Published by 上海大学出版社, written by Yuàn Hénghuī 院恒辉 and coming with yet another diminutive audio CD which can’t be played on my slot-loading CD drive, “自学上海话” is a little red book of 184 pages long. I picked it up at the bookstore across the street from Cloud Nine mall. I figured my curiosity was worth 15元.
pros:
- close to standard use of IPA in the beginning pages1
- detailed info on the tones and basics of tone sandhi
- useful phrases
- tones, thank God.
cons:
- abandonment of IPA after the introduction in favour of yet another janky pinyin system.
The abandonment of IPA is such a grave offence here simply for with that which it has been replaced. Their pinyin needs some explanation. I can’t really type it out here in Unicode with any hope that it will show up even close to correctly on other systems, so instead visualise a series of dots and carons below some of the syllables. Bilabial plosives are written as b or p, but then since Shanghainese has voiced (e.g. [b]) as well as voiceless un-aspirated (e.g. [p]) initials in addition to the voiceless aspirated initials (e.g. [pʰ]), distinction must be made. So [pʰ] is written p, [p] as b as in pinyin, and [b] as b but with a black dot below the letter/character.
Open dots (e.g. 。) are drawn below words/characters that end in a glottal stop [ʔ], though this is redundant since they’re also written with a final -k, much like you see in Cantonese.
Finally a caron appears below two characters that are to be read as one with heavy elision. One of the first instances of this is 好 which is written here as 合噢, linked with a caron below. That 合噢 is their glyphic interpretation of [hɔ].2.
The audio content on the CD is still unknown as I’ve packed away my one external CD drive and can’t quite remember where it’s ended up. When I can find it, I’ll post a clip.
Verdict:
Bear in mind it’s Mandarin only, in case the title hadn’t made that clear, so if you’re not comfortable with characters you may want to skip it. Otherwise if you’re trying to learn Shanghainese anyway and already have a handful of books, what’s 15 kuai to you? At the very least it offers a few different sentence patterns than books you may already own.
- – -
1. The book includes ɿ which I can let slide, but also includes E and A, both of which are unforgivable in 2009 when it was published.
2. The other common example of this in other books is [ŋu] 我 written as linked 嗯无
“for with what it has been replaced”
Yikes, are you looking to incur the wrath of the grammar gods here? I think I got a triple take out of that line.
Do you think there’s some universal theme here about abandonment of IPA in China and US? In the US it is (used to be? I’m getting dated here) that all the dictionaries used their own systems for showing pronunciation, often useful only if you already (mostly) knew the pronunciation.
Fixed it. I’ll try to write with a clearer head in the future.
Anyway, it’s hard to say if it’s a universal theme. If so it’s worth noting that it’s not that people are reluctant to use IPA, since most of these books include it in the introduction. So as a theme, “abandonment” feels wrong. And at least one of the better dictionaries, the 上海话大词典, makes full use of it. Unfortunately the sister-edition lacks it entirely.
I’m a bit bothered by everyone’s need to come up with their own system of transcription when a perfectly good one already exists. Give me one reason why I should bother learning your system when you already know my universal system (IPA in this case) so well. Discussion has been had about intuitiveness of different systems but they’re really only as intuitive as their ability to mimic one you already know.
There are still a number of competing transcription systems in American dictionaries. I did a quick check in my Dictionary application built in to my computer. It’s the New Oxford American Dictionary, 2nd edition, and gives you the choice between British IPA, American IPA (for which it still gives 4 different pronunciation) or American Diacritical (e.g. |ˌdīəˈkritikəl|). Most Americans, at least judging by those I meet as English teachers in China, are completely oblivious to IPA, and I think this may be one reason why.