Sunday, October 04, 2009

Southern Nan in the Hanji script

There is a request for a Wikipedia in the Southern Nan language written in the Hanji script. Given the policy of the language committee it is a straightforward issue; the request is to be rejected.

The rationale is that there should be one Wikipedia per language and, when multiple scripts are allowed, it is for the people of that language to accomodate this. This may create significant issues for the community but on the other hand, the Serbian Wikipedia and the Chinese Wikipedia have proven that this can work.

The requests mentions that the the lack of a standard character set complicating the writing in characters is being overcome by the development of a standard character set by the Taiwanese Ministry of Education. The status of this development is not clear and it is equally unclear if this would be accepted in mainland China.

This request has added significance because it is the 26th language in the world by native speakers. As such the attention given to this language is significant.
Thanks,
      GerardM

2 comments:

Minh Nguyễn said...

Serbian and Chinese aren’t good precedents for Southern Nan. In both those cases, it’s practical to create a more-or-less 1:1 mapping between characters of each script. So those communities have implemented a software feature to automatically convert between scripts. But the Romanization used at the Southern Min Wikipedia and the proposed Hanji script have a many-to-many mapping, because one is based on phonology while the other – as far as I can tell – is ideographic.

From an example I’d know more about, there would be no way for the Vietnamese Wikipedia to add an automatic chữ Nôm (Han-style character) conversion. A word like “trang” could be written as any of 樁, 庄, 妆, 弉, 䊋, 莊, 張, etc. At the same time, any of these characters could be read as a number of quốc ngữ (Romanized) words, each with different sets of meanings. So 張 could map to any of choang, chương, trang, chanh, chăng, dăng, chướng, nhướng, trương, trướng, or giương. Conversion between the two systems is a job for a human, not a machine.

Unknown said...

Nơi in kỷ yếu giá rẻ chất lượng nhất tại Hà Nội