As I start up a new project I try to keep in mind my reasons for doing it. I’ve gone through a lot of projects and the ones I’m doing simply as passing fancy rarely bear much fruit. It may end up being a nice looking tree, but not one that’s going to feed anyone. For me at least, the reasons may be more important than the goals. This is in part because I’m not much for goals, especially when it comes to things linguistic in nature.

One of the things I’m trying to do is figure out the differences that have arisen between different dialects of Wu. I figure if I can make sense of some of the internal variation I’ll be able to more accurately fill in some of the holes in the Changzhou dialect which in turn will help me understand other dialects better. After studying Arabic for a couple of years, it didn’t take much to be able to make the jump to speaking Egyptian Arabic. In very simplified terms, it really came down to a handful of vocab changes and applying a mental matrix of sound shifts. It’s not really that simple when you really get to it, but at least at the beginning it seems to work. So now I’m looking to apply the same ideas within Wu in part by determining internal variations.

In Changzhou at least, “Have you eaten?” is the pretty standard first conversation when you meet someone. Here’s the phrase in the Changzhou and Shanghai dialects.

Changzhou dialect:

Shanghai dialect:

And spoken in the Changzhou dialect:

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The Shanghainese comes from Hilary Chappell’s Sinitic Grammar. I’ve changed the transcription of the 常州话 a couple of times and I’m likely to change it again down the road. I’m still collecting audio recordings and talking to native speakers to determine what’s really being said and have limited text resources. Next week I’m going to try to make it to the city library, the only place I can think of that would have copies of the old 1930s+ texts by YR Chao. Assuming his research still applies, I’m going to attempt to sort out the tones, and so I’m really hoping the trip to the library will shed some light on that particular problem.

Without really knowing too much about it, I’d guess that the change in phrasing may be something that would appear consistently between the two. With a large enough sample of examples I should be able to determine if that’s true or not. Unfortunately my book on Shanghainese is stuck in American for another couple of months, far beyond my reach.

The response to this question in Changzhou is “tɕɛ gə lɛə“, cognate with Mandarin 吃过了, “I’ve eaten”.

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