I was very surprised to see Chinesepod using these random characters to represent the sounds of Shanghainese.
It is obvious that 便宜 or 一百 is always 便宜 or 一百, whether you pronounce it in Cantonese, Shanghainese or Hunanese. In fact, the pronunciation of these characters as we know them today in mandarin is not necessarily the most correct ones from a historical point of view, in many cases the original pronunciations may have been closer to some present day dialects.
Sure enough, Shanghainese is a new language that combines various Wu dialects, so there is little written material in Shanghainese proper. But there is abundant literature written in Wu, and it obviously used the characters in their proper sense. To ignore this is to ignore the importance of characters in the culture and language of all Chinese – including the Wu speakers.
This is a valid response. Why should we write 一百 as anything but 一百? ChinesePod, and countless others, have used substitution characters (呀八 in the case of ChinesePod). I’ve been a guilty of it at well, I’m sure.
I’m not sure what the actual answer to this is, but I have my guesses.
First, it’s a way to show the reader that you’re writing in Wu. This may be how it came about in the first place, when people began writing in the vernacular or doing so for effect. For me it’s a quick way to distinguish between sentences when there are examples of both, as is the case on this blog.
Second, and probably more likely, it has to do with identity and the in-crowd mentality. Something that would be confusing to an outsider is still intelligible to a Shanghainese.
Those two reasons are perhaps reasons for native speakers.
For the rest, it’s to better represent the sound, though an alphabet would do this just as well. I have a number of books on various Wu dialects that have some character, immediately followed by “读×” where × is some other character which in Mandarin sounds like the word in question. Flipping to a random page in one now, I see the phrase
婆佬两个：个读鸽音.
For what it’s worth, in Shanghainese these two characters are read gəˀ¹² and kəˀ⁵⁵ respectively. So one’s 阴声 and one’s 阳声. But how does that help with Mandarin? Only the tone is different, with both otherwise pronounced [kɤ]. So then again maybe it’s only relevant to the native speakers.
Some of this was discussed in the comments of a recent post which may be worth looking at.
Personally, I think it’s part identity and part habit. It would be a lot easier to just give in and say “我 is pronounced ngu in Wu” instead of saying “We use 吾 to show the ngu pronunciation”. But then, no one’s done that yet.
Thoughts?
Slightly unrelated, I have to admit I’m a little surprised by exactly which characters they chose to use. 伐 for negation (normally as 勿), 吴 for “I” (normally 我 or 吾), et cetera. About this I’m quite uncertain. 吾 is used for not only the sound but the meaning. Same with 勿 or 弗. And actually 伐 (or 𠲎) is often used in place of 吗.
First, it’s a way to show the reader that you’re writing in Wu.
Well, the little I have seen in Shanghainese forums seems to follow the standard Chinese characters whenever they exist (which is, I believe, in a large part of words). I am sure some young hippies like to use random script to differentiate themselves, but this doesn’t mean a language site must take that seriously.
For the rest, it’s to better represent the sound, though an alphabet would do this just as well.
That is precisely my point: the transcript of Chinesepod already had letters, so the characters where of little use to anyone.
Personally, I think it’s part identity and part habit. It would be a lot easier to just give in and say “我 is pronounced ngu in Wu” instead of saying “We use 吾 to show the ngu pronunciation”. But then, no one’s done that yet.
Really? Are you sure nobody has done that? I am surprised to hear this. I have the impression from the written Shanghainese I have seen on the net that this is precisely what they do. They write “Kelu” as 开路, or “ng” as 鱼. OK, some commonly used characters like 伐 and 吴 are introduced, I guess that is because the author wants to give a Shanghainese flavour. But to push this all the way to invent a whole system of random characters is absurd, and it only makes it more difficult to understand, even for native Shanghainese.
Sure, in some cases there is no clear mandarin equivalent of the word, so a sound is introduced, like in 册那! I find in these cases the characters used are quite standardized, at least for common words.
Seriously, the only reason I can find for deliberately using wrong characters is that the writer is trying to make a statement, either because he/she is a spotty teenager in his mom’s cellar, or else because he is a language activist. While I may sympathize with either of these cases, I don’t think a serious linguist should follow them.
…some young hippies…
awesome.
but this doesn’t mean a language site must take that seriously.
Do you mean me, or ChinesePod?
That is precisely my point: the transcript of Chinesepod already had letters, so the characters where of little use to anyone.
I agree.
Are you sure nobody has done that? I am surprised to hear this. I have the impression from the written Shanghainese I have seen on the net that this is precisely what they do. They write “Kelu” as 开路, or “ng” as 鱼. OK, some commonly used characters like 伐 and 吴 are introduced, I guess that is because the author wants to give a Shanghainese flavour.
