the Republican and later Communist governments. The idea of a vernacular Wu encyclopedia is not very absurd so long as there are people willing to give the project a try.
Wikipedia being a *written* encyclopedia would mean that we only need *one* Chinese Wikipedia, written in Chinese characters. Speakers of the different dialects can pronounce each characters in very different ways (A Wu speaker can hardly understand Cantonese or Min-nan, and vice versa), they all have the same grammar and similar ways of expression, after thousands years of cultural integration within the unified country.
The grammar is different, the expressions are even more different. I want to remind you that written vernacular Chinese in *any* dialect, including Mandarin Baihua, is a relatively recent development; the "thousands years of cultural integration" mean little and can be quite frankly compared to the "cultural intergration" that is western civilization. We no longer write in Classical Literary Chinese. Currently the Chinese written form is solely based on the Mandarin vernacular; you are suggesting that it is normal for a French speaker to read and write only in English (with English grammar) but pronounce the words "as if in French," making quick mental changes for the grammar and words without equivalents along the way.
(And by the way Mandarin also has a long history of being the "offical" spoken language in China: since Qing dynasty in the 1600s it has been adopted as the language spoken in Emperor's palace, and during the Republic of China period it was selected by the parliament as the official spoken language of the government after a democratic voting.)
The officiality of a language should not be a primary reason for the opposition of any new language Wikipedia. If so, many existing Wikipedias (such as the 3 dialects of German, Esperanto, Anglo Saxon, etc) ought not to exist as well. The success of Catalan on Wikipedia is a good reason to give different vernacular Chinese languages a try; especially for a couple culturally rich and high-population Chinese languages.
Interestingly also Mark seem to neglect the fact that really no native speakers of all these dialects support the proposal, knowing that it is a totally unworkable proposal.
I am a native speaker of Shanghainese and Ningbo-hua, two very close dialects of Wu. I personally know several people willing to work on such a project, and that number will surely expand as the project grows. If my username shows only a few Wikipedia edits, it is because I have just recently signed up, but have for the past 2 years edited anonymously hundreds of China and Chinese related articles.
Best, William Yin
User:nishishei