Re: etc/HELLO: On Chinese and Cantonese

[Eric Abrahamsen]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> From: Stefan Kangas <stefankangas@gmail.com>
>> Date: Thu, 22 Oct 2020 04:45:23 -0700
>> Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org
>> 
>> > Therefore I propose to rmeove the Cantonese line entirely, and change
>> > "(中文,普通话,汉语)" to "(中文)"
>> 
>> The purpose of the HELLO file is to demonstrate the capabilities of
>> Emacs to display various scripts (and detect problems in that support).
>
> Indeed.  Therefore, the requirement to be in line with how the
> speakers of a particular language would say Hello is secondary.
>
>> As far as I understand, written Chinese is pretty much always the same
>> but there are two ways to write the characters: traditional and
>> simplified.  In contrast, the spoken languages (of which there are many)
>> can be completely different.
>> 
>> So perhaps we should ideally just replace "Chinese" and "Cantonese" with
>> these two entries:
>> 
>> Chinese (simplified)
>> Chinese (traditional)
>> 
>> And then try to find some greetings that are actually different in the
>> two scripts.  I don't think they need to be natural in spoken language,
>> but they would have to be technically correct in the written language.
>> If they are unusual, that is fine, because the purpose is mostly to show
>> the difference between the scripts.
>> 
>> Does that proposal make sense?
>
> AFAIR, there are some non-trivial aspects here, some of them political
> and even ideological.  There's PRC and there's ROC (a.k.a. Taiwan),
> and I'm not sure what will each group say about the proposed changes.
>
> So unless we have a representative group of Chinese speakers from both
> camps (traditional and simplified), and they agree on some change
> without any controversies, I'd rather not touch this ticking bomb with
> a 3-mile stick.  The current text might not be 100% accurate, but it
> has been there for many years.  I'd rather not risk causing a
> diplomatic incident by a change in Emacs.

My 2c: the simplified/traditional script distinction is probably the
right way to go. As Stefan says, the point of the file is showing off
scripts, but more than that, the script distinction is actually
relatively apolitical. It's when you get into Mandarin vs Cantonese and
trying to establish a taxonomical relationship between dialects/variants
that politics comes into it. The simplified/traditional split is pretty
uncontroversial.