Well no, I’m sure somebody has done that. Plenty of people in fact. I just mean there are a large number of situations where people don’t do that. Wu Wikipedia is a big time offender.
I’ve not really seen 吴 as meaning anything other than 吴语. And if I have I completely missed that it was meant to be 我. 吾 on the other hand I have seen.
But to push this all the way to invent a whole system of random characters is absurd, and it only makes it more difficult to understand, even for native Shanghainese.
Again I completely agree. If the only audience you have can’t make sense of it, then you’ve failed at communication.
Times I deliberately use the wrong character are always within some historical connection, such as 弗，否，勿 for negation (the last being actually quite common and even existing in a number of dialectal character contractions e.g. 覅 for 勿要) or 吾 for 我 and that’s usually to make it explicit that it’s a Wu sentence, not a Mandarin one. This mattered more a while ago when I’d put in the Mandarin in parallel but now it’s mostly habit.
它 for 太 is another issue. In that case specifically the tone’s don’t match [in Shanghainese], which matters if the sentence is “太贵了” because it changes the sandhi. But that’s probably picking nits.
comment edited for the sake of clarity and because I forgot a relevant part.
The above comment was just to answer your points. More interesting to me are the ideas below:
Shanghainese is a language, I have no doubt of that. But we must not forget it is a language that is closely related to other Chinese languages, and it has evolved together with the rest of them using the characters for many centuries.
It would be a great mistake to consider the characters are “putonghua characters” and therefore foreign to the dialects, because they are not. The characters are as Shanghainese as they are Beijinger. Arguably they are more Shanghainese, as the Wu people in Suzhou were already using them long before anyone thought of doing a capital in Beijing.
From the annals of the kingdom of Wu to the famous Kunshan opera, there must be a massive corpus of Wu literature in standardized post-Qin characters. Obviously a large part of that is in Classic Chinese, so many Wu elements get ignored. But still, for centuries the Wu educated people have written most words in characters and pronounced them in their Wu sounds. To try to give now invented new characters to those obviously Chinese words, or to suggest that they shouldn’t use characters at all, is absurd IMO.
After all, Wu is only a differentiated language at the most elementary level of speech. Practically all the words at a higher level are common Chinese words. This is normal since, throughout all history, any cultivated Wu speaker would be using characters to record new words.
Correction: In the first comment I meant to write 吾, not 吴.
Re 吾/吴, ChinesePod used 吴 so that’s what I thought you were referring to.
Anyway, I agree. They’re not Mandarin characters. They’re 古文/文言/whatever characters. The “Chinese” in “Chinese characters” should be taken as nothing more than geography and cultural heritage, common to the majority of Sinitic languages.
The problem with “Wu literarute” is that the annals et cetera would have been recorded in “Literary Chinese”, not any vernacular. The interesting part is that when people did start using the vernacular for writing, it was by a group of people in and around Shanghai. That’s why a number of characters (e.g. 让) are the local simplified forms. If anything you could say 让 is a Wu character that Mandarin borrowed.
And I agree with the absurdity of it all.
What about the famous 海上花列传, which was translated to English by Eileen Chang? Couldn’t that be used as a standard? Or is that the work you were referring to?
http://www.open-lit.com/listbook.php?cid=1&gbid=18&bid=2&start=0
Oops, I mean translated to mandarin
That could very likely be used as a standard, though admittedly I’ve not looked at any 漢字 version of it too deeply. I’ll check it out tonight and give my thoughts (if they’re worth anything) after.
Part of the issue, though, is if there are enough people doing weird things with characters online, you have to give that some air time when discussing writing Wu. Granted if it’s some Wu variant of 火星文, it doesn’t need that much discussion, since that’s clearly a linguistic outlier.
Haha. Take it easy, I have been looking at it for 5 minutes and it looks like a tough job. I think your best bet is to find both Chang’s translation and the original in Wu, then it should be much easier to check word by word compared to the mandarin equivalents.
Unfortunately, I am still not crazy enough about Wu to go through that, but in view of your latest effort on the Wu corpus I have the feeling that you might be
Finally, to go back to the main topic, there is another major reason why I was frustrated by the Chinesepod transcript. Actually this might be the main reason for most students: it is so much more easier to learn Shanghai sentences when you can relate them to a mandarin equivalent!
Yeah, I’m already planning my attack on this one. The age + being Suzhou dialect will make it pretty tough.
it is so much more easier to learn Shanghai sentences when you can relate them to a mandarin equivalent!
Yep. I can only manage to read what Spanish I can because I studied Latin and Italian and cognates abound. French on the other hand is harder because spelling changed so much since the Latin vulgate. I’d say that might make a reasonable analogy to the problems of character replacement, though with 漢字 it’s surely much worse.
Well, I cracked open Qian Nairong’s Shanghaihua Dacidian (the Pinyin Shuru version), where “tak” is written 忒, but “ta” is written 太.
