Annals of Wu » Annals

Search box added. Finally.

Kellen — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 16:45:34 +0000

Though more than just a little overwhelmed with things that absolutely positively need to get done, I threw a few minutes into the site this evening. The most notable change is the addition of a search box, which you’ll find in the footer. I figured that given the few requests I’ve had for it, I’d post this to let people know.

There are a few other changes yet to be made, most of which are minor and should go unnoticed.

Meanwhile I’ll try to get more audio done but it may continue to be slow for the rest of March at the very least, in large part because I’ll be leaving Shanghai for a bit this month. Once back I’ll try to find the time to sort through the recordings I’ve already done but not yet transcribed as well as putting some time into making new ones.

Happy New Year from Shanghai

Kellen — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 05:42:46 +0000

Perhaps a little late but still useful for a few more days,

新年好

xin nyi hau

[ɕin ɲi hɔ]

Whichever you prefer.

Sinoglot: a group blog on language in China

Kellen — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 14:37:04 +0000

Not sure how I missed this announcement, but here it is:

I’m happy to announce the launch of a new group blog on language in China. Contributors include Sima and Paweł of Echoes of Manchu, Randy of Echoes of Manchu and Yuwen, Syz of Beijing Sounds, Duncan of the Naxi Script Resource Center and myself, of here.

The blog is Sinoglot, found at sinoglot.com. Note that the content is original. That is, it is not simply a replaying of entries from the other sites. We’ve gotten off to a good start and have already had some interesting discussion on many of the articles. Take a look.

More Wu to come.

One year down

Kellen — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 02:34:19 +0000

Today marks one year since the official launch of Annals of Wu. The site was set up in large part to help myself learn as much of the language as I could without formal (or even very directed) study, and I gotta say I’m not disappointed with the results. The comments have one more than one occasion yielded much more interesting directions than I might have been inclined to follow on my own. So thanks to everyone who has left comments and given me something to think about.

For the coming year expect more sound files, more instructional posts and possibly some branching out into other platforms. More on that last one later. I’ll also be adding a search function to the site which is much overdo.

In other news, some of you may have noticed the domain change. That’s part of a larger migration and upcoming project which isn’t quite ready yet. But when it is I think you’ll like it.

Big stuff planned for the year. Stay tuned.

the Sound of Shanghai

Kellen — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 07:39:58 +0000

A few summers ago when I was new to Shanghai, friends and I joked that the smell of the city was really just the smell of freshly cooked crayfish, lined up on a large cooking sheet and sold on the street as a summer snack, mixed with the smell of whatever had accumulated in the nearby gutter that day. If there’s a sound to this city that just as closely tied to my experiences here, it’s this:

[kχʛɣʞɬgʞʞʞʜxkʞǁkxɣʞʞʞʞʜkɣʞʞgχʞʜχ ̚]

Every apartment in which I’ve lived for any period more than a couple nights has been plagued by this sound of neighbourly renovation. To this day I have no idea what the actual tool involved is. It was bad enough my second week since moving back to China two years ago that a friend and I got rooms at a hotel a block away for 2 nights just to get away. In case you were wondering about the recent radio silence, that’s the reason. I don’t have headphones good enough to drown that out for long enough to bother. But fear not. I’m setting up my iPhone to be a mobile studio for just that purpose. Expect a slew of supermarket clips in the coming weeks.

Housekeeping

Kellen — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 09:56:57 +0000

A few things. First, as has been requested, you can now subscribe to this site by email. This is through Google’s Feedburner and will send you posts via email as they’re published here.

Second, you may have noticed 星期沪 has taken a nose dive. I’ve become much busier with my grad classes and in addition to that have picked up some part-time work in order to keep my electricity on. Something had to give and weekly Shanghainese tweets seemed an obvious choice. I’ll probably pick it up again in the future, but likely not until the semester ends.

Lastly, despite the busier schedule I’m putting some more time into other Wu dialects. I’m planning a couple trips into Jiangsu for the dual purposes of collecting books and collecting more audio recordings. More exciting (for me anyway) is December’s minor topolect post, which is the most complete yet, including about 5 minutes of audio. That will be posted after I find some time to transcribe the last few pieces. And while it’s not Shanghainese, it may still be of some value to those of you living in the city. More on that later.

