[Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia in Chinese dialects

Thu Feb 3 11:41:59 UTC 2005

Hi Felix,

I also noticed what you said in Meta about not supporting having a
separate edition for Penkyamp and a separate edition for romanized Wu.
I think this point is important to emphasize.

I don't see why these separate editions are nessecary. The difference
is only between scripts, and Han characters can be converted to
Penkyamp or a Wu romanization system by computer with great accuracy.

Having separate editions for Chinese vernaculars is in my view a good
thing, but as you said it may be a little bit hard to gather support
at first. Imagine how much harder it will be if it is divided across 3
entirely separate Wikipedias for different scripts?

I think we should all start out using the Han script, and from there
we can develop conversion technology if nessecary.

What I think is most important here however is this:

The board needs to make an ultimate decision on whether groups of
native speakers should be allowed their own Wikipedia when they
request it amid objections from a group of speakers of a different
language.

IE, should a Cantonese and Wu Wikipedia be created with the full
support of people like Felix Wan and Nishishei and Pangguanzhe, and
the tentative support of people like Alex, all of whom actually speak
these languages, as well as the support of some non-speakers
(Pektiong, MilchFlasche, Kaihsu, and encouraging words from a few
other zh.wikipedians who don't actually know any of these languages),
against the strong wills of non-speakers such as Andrew Lih, Sheng
Jiong (who, it should be noted, does speak Minnan), Shizhao, and such?

What I think is particularly compelling about this particular case is
that no Cantonese or Wu speakers have come out yet to say outright
"No", even skeptical native speakers like Toytoy have not given such a
strong opinion.

I also think a decision should be made in the near future so this
issue can stop being argued over in slow motion.

Mark

On Wed, 2 Feb 2005 18:55:15 -0800 (PST), Felix Wan
<felixwiki at earthsphere.org> wrote:
> Dear all:
> 
> Finally I have found my way here where the discussion takes place. There has not been much in meta. I have read arguments from both sides here, and I would like to contribute my ideas to the question we have.
> 
> Let me first introduce my language background. My parents' native language is actually Shanghainese, so I know it. I was born and raised in Hong Kong, so I am most fluent in Cantonese. My elementary school used Mandarin as the language of instruction, so I am also fluent in Mandarin. My education later was more and more in English, so I also know the British English dialect. Then I went to USA and became fluent in American English. I also know a little Japanese.
> 
> It is very interesting but not surprising to see that the strongest opposition against setting up Wikipedia in Chinese dialects came from Chinese speakers. Yes, we are educated to believe that Chinese is one language and that Qin Shihuang has unified the written language thousands of years ago. One user correctly pointed out that the unified writing system was Classical Chinese (Wenyanwen). Today's Xiandai Hanyu / Baihuawen is actually based on the Mandarin vernacular. People not speaking Mandarin Chinese suddenly became illiterate when they first encountered Baihuawen but education has successfully established the Mandarin vernacular as the new standard of Chinese writing.
> 
> Cantonese Chinese : Mandarin Chinese :: British English : American English?
> 
> One user has correctly pointed out that the analogy is improper. All linguists agree that the first two dialects are not mutually intelligible but the last two dialects are. The reason that Mandarin speakers can understand writing by people from Hong Kong is that formal education requires students to writing in Mandarin vocabulary and Mandarin grammar. Many students are unaware of the fact just because they do not speak Mandarin. That fact is that every literate Cantonese speaker can understand text written in the Mandarin vernacular. That is why some users argued that text written in Cantonese may not be needed.
> 
> Colloquial vs. Vernacular
> 
> There could be some misunderstanding that I have to make clear. Standard written Chinese is not in colloquial Mandarin but in vernacular Mandarin. There should be a sense of formality in written literature, and the vocabulary should be standardized, but it should sound natural and grammatical like it is spoken everyday. Standard written Chinese does not sound like Cantonese when every character is pronounced in Cantonese. I must say that the literary vernacular Cantonese standard is not as developed as Mandarin, but as many users has stated, there are people creating Cantonese literature. Although writing a Cantonese encyclopedia will be unprecedented, I supported the idea because I already found Wikipedia in minority languages and fictional languages. I thought: why not give major dialects of China a try?
> 
> As an illustration, the language I am writing in is vernacular English. Colloquial English will be like this: http://www.langmaker.com/db/bbl_englishcolloquial.htm
> 
> I found that later in the discussion, the opposition started to get focused on the real issue that got my attention: If I am writing the encyclopedia in vernacular Cantonese using traditional Chinese script, how much will it be different from the existing ZH Wikipedia? We can only try it out to see. So far linguistic studies concentrated only on the spoken varieties of Chinese.
> 
> Proposal
> 
> I propose that we agree on some policies on setting up a Wikipedia in a new language. Since a new Wikipedia will need some good articles to start with anyway, we may ask people who propose new Wikipedia to pick some topics from the 1000 essential articles and write say at least 3 good articles of moderate length and 20 good stubs in the proposed script. A possible location without new setup for those experimental articles will be on meta by using pages with prefixes like "Wikipedia:New/zh-yue-han/", "Wikipedia:New/zh-wuu-han/", "Wikipedia:New/zh-guoyu-pinyin/". (By the way, I support Pinyin Wikipedia. If there is a "Simple English" version, why not a pinyin version for people to learn Chinese?)
> 
> That is just a thought. How feasible is the idea? Please fill me in on the technical issues. I hope that further discussions here can work on the details formalize the procedure so that every language/dialect can have a fair chance to start a new Wikipedia and have a reasonably good foundation if started.
> 
> As for the doubt on how much time I will spend on the Wu Wikipedia? I don't know. How much commitment is required to support an issue on Wikimedia? Is there a policy? The reason I am only active in EN is because I want not only to edit, but to participate in the community. I prefer spending more time on one community first. I have already made some edits on ZH, and I will contribute more.
> 
> Felix Wan
> 
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