Comments on: On replacing characters for Wu

By: Richard

Richard — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 00:07:26 +0000

“eh-wo” is actually 言語.

By: Language Thursdays: Shanghainese Writing | CHINAYOUREN

Language Thursdays: Shanghainese Writing | CHINAYOUREN — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 03:15:53 +0000

[...] This week I have little time to do the Language post, partly because I have been busy writing a short story, partly because I have already discussed a good deal about language in other blogs. I take advantage of this to do the post with my final views on Shanghainese after the long discussion we had on the Wu blog. [...]

By: Karan Misra

Karan Misra — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 07:21:38 +0000

@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.

By: Kellen

Kellen — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 06:25:37 +0000

Robin: I’d love to hear what you came up with in class.

By: Robin

Robin — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 06:01:22 +0000

Wow, fascinating discussion. We were just talking about this in class today.

By: Kellen

Kellen — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 04:46:29 +0000

Ha! Or nothing better to do with our time.

By: Julen

Julen — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 04:45:22 +0000

Yes, but that is because you have super-human linguistic genes…

By: Kellen

Kellen — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 04:38:21 +0000

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.

By: Julen

Julen — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 04:34:00 +0000

@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…

By: Kellen

Kellen — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 04:20:36 +0000

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.