note: It was originally my intent to post this over at Sinoglot. However seeing as it ended up tying into Wu so directly, I’ve chosen to post it here without changing the content. As such the language may assume a certain level of ignorance of Wu that regular readers of this blog may have. Apologies for that.
I was asked last night by a friend why I so firmly consider Wu to be a Sinitic language and not merely a divergent group of dialects of Mandarin. I gave my usual answer, but I think today I’ve come up with a better one.
I’ve just returned home from my New Year’s dinner. On the way home the driver, with whom only Mandarin was being spoken, said “在路口小拐对吧“, or “Turn right at the intersection, right?”. Except as far as I know, most students of Mandarin wouldn’t think to say 小拐 for “right turn”
In Shanghainese, instead of left or right, they say big or small for the type of turn. That makes some sense if you consider that a right turn is in fact a much smaller arc than a left turn. In Shanghainese they’d say 小转弯, roughly [ɕiɑʊ zə͡wɛə]. This always got laughs among friends when a left turn was needed, since 大转弯 pretty much sounds like “dudes, away!”
My point is this: Shanghainese is clearly a dialect of something. It’s intelligible with what it spoken on Chongming Island or in Haimen, but it’s different. That’s not in question. But then the Mandarin spoken in Shanghai by the locals is also clearly a dialect of Mandarin.
So either the Shanghaining (上海人) are switching from one dialect of Mandarin to another equally localised dialect of the same language, but one which they otherwise would never use at home or with close friends, or, and this is much more likely (and in my opinion much more true), both are dialects but of two different languages. You’re quite likely to hear 小拐 coming from a Shanghai taxi driver, but you’re equally unlikely to hear anyone from Shanghai say “这儿蘑菇倍儿好垃!” over dinner.
I recently asked a friend of mine from Changhzou if there were any words like this that even in Mandarin a dialectal variant is used. They do not say small/big turn in Changzhou, despite also being speakers of a Northern Wu dialect. Without any thought the answer I got was “烦死了”. In Changzhou Wu (as spoken by a female speaker, thus the ə at the end), it’s [fei sɿ lɛiəʔ]. In Changzhou, when speaking Mandarin, they say 费死了 fèi sǐ le. I was told that might not be the proper “fei” character but it’s the one they use.
Maybe I’m preaching to the choir. Maybe the fact that I’m writing this in English and not in Mandarin means my readers are in agreement by default. But maybe not. While I do tend to meet the most resistance with native Chinese, conversations with imports like myself aren’t always without a fight.
I’m thinking I may want to work on archiving some of these words and phrases. There are a lot more things Wu speakers use in their local Mandarin dialects. It would be interesting to see if there were any sort of system behind it all.
In Changchun they say 大回 and 小回 for left and right turn, respectively. As far as I’ve been able to tell, this is the only Changchun shibboleth. If someone says one of those, then you know they’re from Changchun.
Of course, don’t you think that one written language exists accounts for why native Chinese people have such resistance to the idea of different Sinitic languages? Although the written language differs considerably from the other dialects/topolects/languages, the way most people experience the language (learning it at school, learning to write only in the standard and not in the topolects) makes them feel there is a unified standard that is not too alien from what is spoken.
I actually think that’s a very minor factor. In part because there isn’t one written language. There’s one major writing system and one standard language which is one of many that uses those characters. I think the real issue is that it’s taboo to say Wu is a language. It’s a problem that’s at least somewhat unique to China.
Arabic is an example where there’s one written dialect and all the rest vary quite distinctly. No one speaks the formal dialect unless forced to. But in the Middle East most people will readily admit that Moroccan Arabic is a different language, when it’s really more a creole or just strongly divergent language. In China I think this has more to do with people adapting to political pressure than anything else.
While I certainly agree that Mandarin and Wu are different languages, and that Shanghai Mandarin and Shanghainese are varieties of them, I don’t actually think your argument works. My brownskin daughter controls two speech varieties, one which she uses with her parents (who are pinkskins), and another which she uses with her friends both pinkskin and brownskin. Both of them are local (the former more so than the latter), but only the former can be used in formal contexts. By your reasoning, they’d have to belong to different languages, but in fact they are the local accent of (near-)standard English and the local accent of AAVE respectively, and so are both clearly varieties of the English language.
I also agree that Mandarin and Wu are different languages by any global standards. The point is that Wu is really not written in any serious way now or ever–sure, there are exceptions, like opera and TV scripts, or a handful of comic strips. Standard Written Chinese (which is based heavily on the Beijing dialect but also influenced by other Sinitic languages/topolects) is what people learn at school–sure, I know it could very well be called Standard Mandarin, but for almost anyone in China or any Chinese speaker, this is what students learn to write.
