Re: etc/HELLO: On Chinese and Cantonese

[Eric Abrahamsen]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> From: "Basil L. Contovounesios" <contovob@tcd.ie>
>> Cc: eric@ericabrahamsen.net, rms@gnu.org,  matthewzmd@posteo.net,
>>   ksqsf@mail.ustc.edu.cn,  stefankangas@gmail.com,  emacs-devel@gnu.org
>> Date: Fri, 23 Oct 2020 12:16:32 +0100
>> 
>> Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:
>> 
>> > But I'd like to reiterate what I said earlier: I would only remove my
>> > objections for changing this part of HELLO if I hear from a
>> > representative enough group of native Chinese speakers from both sides
>> > of the divide that some change will be acceptable to them, and cause
>> > no controversies on either side.  With all due respect, people who
>> > voiced their opinions in this matter till now cannot be considered
>> > such a group.  In particular, none of them stated his/her country of
>> > origin and current place of living, nor the cultural group to which he
>> > or she belongs, which makes judging the opinions harder.
>> 
>> FWIW, I think Eric is also a literary translator of Chinese.
>
> Thanks, but the aspects that bother me are not of the technical
> nature.

Obviously the native speakers on the list are the ones to listen to, but
I've been speaking Mandarin Chinese since 2001 and lived in Beijing for
nearly all that time. And literary translation is very much concerned
with political subtleties! But my real creds are my wife who's a native
speaker (from Zhejiang) and works in localization, where they have to be
super attuned to this sort of thing, and concurs that dividing by script
is mostly politically inert.

But again, we seem to have plenty of native speakers on the list already.