Or “Handbook of Standard Suzhou Pronunciation” written by Wàng Píng 汪平. I found this in the half shelf that calls itself the Dialect Studies section of my local library. The books they have are great; they just don’t have very many of them.
The book gives some brief information on the dialect but then jumps right in. IPA is used only on a single page, a key to the authors own transliteration system. Words ending in -an, for example, correspond to IPA [ã] while -ang corresponds to [ɑ̃]. The book is organised in this manner. For each syllable (san, sang etc) a list of characters is given that take that pronunciation. An index at the end is organised according to pinyin. It also includes the literary pronunciation in a few cases, which is nice.
Allegedly the book also comes with an audio CD that covers the majority of the content, though not the copy I was reading.
As mentioned above, like plenty of other books, they use their own transcription system, which in this case is extra ridiculous since their own is more complex than IPA and they start the book with a chart showing the IPA for their system. So, first you look up the character you want in the index, then follow the page number, get the Romanization and then jump back to the front few pages to figure out how it’s actually pronounced.
| 阴平 44 ¯ | 阳平 223 ´ |
| 上声 51 ` | |
| 阴去 523 ˇ | 阳去 231 ˆ |
| 阴入 43 -k/-t | 阳入 23 -g/-d |
入声 is marked with finals, though in each case they correspond to the glottal stop /ʔ/.
The following is the transcription system which will come in to play in a minute for the example paragraph given in the introduction.
| ii – ẓ/ɿ | i – i | an – ã |
| a – ɑ | ia – iɑ | en – ən |
| o – o | io – io | ang – ɑ̃ |
| e – ɛ | ie – ɪ | ong – oŋ |
| ao – æ | iao – iæ | at/ad – aʔ |
| oe – ø | ioe – oø | ak/ag – ɑʔ |
| ou – øʏ | iou – ʏ | ek/eg – əʔ |
| y – ẓʷ/ʮ | ok/og – oʔ | |
| ian – iã | in – in | |
| iang – iɑ̃ | iong – ioŋ | uek/ueg – uəʔ |
| iat – iaʔ | uan – uã | |
| iak/iag – iɑʔ | uen – uən | ün – yn |
| ik/ig – iəʔ | uang – uɑ̃ | üad – yaʔ |
| iok/iog – ioʔ | uat/uad – uaʔ | üek/üeg – yəʔ |
I’ve left out the initials. They’re pretty self-explanatory. The following is from the preface.
nê hào a, piě ngu at shǐi? nê sek zoě qi liánse’gek ngeg weg, segdǎozii gūxik jiānjian lé! at shǐi liánse’gek ngeg jia, zekpò yôu liánse nié ze. ngû jiao niángyi dao séfhangli koězii ne jìdha, sekshǐi fēn lě, ngû é sǐnfekgu, gatbik gokhǎobhu ad lé koě ne, dāo sekdhao fek lékek ze. nêzak zỳ atshǐi fāngpi, seklagdo éo at yòu yikjù zǔdao. bek ngū dāo jīhao ladli nê zē fek lé meg, saksǐn datnê sângyikshang, sy sy koe meg zè!*
In addition to the myriad substitution characters, the author gets bonus points for including 覅 in his book for 不要.
The ISBN is 978-7-533-1847-5, published September 2007. It’s around 14元 and I’m ordering my own copy this afternoon.
- – -
* 晼 actually ought to have the 口 radical, not 日. The first “sy” should be 阴去 but again, unicode doesn’t support a caron over a lowercase y.
