I spent the better part of my day in Shanghai’s book district, also known as Fuzhou Road. I tend to stay out of the giant 7-storey book city, or whatever it’s called, but for one reason or another I went in and was not disappointed. They actually had a handful of books on Manchu and a Mandarin to ancient Greek dictionary, not that I have a need for ancient Greek.
One book that caught my eye, nudged in between the 外国小说 on the top floor, was Say it Right: A Quick Guide to Mandarin, Cantonese and Shanghainese. What better way than to test the Winchester Theory™ than a side-by-side comparison of the three languages.
Unfortunately it didn’t seem worth the 100元 so I don’t have an excerpt. Needless to say, it didn’t offer much in support of the idea that Wu is a mixture of MSM and Yue and little more.
Anyway take a look if you happen to be in the bookstore. It’s at least interesting to see the comparison on the level of specific phrases.
I would love to pick up this book, seeing that I speak all three dialects. On Amazon the rating is only 2 stars though…
Yeah it would probably not be too useful for you. It’s really just an entry-level phrase book, thought the target audience isn’t too clear, since the general tourist isn’t likely to need Shanghainese, even if they’re planning on including it in their tour of China.
Mostly I just think they had meant to make a Shanghainese book earlier and so someone did all the work for it but then they decided they couldn’t justify it as a standalone. Just a guess though.