[Wikipedia-l] Individual Wikipedias for different Sinitic vernaculars (Cantonese debate) - update

Fri Jan 28 10:34:14 UTC 2005

I am replying to Sheng Jiong's opposition to the proposals for various Chinese 
vernaculars.

Quoting Sheng Jiong <sheng.jiong at 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