User talk:Xingmu

Why we should have a Cantonese wikipedia

Here's my rebuttal to those who oppose a Cantonese wikipedia:

1. Written colloquial Cantonese is not different enough from existing Chinese version. This agrument seemed to come from the misunderstanding that it was just a different of traditional or simplified characters, which it is not. Others say that a the difference of a few function words like 呢個 or 嘅 was trivial. But it's clear that a non-Cantonese speaker would have significant difficulties reading written Cantonese (unless they had actually devoted time to studying it previously). And furthermore, differences are not just limited to function words. Besides different nouns, verbs, etc. there are differences in syntax and idioms.
2. Written Cantonese cannot or should not express technical thoughts. From a linguist's perspective, all languages are equal in the capacity to express any human thought. University professors, businessmen, etc. use Cantonese everyday to express in-depth and technical thoughts. There is no reason why we can not record what they speak directly into a written script.
3. There is no agreement on what script to use for written Cantonese. There are proposals for a romanized script as well as debates over simplified and traditional characters. Why not simply setup one domain for the Cantonese wiki and then use an auto-translator for any additional scripts (besides the most common script based on traditional characters)? Another basic concept in linguistics is that a language can recorded in virtually any script. Taiwanese is a good example of that: it has scripts based on roman letters, phonetic symbols, and Chinese characters.

Obviously, there seems to be some conflicts based on politics and some reservations because this is a completely new undertaking. But in simple terms, we are dealing with a situation where a legitimate and widely-spoken language is left out of wikipedia. It just so happens that most people who speak this language are fluent a script of *another* language and, thus, haven't had a dire need for a wikipedia in their mother tongue. However, we can see there are a good number of people who would like a wikipedia in their native language and no viable arguments to date why they should be denied that. The fact that their native language doesn't have a an official script promoted by some government does not invalidate their request.