Lately I’ve found myself in a number of conversations about being able to speak different languages. And an interesting yet unsurprising thing has been coming up a lot. When asked people will say they speak Mandarin (普通話，漢語，中國話), whatever other languages they may have studied (English, Japanese etc.) and, actually, that’s it. It’s no secret that I fall into the “Wu is a Language” camp, so inevitably I’ll ask them if they speak the local dialect. The locals inevitably say they do, and I then just as inevitably say something about how they speak Wu. I know it’s futile and possibly bad, but I can’t help myself. I can’t leave well enough alone on the subject. Then comes the ‘interesting’ part I mentioned at the beginning of this post. My conversation partners will stop for a moment, think, and say ”Oh. Wu Fangyan,” as though that eliminates Wu as anything but a mere dialect of Chinese.
Meanwhile a battle is being fought in East Asia. It’s mostly quiet but at times the noise is deafening. Founded on some sense of nationalism and clouded history, the fight is often over origins. This isn’t anything new to those of use who’ve taken China as our adopted home. The most common form is the belief that all of Japanese culture is ripped off from China. In a recent conversation the front line shifted into new territory. The Japanese language, I was recently told, is actually just a dialect of Wu. While I can’t say I’ve heard the 方言 crowd explicitly say Wu is the source of the Japanese language, It does show a significant degree of misunderstanding about topolects in China and languages in general.
This specific claim would be less troubling to me except for two things. First, the person who said it is from Shanghai and speaks native Shanghainese. Our conversation was interrupted twice by phone calls and one of them was in Shanghainese. The second thing is a bit worse. In addition to being from Shanghai, he also speaks fluent Japanese. That was the language of the second interruption. He spent time in Japan. He spent a decade studying. He works. As a Japanese teacher. He should be more than just a little aware of the significant differences between the languages.
While this is the first time I’ve heard this specific claim, it’s not entirely without precedent. I’ve heard countless people tell me that they thought Wu sounds quite a bit like Japanese. I’ve heard it from both Wu and non-Wu speakers. Search forums on which people are talking about Wu and you’re sure to read the same. Without being anything like an expert on the subject, I could guess that aside from the rhythm, the voiced initials and various readings of Kanji may have some part in it. The Go-on pronunciation is allegedly based on the pronunciation of the Wu Kingdom ages ago, much of which still sounds a lot like Wu as spoken today. Fortunately this idea of Japanese being a direct offshoot of Wu is not widely accepted, though given the way some conversations go, I wouldn’t be surprised to see it catch on.
This all points to the well-beaten horse carcass of an issue regarding what is a language/dialect1 and more importantly in my little world, what is Chinese? I think it’s safe to say that Japanese is possibly Altaic, possibly Austronesian, but is not accepted by anyone of note as belonging to the same family as the Sinitic languages.
I accept that I may be misguided in my efforts to convince the region that what they have is a language worth embracing and not simply Mandarin run amok, and I accept the fact that that is an uphill battle that may never see an end. But I had certainly not prepared myself for the argument of Japanese as a Wu dialect.
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1. see “What Is a Chinese ‘Dialect/Topolect’? Reflections on Some Key Sino-English Linguistic Terms”
I have heard equally bizarre claims that English is a Romance language, or even that French is really just an offshoot of English. The first group can sometimes be straightened out; the second group are invincibly ignorant.
I guess I could see the French claim, but a quick look at a 6th grade history book should straighten that up. I think I’d have a much better grasp of what was going on around me if everyone was speaking Gullah more so than if they were all speaking French, but who knows.
Probabbly becuause Japan is also known as Wa, which sounds like Wu.
That may be part of it. I remember reading something about an ethnic group in Japan called the Wa which was the predecessor to the current majority and how they had originally come from Eastern China. But my guess is the people from whom I most often hear the concept of Japanese being so closely related to Wu dont know of this name of Japan. If they did, the character used (倭) would prevent them from thinking there was that connection.
I wonder if the connection that’s perceived has phonological underpinnings: Japanese has a pitch accent and Wu, especially Shanghainese, can be analyzed as having one too.
Doesn’t Japanese end up sounding incredibly more like all the conservative southern accents than it does like Mandarin? I’m sure that’s what your source probably had in mind when he said that. Oh, wait, he probably didn’t.
