Well I never made it to America. My dog got sick and so I’ve spent the last three weeks making vet trips and injecting interferon. Had I gone I would have picked up my digital dictaphone so that I could do some quick guerilla recordings as I travel around. A Danyang trip is in the works as the first trip into the surrounding villages. I chose Danyang first because they’re famous for glasses and I could stand to get a couple more pair.

So while I haven’t yet been out recording beyond the confines of Changzhou proper, I have made a few more bookstore trips. Xinhua is doing right by me lately. This time I managed to find a copy of 《常州闲话》by Fan Yanpei (范炎培). There are two big plusses here. First, chapters are arranged by single characters or character pairs e.g. one on 老 and one on 爿, going into pronunciation and use of each. Some are more along the lines of 成语, consisting of four or six characters. The second big reason I grabbed this particular book is in the end it has a few pages of characters with not only the proper IPA transcription for Changzhou dialect but also tones. And not just tones in the sense of first, second etc., but marked as “Yang Ping” or “Yin Ru”, following the system of tones used in classical Chinese and most Wu dialects. I finally have some sort of record of what tones different words ought to be.

At first the tone markers confused me. I wasn’t really sure what I was looking at. Yin Ping is written as U rotated 90° clockwise while Yang Qu is written IU rotated 90° counter-/anti-clockwise. There are glyphs set up in Unicode to cover the eight tone markers, but I’d be surprised if a great many fonts included support. Here’s a quick list of the glyph with their corresponding tone. The list is in Helvetica or Lucida Sans Unicode with the glyph on the left followed by the name.

꜀ yin ping
꜁ yang ping
꜂ yin shang
꜃ yang shang
꜄ yin qu
꜅ yang qu
꜆ yin ru
꜇ yang ru

In the book it gives something like this:
埲 [꜁boŋ]: 灰尘扬起。
忒 [t'ɤʔ꜆]: 太。脱音。
毻 [t'ɤɯ꜄]: 毛，皮等脱落，如毻毛。音通话〝透〞音。

Yang Ping, as in 埲, is a low rising tone. Yin Ru, as in 忒, is a short high tone. Yin Qu, 毻, is a dipping tone similar to the third tone in Mandarin but starting higher and ending lower. You can see how the other of 7 of the 8 used in Changzhou dialect would work out in terms of the tone contour over at the Changzhou dialect wikipedia entry. I transcribed the table on the wiki entry from a book by YR Chao, in case you’re hesitant to trust things wiki without knowing the source.

Over lunch with John from Sinosplice/ChinesePod a few days ago he mentioned my apparent love of phonetics and transcription. I’d not thought about it much before then but thinking about it now I’d say the interest is in being able to accurately write something beyond meaning. One of the things that’s bothered me most as I try to sort out Wu dialects is an inconsistency from one area to the very near next. This is never more obvious than when trying to write things down. I don’t have a dictaphone so I must write things down. That’s what I’m telling myself anyway. In truth I’m just a big nerd.

The book cost 30RMB and is published by Zhuhai Publishing Company, 珠海出版社. It’s readily available at the Changzhou Xinhuas but probably not anywhere else. I’m really hoping to find similar books in the other cities in the area as I begin to travel around.

Expect more recordings soon.