My original point is not about language vs dialect but how people think of the language(s): most Chinese people (speaking a topolect) have a hard time thinking of written Mandarin as a different language because that is how they express themselves in writing, and so it can easily be thought of as a variety of the same topolect. And from there, one can (perhaps erroneously) reason that spoken Mandarin is also a variety.
I guess this is the long way of saying that most people don’t have a linguistic view of language; and maybe even most people (in China and without) understand language through writing and the written language.
John: I see your point and agree. But I still feel like there’s something missing. There’s something different that I’m having trouble putting my finger on between your daughter’s situation and this.
I’ll see if I can’t clarify a bit better. I have two friends. One Indian and one Chinese. They both learned English in their home countries. However they met each other in Singapore where they continue to live. To each other they speak Singlish. In face to almost everyone in Singapore they speak Singlish. To me they speak standard textbook English. One is the “correct” version they learned in school and one is the colloquial. Neither are their native tongue.
In this case the language in question is 2 varieties of the same language neither of which is their native tongue. In your daughter’s case, it’s 2 varieties of the same language where both are her native tongue. In Shanghai, it’s two varieties, only one of which is their native tongue, i.e. what they use to speak with family and peers.
That may be an equally weak argument, but it’s what I have for now.
danielho: It’s what they learn to write because it’s the official language. And they are likely to feel that their topolect is a variety because it is/was taboo to say China is full of different languages. I agree that most people don’t take a very objective approach when looking at language, especially language in China.
You say not written in any serious way. Can you expand on this? Plays and tv shows, both fictional and of the talking-head vaiety, are written in Wu. Song lyrics are written and available in Wu. There’s a Wu wikipedia and sites like Shanghaining.com. Ads appear across Shanghai in Wu, et cetera et cetera. If by serious way you mean a way that’s sanctioned by the Beijing government, then yeah I can buy that. If you mean it lacks some degree of consistency in its written form, well then I have to disagree. While it’s not standard, there is a fair degree of consistency.
In fact when I ask my Wu speaking friends which character goes with a particular phrase, they never hesitate to name one. And in most cases they name the same on even across dialects. Fei being one example. Zhou Libo’s book being readable by other Shanghainese being another.
I suppose I’ve underestimated the degree Shanghainese is used, as well as the consistency of the written vernacular. How exactly do people learn the pronunciation of the characters? Aren’t there many characters that cannot be written??
But I am extrapolating from Hong Kong, having just recently moved to Shanghai.
Even in Hong Kong, for example, where written Cantonese is very much alive (in newspapers–but only in columns and direct quotations), most formal writing occurs in standard Chinese. It’s not necessarily policed by law but by gatekeepers to the language–editors, writers, teachers, and the like. The idea that standard written Chinese (i.e. written standard Mandarin) is part of the same Cantonese language is very very very strong among non-linguists. I wonder how this “taboo” is structured; I guess when you said ‘political pressure,’ I’d agree if you mean ‘political’ in the broadest way–beyond just the diktats of the law into the micro-politics of everyday life.
Wordpress just ate a lengthy comment, so I’ll do my best to recreate it. However the second time around is never quite as good. Frustration inevitably sets in over lost efforts.
First, learning pronunciation: People learn the language growing up at home. The characters come later. In most cases the character is cognate with Mandarin. So 家 is 家 whether it’s Mandarin jiā or Wu ka. Others are taken directly from earlier forms of the Chinese language, many of which are found in classical writings. One such example is 囥 kàng, “to hide”, which keeps that meaning in modern Wu, equivalent to Modern Standard Mandarin’s 藏 cáng. Another is the Wu equivalent of 知道 zhī dào which is cognate with (and keeps the characters from) Mandarin’s less-often used 晓得 xiao de. See the previous post, “Saying No in Wu”, for other examples of older characters being used to write modern Wu.
As for whether or not there are characters that can’t be written, if they couldn’t be written it would mean they lack a form and would therefore not be characters. If you mean that they cannot be typed by conventional means, then yes a few exist. But that’s more a result of the way character is handled on computers today than anything else. 囥, at least for the printer of one of my books on a Wu dialect, was an issue and so 口 was drawn by hand around 亢 for each instance in the text. But overall the number of these characters is few, and they’re more the fault of modern encoding methods than anything else. I touched on this at Sinoglot recently. See “Contractions & Logographic Writing” and “Modern Character Creation”.
