So far all of the books I’ve been able to find specifically covering 常州方言 have been without any real phonetic transliterations, IPA or otherwise. Instead characters are used and loosely at that. 《常州方言》which I bought last week has about 4 occurrences of Latin letters in the whole book, usually of little value. In other places it tells you that “我读罗音” which I’ve not once heard from all the people of whom I’ve asked to speak for me, leading me to believe the authors may not have been cut from the same cloth as my available speakers. See the 丹阳 comment below to see what I mean. At any rate, below are a few more common variations, some from the above mentioned book and some from other sources.

我 can be written 吾 or in the case of Shanghainese can be 阿拉^[1]
你 or 您 in Shanghai is written and said as 侬 (though apparently in 新昌 it can be 倷, nǎi)
不 is written 弗^[2]
太 is written 忒^[3]

What’s more, 呢 is written 唻 and 吗 is written 口伐^[4] or just 伐. There’s a whole chapter in 《常州方言》on modal particles though many of the characters used are not otherwise covered by Unicode.
口格 is used for what would be 的 in Mandarin. Thus 有的 is 有口格 and 好的 becomes 好口格. In some cases 嘚 takes the place of 的 as an adjectival marker. It’s been suggested to me that 嘚 is likely a 丹阳 thing, really just meaning it’s not 市中心 Changzhou dialect. Having not been to 丹阳 I can’t really say one way or another. update: A possible answer to that has come up. 家开, pronounced by the ever-helpful 婷婷 as gu kaⁱ where the i is almost not there, is a phrases meaning 回家. However, as she also tells me, it’s really only spoken in the southern parts of Changzhou. So perhaps it’s not about 丹阳 afterall.

There are plenty of times when a character that may no longer be widely used in Mandarin is used for the Wu equivalent, e.g. 姊 for 姐，囥 for 藏 etc., or even multiples replaced by one as with 什么 becoming 嗲 (so 做什么 is 就嗲).

There’s also something going on with tones being represented by different characters. Iit gives 二 being 两, which happens pretty consistently in Changzhou. However it goes on to say that in some cases 二 should be said as 腻 nì, not nī, ní or nǐ.

I must admit this whole character-only thing is far more taxing than I had predicted. This whole project is moving from the realm of practical proficiency to scholarly pursuit one day at a time. I’m making a trip to Wuxi soon at which time I’ll be hitting up the local bookstores in search of a proper text on that dialect. In the meantime I’m still searching the city for a copy of any of 赵元任’s works or anything that may have a transliteration system I can map on to IPA. In the mean time I’ve reached the point where I need to head back to Xinhua where I bought the one I have to re-evaluate the books they otherwise have to see if I can pick anything of greater value out of those, though I’m not holding my breath for anything that comes out of Xinhua.

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1. which is also a transliteration for “Allah” in Mandarin. See the Glossary of Chinese Islamic Terms which I compiled a couple months back.
2. or, occassionally online, 佛. this however is less accurate in both sound and meaning.
3. pronounced as [te] or in Changzhou as [d̥eɪ̯]
4. unable to find a proper character, i’ve resorted to using HTML to make my own.