The following was previously posted on my personal blog on the 13th of January, 10 days before the launch of this site. I will be re-posting another from that site in the following two weeks. The original post was titled “Wu & Mandarin”. I have updated formatting for this blog and removed a paragraph of superfluous examples.
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In a previous post on xiaoerjing, syz over at Beijing Sounds left a comment on the distinction of Wu as a language vs a dialect of Mandarin Chinese. He said essentially that his “doubt expresses itself in the form of: ‘if one were just to complete the sound mapping would Wu and Mandarin then become mutually intelligible?’” It’s a question i’ve asked myself a number of times since first hearing about Wu. After writing a few paragraphs in the comments of that post I decided it’d be better off as its own.
I’m in the very very early stages of compiling just such a sound mapping. I don’t expect it to be too complete, for a number of reasons. Instead I see it more as a basic guide/crash course in the local dialect. The biggest reason for it’s inevitable incompleteness (can a lack of something be inevitable?) is that there is not really a 1 to 1 correlation between words in Wu and their mandarin counterparts. 劳 láo in changzhou is lào, however 落 which in Mandarin is also láo becomes lɔʔ. Two words that are the same pronunciation in Mandarin differ beyond just the tone in the Changzhou dialect of Wu. This means you would not be able to just say “lao† is always lɔʔ, meaning that even with an understanding of most of the common mappings, a lot of things would still be left out.
As for mutual intelligibility, I’m not sure it’d be there even if you could map the sound change from one to another. There are a number of lexical changes to deal with as well. the first i’d ever learned was 左拐 zuǒguǎi, turn left, being something like duzwei in shanghainese. Zwei is cognate with guǎi and can be conceived through said mapping. Meanwhile du would be cognate with 大 dà. Big turn is left, small turn is right. Another instance would be thirsty, 渴 kě or 口渴 in Mandarin, becomes 口干 kougan in Changzhou.
Another example: If the weather suddenly becomes cold, a Mandarin speaker may say
冷空气来 lěng kōng qì lái, i.e. ‘cold weather approaches’
However in Changzhou you would hear
起冷星 qe lang xin
In this case qe is the soft q quality of mandarin followed by the z̩ sound written as i in 四.
I studied Latin in high school and Italian in college, in addition to growing up in a part of America with a fair number of Spanish speakers. So even though I’ve never studied spanish, I can read a Spanish language newspaper and get more than just the general idea. But any serious attempt on my part to make an understandable sentence in Spanish would be met with derisive laughter. No one would argue that Italian and Spanish are the same language.
On a final note, I just poached the Wuxi hua Wikipedia page into one for Changzhou hua that was previously lacking. There’s a page for it on the Chinese Wikipedia that gives a dozen more examples of Changzhou hua, however almost all of them require the previously mentioned sound mappings to really resemble what’s said. My favourite has got to be what they wrote as 或呐哒 which sounds a bit like wei ne da, “very filthy”.
†It seems worth mentioning that I’ve heard 老外 lǎowài as louwēi but i’ve also been told that it’s a Northern Jiangsu* thing and not actually Wu influenced at all. Not sure if this is true but I do hear it all the freaking time here.
*confirmed
Apparently, I’ve heard that the lexical intelligibility between Mandarin and Wu is about 31%, roughly the same lexical intelligibility between English and French.
The phonological and grammatical intelligibility between Mandarin and Wu is even greater than 31%.
Just my two cents.
I don’t doubt it. I think much of it comes down to how hard you try. I know many people who’ve moved to Wu speaking areas years ago and still can’t understand the basics and many others who can understand quite well.
Do you remember where that number came from? Love to read the source.
Douglas Hofstadter describes how he learned Italian (his most often used second language) as a sort of overlay on French (his first-learned second language). Having learned that the Italian for vache ‘cow’ was vacca, he overgeneralized and said *mucca instead of mosca for mouche ‘fly’. This is a case where the trick doesn’t work because French has collapsed a distinction that Latin retains. Interestingly, even after many years of speaking Italian daily and not speaking French much at all, mucca still occasionally surfaces.
Arrgh. For “Latin retains” read “Italian retains”, of course.
While I’ve not in any way learned enough of any two similar languages to have the problem as severely as that, I was often accused of speaking Portuguese like an Italian. Somehow I could never quite get away from the cadence I learned in Italian class many many years before.
Alternatively I have had some luck with it working out in my favour. After a few years of Arabic I decided to take a Hebrew class at the local synagogue. At least in that limited setting, the over-generalising always worked out in my favour. The only specific instance I remember now was correctly guessing כלב (kelev) as “dog” from knowing Arabic’s كلب (kalb).
Ego: sufficiently boosted.
I think that you may have to construct your dialectal pronunciation mapping by reference to Old Chinese to achieve any regularity. Take Beijing and Guangzhou, for example, the only Chinese languages I’m pretty familiar with: the old tone classes (ping, shang, qu, and ru), in combination with whether the initial was voiced or not, map to exactly the same modern tone classes (although realized differently: yang ping, for example, is rising in Beijing and falling in Guangzhou; qusheng is falling in Beijing and level in Guangzhou), except for the rusheng class, which as it disappeared in Mandarin left its members scattered throughout the other tone classes, and left students of Mandarin wondering what the mysterious “entering tone” could have been. By analogy with the tonal collapse in Mandarin, I imagine that if you dig back in time you may find a point where (some class of characters containing) 劳 and (some class of characters containing) 落 merged in Beijing pronunciation but not elsewhere. A book in my collection, Xiandai Hanyu Fangyan (Hubei Renmin Chubanshe, 1981), has charts of all this stuff: initials, finals, and tones, and how they correlate from place to place in China.
Of course all this is independent of grammatical and vocabulary differences between the languages.