I actually was just reading an article the other day from one of the Sino-Platonic Papers (”The Prospects for the Development of Written Cantonese and Its Romanization”) that was talking about how most people don’t use the standard Romanisation for Cantonese/Yue, if they even know that it’s there to begin with. In it the whole issue of newspapers is discussed, including how Apple Daily largely made a name for itself by using more Cantonese than had previously been deemed acceptable. The author goes on to mention how a number of publications in Hong Kong are now following suit.
And while we’re on the topic, There’s another of the Sino-Platonic Papers that goes into better detail on the opinions of both Mainlanders and Hong Kongers on whether Cantonese counts as a language of dialect. See Julie Groves’ “Language or Dialect — or Topolect? A Comparison of the Attitudes of Hong Kongers and Mainland Chinese towards the Status of Cantonese”. In many ways these opinions mirror those regarding Wu.
My apologies: I mistyped “character” when I meant “word”. So the question really is: aren there words in Shanghainese for which characters don’t exist (partly or mainly because no standard is promulgated for Shanghainese)? Or perhaps characters exist for these words but not a lot of people know or are sure of them? Or else a few different characters are used or are listed in the dictionaries for them?
In Cantonese, there certainly are quite a few of these cases, though when people comment on the internet, Roman-alphabet workarounds are used. And to take a step further backwards, perhaps this is even the case with a more vernacular version of Beijing dialect of Mandarin–the ultimate problem being Chinese characters and the difficulty of representing spoken sounds (which are particularly common in slangy, spoken expressions, not to mention new words).
I don’t mean to say Shanghainese couldn’t be a full written language, just that when the language isn’t taught in schools, there is a whole chunk of formal vocabulary that ends up being used a lot less (which ends up being pronounced in Mandarin). Classical expressions or formal vocabulary (often developed standard Chinese/standard Mandarin), for example–I wonder if Shanghainese people know how to pronounce these in Shanghainese pronunciation. I’m thinking technical or abstract vocabulary that I’d imagine not to be used often in family/familiar situations (of course, I could be wrong).
Just to bring up Cantonese once more (I’m not trying to occupy the position of native informant or anything, just what I know–and to indicate I really don’t much about Wu or Shanghainese), a formal discussion in Cantonese is entirely possible, mainly because the educational system is basically done in Cantonese (spoken) and standard Chinese (written). Can the young in Shanghai carry on a conversation about philosophy, linguistics, or chemistry in Wu? (Again, I think Wu is capable but the ways education is set up might mean this is being lost or has been lost)
“aren’t there words in Shanghainese for which characters don’t exist (partly or mainly because no standard is promulgated for Shanghainese)? Or perhaps characters exist for these words but not a lot of people know or are sure of them? Or else a few different characters are used or are listed in the dictionaries for them?”
Yes. But then, there are words in Mandarin for which no characters exist, for example 不是 in Beijing which is “ber”, one word. Ok, I know, it’s not really fair to consider any instance of a single syllable to be a single word, but I think it somewhat appropriate. Aside from things like that, there aren’t really words that don’t have a character. Now, whether most people know them or not is a different matter. And to the last part, multiple characters for one word, well that’s a standardisation issue. See “Saying No in Wu”, linked above, for examples.
There isn’t to my knowledge, any usage of Latin letters intermixed with characters for Wu. I at least have never come upon any written Wu that uses Latin letters, aside from things like KTV or DVD, which are pretty universal in Mandarin as well. But yeah I agree with your second paragraph without issue.
Re technical vocabulary, let’s say for example we wanted to say “voiced bilabial plosive”, i.e. the linguistic term for the sound in English represented by the letter B. That technical term is by all means possible to use Wu to refer to, but in these cases it’s most likely a Wu pronunciation of the same characters used in Mandarin, “雙唇塞音”. Of course this hardly causes any major issues as there are a huge number of cognates between Mandarin and Wu, and I’d guess than Cantonese has a nearly identical set of words, possibly with identical characters, for that concept.
Can the young in Shanghai carry on a conversation about deeper things in Wu. Absolutely. I’ve personally been witness to discussions in other dialects of Wu on topics of life after death, linguistic anomalies, and a handful of other such topics, all done in Wu without a second thought as to the words being used. While not Shanghairen, I do have friends from Wu speaking places who were educated in Wu up until almost college. The Gaokao was done in Mandarin, but much of the rest of their education was in Wu, Chinese language class aside.
And no worries brining up Cantonese. I think it makes a very good parallel to the Wu situation, with obvious differences.
Re: Your edit on this subject
I’d have to disagree on the “Mandarin is never your first language,” at least for the current very children in Shanghai. Most of my youngest students (aged 3-6) can understand – but not speak – Shanghainese. When I asked their parents why they do not speak Shanghainese at home, they said that because as early as preschool they *must* speak Putonghua, their schools and all their classes that they enroll their students in to further their skills (English included). So, they do not speak Shanghainese at home.
