From the Wikipedia article on Cantonese phonology:
The numbers “394052786″ when pronounced in Cantonese, will give the nine tones in order (Romanisation (Yale) saam1, gau2, sei3, ling4, ng5, yi6, chat7, baat8, luk9), thus giving a good mnemonic for remembering the nine tones.
And I’m thinking, “That’s cool! Does Wu do that?”
Of course, Shanghainese only has 5 tones. You could cover them all in order by saying “34126″, but that’s not nearly as neat as the Cantonese version, mostly just because there are so few to be covered. So I started looking in Wu dialects that had more tones. Specifically I looked at the Suzhou dialect, which has 7 of the 8 otherwise found in Wu. Actually I also got into Hangzhou and Lüsi dialects, but was swamped with information. More on that in another post.
In Suzhou, the numbers are as follows.
1 [iəʔ] (1st tone)
2 [ni] (二, 6th tone), [liã] (两, 2nd tone)
3 [sɛ] (1st)
4 [sɿ] (3rd)
5 [ŋ] (6th)
6 [loʔ] (7th)
7 [tsʰiəʔ] (4th)
8 [boʔ] (4th)
9 [dʑiu] (2nd)
0 [lin] (5th)
Were one to say “一两四七零五六” (1247056) in Suzhou dialect, this would cover the 7 tones in order. Some of these number have two pronunciations: one colloquial and one literary. I’ve gone with the colloquial in those cases. Also, 二/两 appears in both forms but more often than no 两 is used. Also, the tone on 两 is different depending on if you’re counting or if you’re saying two of something (”两个…”). I went with the counting version here.
See the earlier post A Survey of Numbers in Wu for other examples of numbers in Wu.
Ah, that was in fact how I learnt to distinguish the nine tones in Cantonese (I’m a native speaker). Strange to say this, but I remember a time when I didn’t know Cantonese had tones, and I’d wager that quite a few non-linguists in Hong Kong don’t know how many tones there are, and even more would not be able to point out exactly what the nine (or six) tones are.
I suppose it is sort of similar to how most English speakers think there are only five vowels (true in orthography, but not even close in linguistic terms).
BTW (off topic here): have you ever come across examples of zhuyin fuhao being used for Cantonese?
(I feel like I already responded to this, so if a double-comment comes up, apologies.)
It’s funny you bring up not knowing. I was talking to someone from just outside Shanghai the other day about their local dialect and how it had 8 tones. Their response was basically “it does?”. I don’t know if they assumed it had four like Mandarin, or more likely just never thought about it.
I can’t say I’ve ever come across zhuyin used for Cantonese. Robin, a semi-regular commenter here, may know something about it though.
Well, AFAIK Zhuyin is not really used in Cantonese because it was never intended to (even though 1st draft meant that a symbol for /ŋ-/ existed). My trusty Ciyuan (辭源) dictionary only has Romatzyh (with equally insane rules of respelling) for phonetic purposes. However, Zhuyin was retrofitted for Taiwanese/Hoklo/Min-nan in Taiwan (and now supported in Unicode too!)
Romatzyh is that guy you meet at a dinner party who simultaneously seems like an incredible visionary and a colossal pain in the ass to work with.
Zhuyin need more Unicode support for more glyphs. He was absent from the dinner party.
BTW, when I say “My trusty Ciyuan (辭源) dictionary only has Romatzyh”, I meant for Cantonese of course as implied. Mandarin obviously had both Zhuyin and Romatzyh for illustrations.