Slightly different from previous ideas on the origin of Wu, the following comes from Simon Winchester’s 1996 book The River at the Center of the World.
I’ve always enjoyed Simon Winchester’s books. I’ve read many of his works, starting with The Professor and the Madman, through Krakatoa, The Map that Changed the World and most recently The Man Who Loved China. Now I’m in the middle of the book quoted here and for the most part I’m still quite enjoying it.
But Wu as a mélange, a creole? I guess I can see it. There are a great number of aspects to Wu that are cognate with Cantonese (Yue 粵語) and a great number cognate with Mandarin. But it seems that makes it no less a mixture than Castillian is a mixture of Catalan and Portuguese or Catalan a mixture of Castillian Spanish and Parisian French. One would not be too far off to describe Catalan as such, but I think it severely misses the point.
Ugly or not and I tend to think not, I believe Wu is significantly more than some pidgin or creole made up scraps of Mandarin and Cantonese, especially considering Shanghainese far outdoes Mandarin Proper in longevity given the comparatively recent creation of Mandarin, the presence of dialects of Northern Chinese aside.
But, maybe I’m making something out of nothing, so other than this post, I’ll let it go.
Completely off the topic of Wu classification, I was a little disappointed to see a number of errors in the maps in the book. I expected the cartography to be spot on given the resources at the author’s disposal. I’ll chalk it up to an editing error.
Take a look at http://www.ccil.org/~cowan/essential.html (I’m just the editor, I didn’t write most of them), particularly the Sino-Tibetan section.
Nice. I rather like “English is essentially Anglo-Saxon with all the cool bits taken out.”
Good stuff. Thanks for the link.
@Cowan: amusing stuff on that site
@Kellen: It may not mean much in the big scheme, but I’m glad you posted it. As the Language Log folks keep pointing out, the state of general knowledge about linguistics is abominable. That an otherwise reasonably intelligent human could get away with such a meaninglessly idiotic statement is just one more example.
Or maybe (hopefully) the context was that one of Winchester’s dumber characters said this? Or it was intended as humorous?
The edited part of the sentence is as follows. “Her location on the Yangtze is her greatest boon; her people, unique in all China (and speaking the ugliest… …delta), are her greatest asset.”
I don’t believe it to be an attempt at humour, and the speaker was Winchester himself. I think it’s definitely a case of an intelligent man making an idiotic statement, not an intelligent man making a joke.
Utterly ridiculous. No one who speaks Shanghainese, Cantonese, and Mandarin would assume that Wu is a creole of Cantonese and Mandarin. There is literally no reason to see that. However, I have read a paper in the past speculating that some southern Wu dialects developed on a Min language substratum. In fact, there are occasional instances where I find that there are similarities between Wenzhou dialect and Minnan. I need to find that paper again…