I also found out through asking that a lot of my students’ grandparents don’t live with their parents so much anymore, so there is even less of a Shanghainese presence in these kids’ lives. It’s almost like when an Asian kid grows up in a non-Asian country; their friends don’t speak XX language, they don’t speak XX language at school, so why should they speak it?
In a way, this means that these languages are going to become endangered. Many of my Chinese friends say they prefer Mandarin over Shanghainese because “only uneducated, poor people speak Shanghainese,” so I don’t think it will be long before Mandarin DOES become the first language. It may be different for countryside children, however.
Jaenelle: The comment was made by a post-80s kid (i.e. a twentysomething), in which case I think the comment rings true. But I agree it doesn’t really apply for the youngsters.
Conversely, I know a number of post-80s Shanghainese who are taking more pride in Wu than their parents did. Check out a post from a year ago, “On the Future of Wu” for an expanded version on that to which you refer. And be sure to check the comments since that’s where the real meat is.
The other thing to keep in mind is that in places like Nantong, Changzhou et cetera, you’ll find people for whom Mandarin was less of a priority. Places like Shanghai, and on the opposite end of the spectrum, places like Gaochun south of Nanjing, it’s certainly more encouraged. I couldn’t say for Suzhou. It would actually make an interesting study to see how the former center of 吴国 and home to the former prestige dialect sees this Mandain/Wu battle of epicness.
p.s. welcome to the comments section
I’d have to agree that Wu (or let’s say Shanghainese) is not written in any serious way. I don’t see how shows and plays relate to this. Yes, there are some in Shanghainese, but they are spoken, not written. As for song lyrics, the number of these is very very very small, and is usually just a translation from Mandarin by some individual doing it for fun. The entries on Shanghaining are very casual. The language used has no standardization, and all kinds of characters are chosen arbitrarily to represent Shanghainese sounds. And as for ads “appearing across Shanghai” in Wu, I’m not sure where you are seeing all these ads, because from what I’ve seen, they are very very few and far between.
>>> when I ask my Wu speaking friends which character goes with a particular phrase, they never hesitate to name one. And in most cases they name the same on even across dialects. Fei being one example.
In some instances this is not surprising, given that many words, such as 烦, this is the proper character to use anyway. But try asking your friends to write down the characters for brilliant (jie gun), tired (sa du) or bad (tei bei) and then see how consistent it is.
Sorry, I’m not intentionally wanting to contradict your every point, but I’m just surprised as your description seems quite contrary to what I’ve exprerienced in Shanghai.
Hey D. Welcome. No worries on contradicting. I’ll do my best to address each point you make in turn.
First, regarding it being written in a serious way, those plays are, but only after first being written. Song lyrics are actually quite common and not just as translations. And, if plays are to be dismissed for being spoken, then you yourself should reject song lyrics, regardless of how few or many there may be.
Shanghaining is indeed casual. That’s the internet for you. Most popular Mandarin forms/BBS’/websites are equally so.
My use of “across Shanghai” is in terms of geography and not popularity for frequency, and though they may be few and far between, they’re still there.
I agree that choosing the character across dialects would be unsurprising, except it wasn’t 烦 that was given for “fei”. It was 费. In the Changzhou Wu dialect, 烦 is the one used (see here for example). It’s the Changzhou Mandarin dialect that uses 费. This is of course not the only time I’ve requested someone to write down a character for a Wu word. Variation exists. But ask a Mandarin speaker to write down the character for 屄 or 肏 and you’ll get half a dozen answers for the first and a couple (usually still wrong) for the second. So I’d have to reject inconsistency in writing the spoken language as grounds for dismissal.
There’s been a long history of Wu being written down, though of course not to the extent that Mandarin has been. No modern Wu-speaking state has ever existed, so that’s to be expected. I agree that it’s never been fully standardised, though there is still consistency within dialects. Speakers (at least those I’ve spoken to on the subject) may not know why a certain character is the right one, but they do have some sense that it is. That’s not unique to Wu either.
I have no delusions that Wu is going to become this grand powerful language in East Asia. I’ve been criticised for saying just the opposite. While I can’t speak to what you’ve experienced in Shanghai, in my experiences (which I admit are more on the side of seeking Wu out rather than passively experiencing it) there is plenty of evidence to suggest a large population of Wu speakers in Shanghai are comfortable with the language in written form.
>>> And, if plays are to be dismissed for being spoken, then you yourself should reject song lyrics
Yes, I just thought I’d give you the benefit on that one.
