But how many possible pages could there be on such a Wiki?
You could divide it into pages for grammatical features, dialects, and
even phonology. But even then it would be really small.
And Sheng Jiong: Second-language learners rarely preserve endangered
languages. (Cantonese isn't exactly "endangered" though). The only
proven effective method to revive dying languages is the kohanga
reo/punana leo method - a pre-kindergarten immersion program, usually
followed by bilingual primary school and often secondary and
post-secondary school as well.
To maintain languages which seem to be on the downtrend but are still
taught to most children, the best strategy is to increase the wealth
of content available /in/ the language, rather than about it - the
people who are responsible the most for the maintenance of any
language are its own native speakers, and a speaker of a language has
no use for lessons in their language and seldom has use for
grammatical information in their language.
While for Cantonese, at present visual and auditory material is
definitely most helpful in maintenance (movies, songs, etc) there is
already a wealth of this and currently the area the language is most
lacking and which seems the most questionable part of its future and
legacy, is literature and other written material. There exists some,
but it is a very small amount and is NOT proportional to the visual
and auditory matierals.
I am surprised that you introduce a new reason for not creating a
Cantonese Wikipedia - it's "too big of a step" for the speakers of
this language. That is not a decision for you, a monolingual speaker
of Mandarin, to make!
Mark
On Sat, 26 Feb 2005 12:02:11 +0800, Sheng Jiong <sheng.jiong(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Now I think that is a much more sensible idea. An
encyclopedia would
be too big a step to take at the moment, but a wiki introducing
Cantonese or other smaller languages would certainly help maintain and
preserve the languages.
I like the idea and I certainly support the project.
formulax
After browsing the wonderful Wikicities for some
time, I have a
different idea. We do not need to be bound by the format of an
encyclopedia. Why not start a wiki about Cantonese, written
mainly in standard English and/or standard Chinese? I believe
that wiki will be very useful, will attract contributors and
readers, and should not be opposed.
Since that will be a different project, I would like to do a
quick popularity survey here. Who will support that project?
Who will contribute?
If the Quenya people are still on the list, let me tell you that
I would like to see a wiki about Quenya written in English too.
Of course, there is no restriction on writing example articles
in Quenya.
Felix Wan
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