For what it’s worth, this came up again in a recent conversation with a well educated and presumably well respected individual. I told him it was just the sounds and possibly the cadence but he had nothing of it.
^^ “just the sounds and possibly the cadence…”
Well that’s actually quite a lot when one thinks about how all Chinese dialects/languages are supposed to be sinitic, then you have this one very old dialect that’s all of a sudden very different from the rest. And WU can be quite different in terms of vocab, tones (or lack there of) and even grammar. Now how did that come about? It’s a mystery just like how the Japanese came to be. But one thing is for certain, besides differences their language and even mannerisms have many similarities to Korean and Wu (mostly Shanghainese and Ningbonese) than can be explained by mere coincidence or casual borrowing. Certainly many Japanese I have met have said their ancestors probably came from somewhere in Korea and Eastern China, most likely the Wu areas. And get this, some sources have cited Wu as having Austronesian roots too, which under the circumstances wouldn’t be too surprising.
Edit: correction: I meant to say, “can’t be explained by mere coincidence or casual borrowing”, referring to similarities between Japanese and Shanghainese.
Also, was it mere coincidence that ancient people of Wu area Shanghai (and nearby) practiced tradition of teeth pulling and tattoing as ancient Japanese?
Well, without being fluent in Wu I can’t be sure, but,
a) Wu isn’t that drastically different in terms of grammar. the SVO/SOV stuff gets thrown around a lot, but in classical Chinese it happened and in Modern Wu it doesn’t happen as much as some sources would have you believe.
b) There are most definitely tones in Wu, and they do matter.
c) The ethnic origins of the majority ethnicity in Japan aren’t necessarily directly tied to the linguistic origins of the modern Japanese language.
d) Mannerisms doesn’t seem like a strong argument. Albanian men greet with kisses on the cheek. Turks do the same. There are also words borrowed into both languages from the other. They do not however otherwise share the same roots. Two language groups being in contact with each other would accomplish all of the same without them necessarily having to be from the same origin, teeth-pulling or not.
I think there’s little actual support to say that Japanese language comes from Wu language. I’ve not once read from a single academic source in support of the language hypothesis. Instead I hear it as yet another means of saying the Japanese stole something from us, the writing system being the more common one.
Oh here is more interesting tidbits:
Kimono or Gofuku, literally translates as “Costume of Wu”.
Recorded in Chinese historical texts from 200 -300 AD, the Japanese themselves stated, “We are descendant of the Ancient Wu Kingdom” when asked by envoys sent from China at the time.
And this (in Japanese):
http://www.iokikai.or.jp/kaigairyokou.sosyuu.html
Well, I’m familiar with the Go-on 吴音 Japanese readings and the Ancient Wu Kingdom bit. It’s just not sufficient evidence to say that Japanese language is coming from Wu language. It’s not that controversial that the ethnic majority in Japan likely came from the area of the many Wu Kingdoms of the Jiangnan area. DNA isn’t language. If you don’t believe me you can go ask any of my non-English speaking ancestors who emigrated from their homes and took up English in a generation.
It could be seen that Japanese became Japanese through and amalgamation of languages and different peoples emigrating to the Island, one of those being the people of WU. It can’t be denied that there is not a whole lot of understanding about the origins of Japanese and even Shanghainese. As for comparing immigration/emigration and languages, 20th/21st century is in another world all by itself, although Afrikaan languages came about through melding of sorts, as a couple of others. Perhaps in another couple of hundred years, we will all look the same (especially America), maybe even speak a different language that is a mismash of many others. Who knows?
People seem to politicizing too much these days, especially East Asians. There’s a lot of sinophobia going on, but let’s face it, a lot does come from China. It is what it is, and it’s very interesting, not to mention a good mystery. How about the legend of XU FU?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xu_Fu
Btw, the surname XU is most common in the WU provinces.
The really weird and deviant topolect group is Min, anyhow, which probably doesn’t even descend from Late Middle Chinese as we know it, but from some unrecorded sibling of it. Wu by comparison is fairly normal, if you discount the tendency of Shanghairen (and Shanghai is a very new city, after all) to talkreallyfastandrunthingstogether.
