維基百科的 Cantonese 條目

看 Daily Fongyun 才知道某人把 "Cantonese language" 條目改為 "Yue Chinese"。看到維基上的熱烈討論，忍不住參一手，誰知在我忙著打字的時候，條目的題目已靜悄悄地改為 "Cantonese"，辛苦打的意見被吸入了黑洞，唯有在此張貼。

If I understand correctly, this article is about the languages/dialects spoken by the Cantonese people, including but not limited to those spoken by the people of Guangzhou, Hong Kong and Macau (thereby GHKM). It is perfectly legitimate to write another entry about the GHKM language/dialect, but this is just not what this article is about. Now the problems with the current article title are threefold:

1) If we write an English Wikipedia entry on Russian language, we would not entitle it as "Ruso (language)". The entry is written for English-speaking readers and it is about Russian. There is no reason to use a third language (Ruso means Russian in Spanish) in the title. Yet, this is exactly what the title in question is doing. As many have pointed out, "Yue" is the Mandarin romanisation of "粵" (the Cantonese). So, what the current title ("Yue Chinese") says is actually "This is an English article about Cantonese in the eye of a Mandarin speaking person", which is utterly absurd.

2) It seems that "Yue Chinese" is either a new term coined by the proponent of the title or a scholarly term that is only used by a few linguists. Unless this entry is meant to be only read by linguists, there is no reason to use a title that is largely unintelligible to ordinary people.

3) "Yue Chinese" is misleading because the so-called "Yue Chinese" and "Wu Chinese" referred to by some in this discussion cannot draw parallel with the relationships between British English, Canadian English and American English. The latter three are varieties of the same language. Cantonese, Shanghaiese and Mandarin are not. In ancient China, people in different regions spoke and wrote different languages. Since Qin Dynasty, the written language has been standardised in Qin Dynasty, but spoken languages have not. Rather than being languages/dialects of the same root, Mandarin, Cantonese, Shanghaiese and alike are different languages that co-evolve under the same cultural roof. Owing to migrations of people across China, these languages seem more like dialects or varieties of the same language nowadays, but this is not really the case.

If the title "Yue Chinese" is to be replaced, what are the options?

The long-standing and commonplace use of the terms "Cantonese", "廣東話", "粵語" refer to the GHKM language/dialect. One defender (or proponent) of the title "Yue Chinese" is correct in pointing out that calling this single language/dialect "Cantonese" is imprecise, because there are a number of other Cantonese languages/dialects as well. This reminds me of the Wikipedia entry "America". Calling USA "America" is also imprecise, but a simple disambiguation will clarify. I don't understand why we cannot do the same for "Cantonese":

(a) Cantonese - the ethnic group primarily associated with the Guangdong Province of China.

(b) Cantonese - the language usually known as "Cantonese" in the English world, which is the primary spoken language in Guangzhou, Hong Kong and Macau.

(c) Cantonese languages - the family of languages spoken by the Cantonese people.

Alternatively, one can call the three entries (a) Cantonese (people), (b) Cantonese (language) and (c) Cantonese (language family). At any rate, if "Cantonese" (the GHKM language) is a misnomer, one should clarify this confusion inside the article, not create a new one in the article title.

後記：雖然現在條目的題目已改回 "Cantonese"，但內容仍未能令人滿意。譬如 "Cantonese" 條目的內容仍保留 "Yue" 這個詞語便有點不妥，雖然放在比較中國各種語言這個 context，勉強可以接受 ，只是「這是寫給英語讀者看，說普通話的人眼中的粵語」這種感覺仍揮之不去。不過最主要的問題，是撰寫有關維基條目的人似乎持有「中國的語言都是同一種語言的不同分支」這種觀點。維基依然用 Mandarin Chinese, Wu Chinese 此等生安白造的詞語便是例證。"Cantonese" 條目的第一句亦稱 "Cantonese, or Yue ... is a primary branch of spoken Chinese"，這種想法相當奇怪。

從高角度看，如我在上面英文意見的第三點所說，北京話和廣義的上海話、廣東話等等根本就不是同一語言的變種。事實正好相反，這些語言本來不同，只是在演變的過程中趨於均一。從低角度看，既然作者認為 Cantonese 泛指越人所說的語言、廣義的廣東話，那麼在 "Cantonese (disambiguation)" 中便不應稱這條目為 "Cantonese language"，而應該是 "Cantonese languages" （眾數）或 "Cantonese language family"。稱廣義的廣東話為 "a branch of spoken Chinese" 也不妥，因為這暗示各種廣東語言都是近似的。對某幾種廣東話（如廣州話、汕頭話和福建話）來說，這也許正確，但聽過新界人講圍頭話的香港人都應該知道廣州話跟圍頭話是截然不同的，很難相信它們是同一語言的分支。