In 海上花列傳, too, where you would expect 太 in Mandarin baihua, you see 忒 (for example, in chapter 5 來安說：「忒遠。」).
I guess Qian Nairong is basing his reading of characters on a tradition, presumably; he mentions in the dictionary that he tried his best to look for the original characters 本字.
As a non-Shanghainese speaker, I could make out most things in 海上花列傳 except for the dialogues, which is a little frustrating….
The explanation that a native Shanghaier wrote the transcript of Chinesepod is far from satisfying.
That native guy is completely illiterate in the language, as 99% of Shanghaiers are. Therefore he writes the words randomly in similar sounding mandarin. Another speaker would have written them differently, and popular entertainers or “linguists” may have done idiotic learning methods like that. It is sad that the Wu language has fallen so low.
Here are the main reasons why Shanghainese should be written properly:
1- Historically and linguistically it is obvious (see previous comments)
2- The large majority of words have an exact equivalent, for those which don’t many have established 汉字 already.
3- Using Shanghainese with silly writing is only contributing to exterminate the language even faster, ignoring its old roots and rich culture, and making it what many people would like it to be: a poor uncultivated dialect.
4- It is so so much easier to understand with the right characters.
Just listen to the transcript in the Chinesepod lesson imagining character lines like: “不好再便宜了” etc. If you know the right characters it is real easy to figure out what the guys are saying. There is no more than 3 or 4 words in the whole text that have no mandarin equivalent.
I know I’m simply echoing what everyone has always said, but I’m also deeply disappointed with ChinesePod’s choice of using characters
for their Mandarin phonetic value for transcribing Shanghainese. What they’ve done might have been really useful had their main audience been native Mandarin speakers. Instead, their audience is Mandarin learners, and given that they already provide an IPA transcription, I feel that or would have been ideal if the characters were etymologically as correct as possible, since that would allow the learner to match the sounds and the meanings. More importantly, it helps the learner create mappings in their head for how sounds go between different Chinese languages. For example, we qiān in Mandarin might go to either chīn or chīm in Cantonese, but if I knew that the character had the 僉 component, I would bet a good amount of money that it was the latter, since characters with that component usually have a -im sound in Cantonese.
Sorry about the numerous mistakes in the previous comment. Blame it on my phone.
I’ve slept on this and here’s what I think. I can see both sides of the argument.
In a historical context, in a linguistic context, I think the right thing to do it to use the hanzi that has the meaning required. That’s been discussed plenty so I need not say more.
But, for intermediate level (by ChinesePod use of the word) students, I can see the value of changing the characters, at least or the depth with which the majority of users are likely to go with Shanghainese. For example, if the learner is perhaps unfamiliar with 晓得, “小的” or something might be of some use.
And, before we all jump in the IPA bandwagon (of which I’m usually the diver), I’ve received numerous complaints here about my frequent and unforgiving use of IPA. IPA is damn foreign to people who aren’t pretty familiar with it, especially IPA for Shanghainese when it comes even close to representing the sounds.
So while I can’t speak for the specific replacement characters that were chosen, I can understand the feeling that choosing some would benefit the ChinesePod user base. It’s ChinesePod, not the Greater China Society of Persnickety Dialecticians.
Meanwhile for the GCSPD, I’ll have my membership dues in the mail by sundown.
There seems to be a bit of mish-mashing of points here, but I’ll try to lay it out as I see it:
One big point here that seems to be getting overlooked is that Cpod never meant/claimed these as an official written Wu, but rather phonetic approximations using 汉字, like that which is found in all Shanghainese learning materials meant for 汉字 reading people.
So, it’s not using Shanghainese with silly writing, but rather, learning Shanghainese with silly writing.
Is the argument then that representing Shanghainese sounds with 汉字 is an injustice to the language? If that’s the case, then all Shanghainese learning materials are culprits as well.
A second, and separate, point is about which system would be optimal for learning the pronunciation. I think all three together would be ideal. However, I find the pronunciation-approximations very helpful actually, as I don’t read IPA and they are usually closer to the correct pronunciation than how they would be read in modern Putonghua. (They can also help describe situations in which Shanghainese is multi-syllabic and Putonghua is not.)
Using historic Wu, on the other hand, would be helpful for meaning association, but can also hinder pronunciation. (by being dissimilar and also by confusing readers of Putonghua)
In the end: the goal is to learn how to speak some of the language, not to learn how it was written historically. That doesn’t mean I don’t think including the Wu would be helpful/appreciated though.
Well, there’s another lesson coming out tomorrow about ‘Calling People Names’, hopefully we can learn a few colorful ways to describe each other.
Full discretion: I work for ChinesePod!