Since living in Shanghai for 3 years and learning Chinese language starting with characters and also studying the different dialects. I can honestly say, that Japanese language has less in common with the dialect spoken in Shanghai, since Shanghainese are largely of Ningbo origin. Shanghai is a pretty young city compared to other paces around Changjiang river. For anyone who is interested about the origins of japanese languages I would recommend a trip to Yangzhou and Wuxi. Those places dialect of Wu languages is much closer to Japanese that Shanghainese. Especially the people in Yangzhou pronounce the “l” as “r” like you hear in Japanese and the words are spoken like the japanese Kanji. Mandarin only has little influence there.
Asher: Thanks for the comment.
The problem is that despite many loan words in both directions and despite the Go-on readings, Japanese is not derived from Wu. What’s more, Yangzhou doesn’t speak Wu but rather Southern Mandarin.
Wuxi is definitely closer to how Wu would have sounded back when the Go-on pronunciations were adopted than modern Shanghainese.
But back to the main problem, the real issue is the erroneous belief that one language sprung forth from the other.
That’s what they write on Wikipedia. The spoken dialect there is not Mandarin. It’s very close to Wuxi dialect, but the pronunciation is even more like Japanese. Go there to judge for yourself. I was just there last week.
Fair enough. I’ve not been but was basing my understanding on Yangzhouren I’ve known outside of Yangzhou who themselves stated it wasn’t Wu, and listening to the dialect it sounded more at home in rural Nanjing than Wuxi. But it’s been a while so I’ll take your word for it.
Before i came to Yangzhou I also thought people speak Pu Tong Hua there. Because in Nanjing or Haian county, which are neighboring to Yangzhou, people don’t speak Wu dialect at all.
Anyway you might find this very interesting.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xu_Fu
I’ve heard about Xu Fu. There are still a couple problems though. For one, Chinese sounded nothing like it does now back then. It wouldn’t have even sounded particularly “Asian” at that point. So it doesn’t really give any support for the languages being related considering phonetic similarity is the most often cited reason.
For what it’s worth, there are parts of Nanjing that speak Wu, but definitely not the majority of the city and not the parts closest to Yangzhou.
I’m still not convinced that the dialect in Yangzhou isn’t just a Southern Mandarin dialect with heavy phonetic influence from Wu. I think most linguists who’ve studied the regional dialects would agree. There is evidence to support Yangzhou speaking Wu a few hundred years back, and the same evidence supports Wu in Nanjing during the same time period, however with a great deal of migration by Mandarin speakers into the area, Wu seems to have been mostly pushed out, Gaochun being the one major case of a holdout in the area.
Don’t get me wrong: I’d love to be proven wrong on this. The more places that can be linked to the language, the better, in my opinion. I’m just not sure there’s any real evidence to support anything more than phonetic borrowing. If you’ve got friends from Yangzhou, as I assume you might if you’ve been recently, I’d be grateful for a donated recording of some simple things like numbers 1-10 and common phrases. That would be enough to convince me.
I think I can easily distinct between Wu Dialects. and Pu Tong Hua.
Typical differences from Pu Tong Hua.
zai jian = za wai
er = liang
ren (sillable) = nin or ning
ni = nong (Shanghai, Ningbo and Yangzhou)
andy dui ba, dui ma etc = de waa
qian (money) = za piao
Yangzhou only:
syllable le, la, li = re, ra, ri
Yangzhou dialect is originally a Wu language that has been heavily influenced by northern guanhua. The proof is that migrations patterns were always (and most likely) from north to south and not the reverse. This means Wu substrate in Yangzhou can’t have been borrowed from the south due to migration patterns nor to long contact. This is actually corroborated by the “strata” theory, that a language is the result of several layers imposed one on another, eg that northern guanhua gradually overtook local wu language, but the wu substrate is still discernible.
Otherwise there used to be an ancient kingdom called Wu (not Wuyue) or Yangwu 楊吳 which encompassed the Huai River area up to Hunan and Jiangxi, during the ten kingdoms and five dynasties and which capital city was Yangzhou, so if it wasn’t for the “Wu culture” I don’t understand why they would have set it up as the “Wu” kingdom.