Anyway, I still feel Shanghainese is not written “in any serious way”. I mean, just go into any bookshop in Shanghai, and out of the hundreds of thousands of books available, I don’t think you’ll be able to find a single one in Shanghainese. (Even books on Shanghainese don’t tend to have any text in Shanghainese, except phrases and dialogues.) Whether Wu speakers in Shanghai are comfortable with the language in written form or not is a non-issue since they would rarely if ever come into contact with it anyway (except, as already mentioned, informally on the internet).
Except it being a non-issue, I can agree with all of that.
I actually was just reading an article the other day from one of the Sino-Platonic Papers (”The Prospects for the Development of Written Cantonese and Its Romanization”)
Could you tell me which paper that was?
Also, back to the knowledge of pronunciation: surely there are more obscure characters from the classical tradition (some chengyu, for example) for which most Wu speakers don’t know the pronunciation. Of course, even though this could be the same case for Mandarin and Cantonese speakers, the fact that there are few popular Wu pronunciation dictionaries would mean people don’t know how to say certain things in Wu, no? Knowing Mandarin well also means that people could fall back on that if, say, they’re reading (unlike in Hong Kong where most people’s knowledge of Mandarin is desultory).
“Serious” books–I guess high-brow books with literary aspiration/snob appeal–are only rarely published in Cantonese, and the ones that do appear are not “great” works, IMHO. Maybe what’s really needed are a few great writers or poets….
The paper is included in the June 2009 one, “Sinographic Languages: The Past, Present, and Future of Script Reform”. Here’s a direct link to the pdf.
As far as chengyu, there are some that exist in Wu which are nearly identical to one existing in Mandarin, but with a few minor changes, such as _说_话 becoming something like _颜_色 (though probably not that exactly). At any rate, for the Wu speaker to not know how to pronounce the character, it would probably have to be one that was unfamiliar in Mandarin. I’m sure there are plenty of exceptions to that, but I think for the most part they’d be able to determine the pronunciation if not the tone based on shared pronunciations with other characters. But then the chances of those truly rare characters coming up may be small enough for it to be irrelevant to most people.
I guess my thought on the whole ultraformal pronunciation is that for a very very long time, when people were very much still into classical content, there were scholars speaking Wu and reading books with Wu literary pronunciations in places like Shaoxing/Zhuji and Suzhou. I mean, that’s why there exists the literary pronunciation for Suzhou dialect et al. So clearly at some point all of this was done, even if that’s since been lost. How I wish I could channel YR Chao at times like this to get his take.
> Maybe what’s really needed are a few great writers or poets….
Amen.
Oh, I have no doubt that in the past this was done. In some ways, Hong Kong basically kept what was normal practice in the past (reading and writing Chinese characters in local pronunciation)—which is also why people think these “dialects” are dialects.
Quote from Chao Yuanren, A Grammar of Spoken Chinese (page 17, 1968 edition):
Over and above all the dialects, or, more accurately, included as a part of every dialect—there is a literary language called wenli [wenyan] by Western writers on Chinese. Wenli is not an additional dialect, for it has no pronunciation of its own. The same sentence in wenli has as many ways of pronunciation as there are dialects. To be sure, a direct quotation in the Analects of Confucius must have pronounced in one particular way in a dialect of Lu in the sixth century B.C. But what concerns us is the fact that the Analects as a currently read book of a still living, if not spoken, idiom exists in the collection of meaningful sounds in the mouths of literate persons of all dialects. The fact that there is one and the same system of characters throughout China has certainly played a major part in the preservation of wenli, but the nature of existence of wenli is not in the writing as such, but in the understanding, reading aloud, learning by rote, quoting, and free use of this common idiom, though its actual linguistic embodiment in audible form varies from dialect to dialect.
end quote
Wenyan has been replaced by Mandarin. While this is different on the mainland, I really do think in Hong Kong at least, people treat written Chinese basically exactly the same way people did with Wenyan—written Chinese/Mandarin is pronounced according to how each character would sound in Cantonese and so this “weird” hybrid formal language is born–formal Cantonese–which differs almost not at all in word order but a little in vocabulary and ginormously in pronunciation. It’s to the point where someone educated would understand this “formal Cantonese” but really it’s something quite different.
I think he also mentioned how he learnt the classics in his Changzhou dialect (I think it was Changzhou if my memory serves me right).
Yeah I recall that as well. There’s a section about that in the interview of his I linked two a couple months back.
And thanks for the quote. I don’t know if I should be happy or depressed that I read through “ginormously” without a second thought.
26 mentions of the English word “language” but no mention of which Chinese term your informants said Wu is not. 一文万语. (No ghits on that, but 6 on 万语，一文.)