Jason: Glad you brought up the multisyllabic part. I meant to touch on that in my last comment but obviously forgot. It’s a major issue when we have things like 阿拉 etc., as per previous discussions you and I have had.
I think the distinction between learning vs using is an important one to keep in mind.
Here’s a question. When (They are, right?) ChinesePod does Cantonese, are they likely to use the “standard” Cantonese characters (e.g. 啲) or rather approximations? I fear this may be a lose-lose situation as some people with familiarity with Cantonese (I’m not one) will feel it an injustice to use the standards, while others will find the “standards” confusing.
Thanks for the comment Jason.
zəˀ sɛ ti.
@Jason – I hope you don’t take bad my little critique. It was not really against your lesson, but against a certain trend (that I consider idiotic) of locals destroying the Shanghainese culture under the pretext of protecting it. I feel very strongly about languages and I might get overexcited sometimes
Anyway, from the practical point of view, here is my response:
1- I agree with you full IPA is not a good choice for most casual users of Chinesepod, they will not be able to understand it.
2- I actually like the sort of “pinyin” pronunciation script that was included in the lesson, I think it is very useful to figure out more or less how the words sound, and to remember them.
3- Regarding the characters, I think there are two possible choices: either not give characters at all to avoid confusing the students, or else give the correct character transcriptions. There IS a correct way to write Shanghainese in characters, even if it is lax and it hasn’t been officially sanctioned. To write it in mock internet-slang transcription is a disrespect to the language.
But more importantly to you: Real characters are more useful for the students. Listen again the Shanghainese dialog in the lesson looking for parts like 太贵了 instead of 它句了. It suddenly becomes easy to understand without even reading the translation, because like many close languages (like Portuguese with Spanish) the differences among Mandarin and Shanghainese are tiny, and mostly restricted to the field of pronunciation.
“the differences among Mandarin and Shanghainese are tiny, and mostly restricted to the field of pronunciation.”
I gotta disagree with that one, at least the “mostly restricted to pronunciation” part. If only because it’s a view I had once and have since found plenty of evidence to the contrary. I started messing with Wu a while back simply because I thought it would be like learning dialects in Arabic: get some sound change matrices, move a word or two around in the sentence, et voilà. No such luck, I’m afraid.
But yeah, for casual learners I can otherwise agree with it.
Regarding things like 上海-e-wu （how do they write that?) or 阿拉:
First of all, there are just not so many of these cases, and most of them are very common words that already have standard characters assigned. These words happen mostly at a basic level of speech.
Also, bear in mind that Nanjing had some influence in the establishment of the standard putonghua. In many cases the Wu variants are in fact accepted expressions in mandarin as well, they are just less common than in Shanghainese. (I think this might be the case for 晓得 that you mention above)
上海 -e-wu is 上海闲话 zɑ̃hɛ ɦɛɦo.
I know 晓得 is a Mandarin phrase as well. I just mean for some of the CPod users they may not be familiar with that, so giving them 晓得 as the pronunciation may be more distracting than 小的 (or something). I’m not sure about this, but it seems possible. Just a guess.
@Kellen – It all depends on how you define “mostly”. I know there ARE a few differences in vocabulary and even in grammar,
I don’t know the Arabic dialects, I am comparing it more to Spanish-Portuguese languages. Better still Spanish-Catalan, which have lived together in the same country for centuries and therefore absorbed all the modern vocabulary together.
There are many words (and some grammar structures) with a strong local flavour that are unique to Catalan, but in the end of the day it is a very similar language. Any conversation at a higher level is quite easy to understand for a native Spanish who’s lived there for some time, as long as he has been paying attention and training his ear.
Funnily enough, all the foreigners I met who lived in Barcelona for years considered Catalan was unintelligible and REALLY difficult…
I never understood that. My sister lived in Barθelona for a while, and from what I remember from what she told me, she didn’t have much trouble with Catalan.
Yes, but that is because you have super-human linguistic genes…
Ha! Or nothing better to do with our time.
Wow, fascinating discussion. We were just talking about this in class today.
Robin: I’d love to hear what you came up with in class.
@Jason I think what would be ideal for the ChinesePod Shanghainese lessons and Cantonese lessons is gloss like this:
勿好再便宜了（讀：伐好再比尼了）
The “讀” part would of course be in your mouse over pop up box along with the Mandarin Pinyin of that, maybe slightly altered so that you use va instead of fa for 勿, and also mark which characters have a stop at the end, so 一 would be yak or yat. This also extends well to Cantonese lessons in the future, in which using Cantonese characters would be good because they are very well established. So, something like this for example:
你好犀利呀！（讀：你侯塞雷啊！）
In this way, you can give both a very good pronunciation aid and meaningful characters. I don’t think IPA is very valuable because I doubt many ChinesePod listeners know any IPA at all. I certainly don’t.
“eh-wo” is actually 言語.