I recently registered on 知乎 (zhihu.com), the Chinese clone of Quora. I’ve been meaning to improve my reading speed for a while, but I don’t really have too much time to sit down and do much pleasure reading. Instead, I’ve been going for flashcards style reading, following more Mandarin speakers on Twitter, registering for 微博, and as of last week, for 知乎 too. I’ve got to say, the biggest surprise is just how much is being said about dialects there. There are at least 3 separate tags for Shanghainese, and the quality of questions asked is high enough to warrant a read but not so high as to be too esoteric even for me.

Here’s one of the top ranked questions for Shanghainese, and one which I’ve touched on before:

Q: 上海话里面，“一刚”是什么意思，我怎么觉得像是“思密达”的意思啊？
A: 有三個意思，一是「她說」。放在句末則是語氣助詞，表示訝異，類似「竟然」。另外還有「她傻」的意思。（正確寫法應該是「伊戇」？）
所以有那句著名的「一剛一剛一剛」：她竟然說他傻。（伊講伊戇一剛。）

Roughly translated:

Q: What’s the meaning of “yi gang” in Shanghainese? Is it like “imnida”?
A: There are three meanings. One is “he/she said”. The second is as a modal particle affixed to the end of a sentence to express unexpectedness. The third is “he/she is stupid” (which might accurately be written 伊戇 yīgàng?). Thus the famous sentence “yigang yigang yigang”, 伊讲伊戆一刚.

思密达, from Korean 입니다 imnida which is a common form of the verb “to be”, deserves a post all of its own, and probably over on Sinoglot at that.

Check out 知乎 if you’ve got the time. I anticipate spending a fair amount of time on there in the coming months.

I came across a few lessons on Changzhou dialect. They’re nice and slow and it’s a nice way to hear clearly some of the different pronunciations from someone who clearly knows what they’re doing.

lesson one
lesson three
kesson three

Looks like there are only three lessons. Part one goes over the basics like “hello” and “are you from Changzhou”. Part two is for numbers, and part three goes into more complex sentences, such as in the image above.

Good stuff. I’d love to see more.

The latest update for Pleco (2.2.2), which as far as I know came out today, has support for non-pinyin pronunciations. Sweet!

I’d exported the the whole Shanghainese IPA as a dictionary a while back but it wasn’t quite what I wanted. This seems like it might be the real fix. I’m going to try to mess with it this weekend.

Fingers crossed.

CNNGo has an article up on the disappearance of Shanghainese.

I may have mentioned a while back that just because there are a kabillion Wu speakers it doesn’t mean the language won’t be gone in a few generations. Looks like it’s happening sooner than predicted.