I’ve recently realised that the vast majority of recent posts at my blog were about Wu. For this reason I’d been considering setting up a second blog strictly for the sake of sorting it all out. So, when syz at Beijing Sounds requested some sound samples and the few attempts I’d made on Blogger didn’t really work out, he was gracious enough to offer the hosting for this blog.

In the coming months I will be adding a number of recordings of various things spoken in Wu, mostly that spoken in the south of Jiangsu province since that’s where I’m currently living. I’ll be keeping track of the speakers with information that would affect their pronunciation, including other languages spoken and when they first had to speak Mandarin. I’m using Praat for graphic tones, which I hope to make some sense of, so expect a number of visual aids to go with the sound clips.

I will be using a lot of IPA to transcribe since pinyin doesn’t really work in this case. For more information on that click transcription below. This means you may not be able to see everything properly if you don’t have a font installed which supports IPA. A quick way to know is if you can read the title of this post. it ought to be ““, which actually is “have you eaten?”, the local greeting.

For information on Wu in general check the link at the bottom or head over to the Wikipedia article on the subject. Or, just check back here from time to time. I’ll be posting something a bit lengthy in the next week.

Cheers