Hi all,
I agree a lot with Mark. First of all, we need more persuasive evidence to show the gap between Wu, Cantonese and Mandarin, even when they are all transcribed in hanzi. I myself would like to see several whole articles totally in Wu or Cantonese, just to stun me how hard it is for a Mandarin speaker to understand those languages.
Shizhao's position is mainly that Mandarin Wikipedia is enough for all users of different "dialects", since hanzi can provide a common communication media among them (as Formulax has also suggested). This kind of argument can't deny that other vernaculars are actually quite different from Mandarin in speech, and in effect ignores the limited role of hanzi in zh: it denotes mainly Mandarin, and to ask speakers of other languages to use zh is to force them abandon their own tongue to use Mandarin to think and write instead; to ignore such fact is to wield the authority of the common language again.
Arguments that letting other Sinitic version establish would detract users from zh are also quite impossible. I'd like to say that this is the last thing zh users should worry about.
What we should treat seriously is what Toytoy always claims: there's no need for vernaculars to be transcribed (he did said that), or at least be used in knowledge, since what Cantonese scripts are used for is to express vulgar speech or to publish gossip magazines. Is this argument strong enough to block projects to increase texts and accumulation of knowledge written in "dialects"? I think we should spend more time reflecting such point. I agree that in history there are far less publications and works in Wu or Cantonese or Holo, but I wonder if past development of reality is the main concern of all Wikipediae. In history, too, there are never many publications in Asturianu or Plattdüütsch, do we say that "there's no need to transcribe them in the past, and no Wikipedia is allowed for them"? "The Free Encyclopedia" should encourage writing in languages which were deprived of chances of publication due to early modern development of "national language", especially regional tongues with abundant population. Hanzi is absolutely domininating China, and this helps the domination of Mandarin a lot, but such situation is mostly created by state power and should be liberated. In times before 20th century state-building, hanzi was also freely used in different vernaculars, since there were no such ideas of "Putonghua" or "Guoyu"; and in Hong Kong, a modern metropolis which stayed intact out of central control, Cantonese is not only used in popular publications, but also in almost all movie subtitles (I hope Cantonese friends could provide more usage of baihua in Hong Kong). So, stop the mirage of "language unity" in China! Mandarin Wikipedia is for Mandarin ONLY, and don't copy the government way and language nationalism on Wikipedia.
I appreciate opinions to support me or challege me:)
MilchFlasche von Hroedeboerht.
------- By the way, to reply long ago Mark's reply to me: 1. Actually I'm a Mandarin speaking Taiwanese, so "Jiang55" is enough to pronounce my family name, or to use Minnan "Gang33" --- but in Hakka, it's also "Gong24":) 2. As for I know, Toytoy is also a Taiwanese. I'm not sure how he knows about Cantonese, but he did mentioned on zh that he could have learned Wu --- his father's tongue --- but he wouldn't like to.
On Fri, 28 Jan 2005 14:48:12 -0700, Mark Williamson node.ue@gmail.com wrote:
Hi Yin,
I understand everything you say but I have a small request for you.
Can you provide a short sample in coloquial written Wu using Hanzi (if you can't find all the correct characters, I can insert them for you if need be)? I think that is wht doubters like Shizhao need, to see that there really is a huge difference between baihua and zanhe-ëwo in hanzi.
Until then Shizhao will continue to believe that Baihua is grammatically and vocabularically identical to all fengyan-kouwen because he can onlky speak and write Mandarin himself.
Mark
On Fri, 28 Jan 2005 04:34:14 -0600, W Yin <yin@uchicago.edu > wrote:
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
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