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Requests for new languages/Wikipedia Colloquial Cantonese

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submitted verification final decision

This proposal has been rejected.
This decision was taken by the language committee in accordance with the Language proposal policy based on the discussion on this page.

A committee member provided the following comment:

This does not have a valid language code, and there is not even evidence that this approach reflects an established writing standard. If there is actually interest in this approach, the thing to do is to see if it can be incorporated into the existing Cantonese Wikipedia by means of a conversion script. For LangCom: StevenJ81 (talk) 15:56, 2 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • The community needs to develop an active test project; it must remain active until approval (automated statistics, recent changes). It is generally considered active if the analysis lists at least three active, not-grayed-out editors listed in the sections for the previous few months.
  • The community needs to complete required MediaWiki interface translations in that language (about localization, translatewiki, check completion).
  • The community needs to discuss and complete the settings table below:
What Value Example / Explanation
Proposal
Language code  (SIL, Glottolog) A valid ISO 639-1 or 639-3 language code, like "fr", "de", "nso", ...
Language name Traditional Colloquial Cantonese Language name in English
Language name 俗粵語 Language name in your language. This will appear in the language list on Special:Preferences, in the interwiki sidebar on other wikis, ...
Language Wikidata item Q19840008 - item has currently the following values: Item about the language at Wikidata. It would normally include the Wikimedia language code, name of the language, etc. Please complete at Wikidata if needed.
Directionality no indication Is the language written from left to right (LTR) or from right to left (RTL)?
Links Links to previous requests, or references to external websites or documents.
Site URL .wikipedia.org langcode.wikiproject.org

Settings
Project name Wikipedia "Wikipedia" in your language
Project namespace usually the same as the project name
Project talk namespace "Wikipedia talk" (the discussion namespace of the project namespace)
Enable uploads yes Default is "no". Preferably, files should be uploaded to Commons.
If you want, you can enable local file uploading, either by any user ("yes") or by administrators only ("admin").
Notes: (1) This setting can be changed afterwards. The setting can only be "yes" or "admin" at approval if the test creates an Exemption Doctrine Policy (EDP) first. (2) Files on Commons can be used on all Wikis. (3) Uploading fair-use images is not allowed on Commons (more info). (4) Localisation to your language may be insufficient on Commons.
Optional settings
Project logo This needs to be an SVG image (instructions for logo creation).
Default project timezone "Continent/City", e.g. "Europe/Brussels" or "America/Mexico City" (see list of valid timezones)
Additional namespaces For example, a Wikisource would need "Page", "Page talk", "Index", "Index talk", "Author", "Author talk".
Additional settings Anything else that should be set
Once settings are finalized, a committee member will submit a Phabricator task requesting creation of the wiki. (This will include everything automatically, except the additional namespaces/settings.) After the task is created, it should be linked to in a comment under "final decision" above.

Proposal

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Hi, this Wikipedia is written using a combination of traditional chinese Han and Bopomofo characters. I feel that "Traditional Colloquial Cantonese" is actually separate dialect to "Standard Cantonese" such as at "Cantonese Wikipedia", in grammar and in writing. Hitherto there has not been such a thing as "Modern Cantonese Literature", because up until the 20th century, chinese was written in the literary language, which was uniformly read and understood by all literate chinese speakers of all dialects. The language reforms of the 20th century led to the standardization of the Northern (Mandarin) dialect as the official chinese written language for all chinese speakers. This meant that throughout the 20th century, if you spoke Cantonese, but could not speak Mandarin, you had to read the text using grammar and words that belonged to a separate dialect. To compound the difficulty, non-chinese appellations such as peoples' and place names were (and still are) transliterated using a non-obvious manner into official transliterations for publication in "standard Chinese". Since the advent of the internet attempts have to made to establish a "standard modern Cantonese" literature as distinct from "standard modern Chinese" literature. But I feel that these measures are insufficient for the following reasons:

  1. non-chinese appellations are still transliterated using the arcane method, thereby inhibiting understanding and access to information.
  2. "standard Cantonese" 廣東話 is greatly influenced, grammatically and phraseologically by "standard Chinese", so much so that many of its phrases and modes of speaking feel strange to someone who speaks "traditional Cantonese" 廣府話.

Therefore the ethos of the "Traditional Colloquial Cantonese Wikipedia" is to focus on:

  1. Traditionalism through:
    1. use of traditional Chinese characters
    2. use of traditional bopomofo for non-chinese appellations as opposed to latin script
    3. use of traditional 廣府話 (gwangfuhwa) grammar and vocabulary.
  2. Colloquialism through:
    1. use of bopomofo to write words that do not immediately have chinese characters, such as non-chinese appellations.
    2. through the above to provide an accessible written language that accurately and immediately reflects the ordinary speech of traditional Cantonese speakers.

Discussion

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Where's the "gfh" code? [1] gives me an invalid page. --Liuxinyu970226 (talk) 10:35, 8 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I believe that having a second Cantonese Wikipedia will not be productive to either wiki. Also, English Wikipedia is in formal English, but we don't have an AAVE Wikipedia. Also, no code. Suzukaze-c (talk) 03:56, 7 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Strong oppose: Unfortunately I have to say this proposal is terrible. Why would you use bopomofo for Cantonese (did you mean Jyutping)? Also, I believe that in the current Cantonese Wikipedia we are using Cantonese grammar and vocabulary, but not Mandarin. And yes we are using traditional Chinese characters. To conclude, this "Colloquial Cantonese" is not unique enough.--Hello903hello (talk) 08:51, 7 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose and close as stale. I'm not sure what this edition of Wikipedia tries to achieve that isn't already encompassed by yue.wp. The proposal is titled "Wikipedia Colloquial Cantonese" but the body of the proposal is anything but modern colloquial Cantonese. It seems to attempt a version of Cantonese literature that rejects 19th-21st century influence from both Mandarin and European languages, which contrary to another statement of the proposal the proposal has never been anybody's mother tongue. Since the proposer hasn't appeared on Meta for a few years now, let's just close this as stale. Deryck C. 10:58, 7 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose Wikipedia is probably not a good place to invent new alternative writing standard for something that can already be written, albeit with some mismatch between written form and spoken form.C933103 (talk) 09:10, 8 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

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