Addressing the wu/japanese relation, a friend studying japanese once told me that the sentence “the world is mine” could be translated in japanese as
“sekai wa ore no mono da”
the translation in shanghainese is as follows
“sika si ala ‘e mosi” or
“sika we ala ‘e mosi”
apart the phonetic similarity (sekai/sika; mosi/mono)which might be due to borrowing, it is interesting to notice the cognate “ore/ala” which (coincidentally?) happens to be the same in both languages. The cognate is specific to wu, notably to shanghainese. for instance when I say “my dad”, I will say “ala ya” 阿拉爷 and not “ngo’e ya” 我的爷.
I don’t know whether northern guanhua chinese has such a cognate but if not, it means that either japan borrowed a lexical element from wu area, or that japanese and wu are actually originally related in a to-be-defined way.
I don’t know enough japanese yet and my reflexion might be misfounded and not convincing at all. However even being a native shanghainese (suzhou/ningbo ascendance), people are always mistaking me for a Japanese man, even Japanese people themselves which led me thinking that ancient Wu and ancient Japan were related.
cordially
I’m typing this on my phone so a longer response will have to come later.
Ala, as I understood it, isnt originally shanghainese but a borrowing from ningbo. Not surprising since most shanghairen trace back to the area. For ore/ala, it’s not enough that they sound the same. A recent post on sinoglot addressed this. I’ll track down the link. And even if one was borrowed, I’m inclined to think it was east to west. Finally, borrowing a pronoun isn’t enough to say that the languages are genetically related. Find one peer-reviewed academic paper that says they are and I’ll gladly accept it as a possibility. So far I’ve seen no such work.
Thanks for the comment. I’ll try to write a longer response when I’m back at a computer.
- kp
How about they sound the same, have the same nature, and same function/ operate the same way in the syntax ? What if it’s not a borrowing ?
I’m not sure that “single loanwords” as one like this (it’s a pronoun and not a noun, japanese traditionnally borrowed nouns and writing system and phonology but kept core language items such as pronouns) could actually be borrowed that easily but would rather occur within and a large language mix making up a kind of creole language. or then could show the existence of a common substrate to both languages.
In a different order of things, Ningbo people are the ones who look the most like Japanese people among wu people (very white skin, skull and face characteristics…) and whose dialectal wu sounds the most like japanese to me.
looking forward to reading your answer.
I guess my main response is that I’ve never seen anything to suggest a genetic relationship between Sinitic and Japonic languages, and have seen plenty to the contrary. By “seen anything” I mean read any peer-reviewed academic articles or anything of that sort.
For ala/ore, is there any reason to skip over uri (오리), the Korean equivalent? It has the same sound, same function/nature, so does that mean Korean, Japanese and Sinitic are all related, or does it add more plausibility to the idea that Ningbo/Shanghai borrowed something from Japanese? Other Wu dialects don’t use ala and it’s only a recent addition to Shanghainese.
I guess I’m just not buying it on recent phonetic similarities alone.
Does one language necessarily need to derive from another for them to be related? They could for instance have evolved from a single original language. One being overlayered and intermixing more with guanhua and southern chinese varieties (Wu), the other evolving more independently (Japanese) from the so called “sinitic” nucleus.
Well since modern Shanghainese is a creole based on Suzhou substrate and Ningbo superstrate and was formed by the 1930s, I don’t see any problem of “ala” being a “recent” addition. That it is a recent word in Shanghainese doesn’t mean that it is recent one in Ningbo dialect.
At least one another Wu dialect have an equivalent of “ala”, which is Suzhou dialect that has “li” (and what an outstanding one). How likely do you think it is that Ningbo dialect borrowed it from Japanese, then Suzhou dialect borrowed it from Ningbo dialect ?
Approaching zero…
And eventually Wu cam to be sinicized as much a could share something with Japanese that Mandarin does not itself. That Mandarin isn’t genetically related to Japanese doesn’t prove anything for Wu nor
Does one language necessarily need to derive from another for them to be related? They could for instance have evolved from a single original language. One being overlayered and intermixing more with guanhua and southern chinese varieties (Wu), the other evolving more independently (Japanese) from the so called “sinitic” nucleus.
