Hello,
Mark Williamson wrote:
If you have a method you would write it in,
then...
I see no problem here, but undoubtedly it will be cast in an extremely
negative light by some of the users on zh: who will probably oppose it
on the grounds that it will take oh-so-many valuable users away from
the oh-so-poor zh.wikipedia.
*cough* I'm a Cantonese speaker from Hong Kong and I don't think we
should. There's the issue that Mark already brought up, what method
should we write it in: romanization has never been standardized and
traditional Chinese but with Cantonese words is, well, redundant...
Heh, what I meant was that, if you write in Baihua, but just read it
in Cantonese, it's redundant, but if you write it in *colloquial*
Cantonese, but with characters, it wouldn't be redundant (but perhaps
still a bit strange).
While for Minnan and Hakka the current trend seems to be to write them
in "Peh-oe-ji", for Cantonese it seems to me like the trend is to use
hanzi, but it includes some hanzi not used in writing baihua (this
isn't a problem as Unicode supports almost all 'fangyanzi' from
Cantonese, but not nessecarily from others).
While there is an official romanisation system for Cantonese used in
Hong Kong, I was under the impression that it was only for place names
and had no provisions for marking tones. Jyutping seems to be gaining
in popularity, but then there is also Cantonese Pinyin, and Yale
romanisation, and then of course IPA (but who uses IPA?).
Another huge problem here is the fact that some people who try to
write colloquial Cantonese on the mainland use Simplified characters,
as opposed to Traditional in Hong Kong and Macau.
Some people
might argue that all people who speak Cantonese can read
baihua, but the same argument applies to other populations as well,
for example how many Basque monolinguals are there? But they have a
Wikipedia because they have a right (well, they don't "have a right",
Well, just because we can doesn't mean we should. ;)
Nonono, that's not what I meant. I meant, if Cantonese speakers want
one, people like Shizhao should just let them instead of opposing it
so much.
Mark