Well since modern Shanghainese is a creole based on Suzhou substrate and Ningbo superstrate and was formed by the 1930s, I don’t see any problem of “ala” being a “recent” addition. That it is a recent word in Shanghainese doesn’t mean that it is recent one in Ningbo dialect.
At least one another Wu dialect have an equivalent of “ala”, which is Suzhou dialect that has “li” (and what an outstanding one). How likely do you think it is that Ningbo dialect borrowed it from Japanese, then Suzhou dialect borrowed it from Ningbo dialect ?
Approaching zero…
I’ll try to do more research when I have time…
Derive from one another, no. Common ancestor though. I’m saying that in terms of Wu and Japanese, neither is believed to exist.
Fair enough. Do you have any sources on Ningbo dialect that can provide any insight on the use in Ningbo hua?
My understanding of Suzhou hua was that “li” is actually 3pp, corresponding to 伊 and thus consistent with the rest of Wu. I’ve never come across presenting “li” as anything but third person before now.
You seem to have been cut off there.
Anyway, again, I’m open to the possibility, but only if presented with evidence. In the mean time the majority of linguists with knowledge on the subject will say Wu, Yue and Mandarin are related, and Japanese is not. There’s considerable debate regarding Japanese (and Korean for that matter) as members of Altaic but I’ve not seen it argued in any peer reviewed anything that Wu is anything but Sinitic. So again, if you have anything that might suggest otherwise, beyond the face that ala sounds like ore (but so does uri), I’d love to see it. Similar sounding pronouns don’t do it for me. Especially when it’s only one pronoun.
I’d be more interested in the ore argument as applied to show Korean and Japanese having similar roots, but then it would only be a small part of a greater argument.
My bad I meant “r” or “l” (not “li”) for “we” 1st plural person.
I assume that it s more than only similar sounding, but obviously a same cognate.
3000 years ago Cantonese was most likely Austronesian or “Vietic”, but today it is labeled as Sinitic due to numerous linguistic and population shifts and noone s gonna deny it. So today Wu clearly being a “Sinitic” language does not mean it always was “Sinitic”. And put apart the ore/ala detail, Wu language obviously has alien features that none of Cantonese, Min or Mandarin now share but which Japanese seem to possess (pitch accent, pronounciation voicing).
I’m not saying that same characteristics always prove links, but sometimes they likely could and using counterexamples as generic truths may prove counterproductive.
So you mean “ri” as the equivalent of 我们? In that case I have no idea what you’re talking about.
That it’s pitch-accent instead of a tonal system like Mandarin or Yue has been explained. Voiced initials are part of that same explanation. That the language has lost the tonal system previously adopted by an earlier form is far from surprising and far from any sort of proof that Wu is related to Japanese.
I’ll make you a deal. You provide just one peer-reviewed paper with an even mildly positive reception from the linguistics community that supports what you’re saying, and I’ll gladly do a full writeup of it here to include crediting you for providing it. Until then you’re just giving me the same quasi-nationalist non-proof that i’ve been hearing for years. Until you can provide that sort of support, I’m afraid I’m not much for the discussion.
Hello,
I’ve spent much of my time providing sentences in SH dialect on Tatoeba lately, (which I happened to have discovered through reading your blog, and props for the IPA corpora). Now that i’ve read the thread over, second time, I’m sorry if I made you feel that I was overly blunt or stubborn. Apologies, it was not my intent.
as a native Wu speaker (SH, and 苏州话) I find Japanese familiar to the ear and in the structure. It’s not some nationalistic-wise comment (I dont’ bear Chinese citizenship nor am pro-CCP) it’s just the feeling of a native, that no peer-review or academic statement would likely take me off. Now maybe that due to the concomittance of nationalist-rise in China and its stepping on the world stage, that idea seems far-fetched, just good babbles for the trolls.
Should I stumble upon such paper, I d be glad to provide a serious source supporting it, however I’m not sure I ever will find one. But fair enough.
I know there’s a site that provides archives of Ming era Ningbo dialect compiled stuff, but I can’t get back to it.
And yes I meant “ri” or “r” or “l” as an equivalent for 我们 in 苏州话.
One acquaintance of mine is currently finalizing his thesis about SHnese.
If i get a copy of it, I might provide you too, should you be interested in. (in French though)
peace.