Keep your eyes open for that in a week or so.

A Comparison of Transcriptions

Kellen — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 07:58:43 +0000

We’ve been talking about transcription a few posts back and the rather unorthodox method used in some sources. Logically “bh” seems like it ought to correspond to [bʰ], not [b], but as we’ve seen, that’s not really the case in some texts. So I’ve thrown together a quick comparison of four different methods of transcription for Wu, as well as including pinyin for Modern Standard Mandarin.

I didn’t include endings in this, though really that’s where the biggest differences are. For example depending on the source cases y could be [y], [ẓ] (aka [ɿ]) or [i], not to mention the extreme variation for something as simple as [ã]. But that would be incredibly time consuming and this is really just to get a general idea of the variety.

Top row is International Phonetic Alphabet, Shanghainese Pinyin^*, Standard Mandarin Pinyin. Second row is Long-short transcription and the Wu Association transcription.

[m]　m　m	[n]　n　n	[ɲ]　n	[ŋ]　ng　ng
m　m	n　n	gn　ny	ng　ng

[p]　b　b	[t]　d　d		[k]　g　g	[ʔ]　k　`
p　p	t　t		k　k	*　`

[pʰ]　p　p	[tʰ]　t　t		[kʰ]　k　k
ph　ph	th　th		kh　kh

[b]　bh	[d]　dh		[g]　gh
b　b	d　d		g　g

		[ts]　z　z	[ʨ]　j　j
		tz　ts	c　j

		[tsʰ]　c　c	[ʨʰ]　q　q
		ts　tsh	ch　tsh

		[dz]	[dʑ]　jh
		dz	dj　j

[f]　f　f	[s]　s　s	[ɕ]　x　x		[h]　h　h
f　f	s　s	x　sh		h　h

[v]　v	[z]　sh	[ʑ]　xh
v　v	z　z	j　z

	[l]　l　l			[ɦ]　hh　h
	l　l			r　gh

Now you see why I’m such a big supporter of using IPA. Standard IPA. Even though I really do like [ɿ] for [ẓ], having an internationally accepted standard is a pretty big convenience. The only reason I even use things like [ɿ] and [ȵ] are because they’re so widely understood in terms of Chinese topolects, even if a little obsolete.

It’s like the Esperanto of transcription, except that it’s actually useful to learn.

- – -
* as used by 上海辞书出版社 in their pinyin Shanghainese dictionary.

Why Tones Might Not Matter in Wu

Kellen — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 06:32:15 +0000

Or at least why they may be much less important than in Mandarin.

I’ve argued that tone is important in Wu, even if focusing just on a dialect with a drastically limited tone set such as the Shanghai dialect. While most Wu dialects have 7 or 8 tones (including those immediately outside of Shanghai), Shanghainese has been reduced to about five. Maybe less since two of those 5, the 阴入 and 阳入, are mostly just reduced form of the 平声 and what’s called the 舒声 which is really just an amalgamation of all the non-ru 入 in the lower register (阳). Many people, locals included, will tell you that after the first word of a sentence the rest of the words don’t matter. I wouldn’t go this far but I could see taking the first and last into account and then dropping everything else to mid-level tones and still getting by just fine.

Previously, I’ve written that I think the reason most people neglect tones or feel they can be neglected in Shanghainese is that they just never get far enough into the language to really see how much they matter. You can have an atrocious “厕所在哪儿” in Mandarin and get by just fine¹.

But I think I may have been wrong in taking that position. I still think there’s something to it, at least in the early stages of learning the language. I do think you can get by for a good while with crap tones in Shanghainese as long as your pronunciation is decent (mine’s not, for the same reason I could never say “não” right when studying 巴西话 years back). The following is from the Wikipedia article on tonogenesis, emphasis added.

André-Georges Haudricourt established that Vietnamese tone originated in earlier consonantal contrasts, and suggested similar mechanisms for Chinese. It is by now well-established that Old Chinese did not have phonemically contrastive tone. …

Very often, tone arises as an effect of the loss or merger of consonants. … In a non-tonal language, voiced consonants commonly cause following vowels to be pronounced at a lower pitch than other consonants do. This is usually a minor phonetic detail of voicing. However, if consonant voicing is subsequently lost, that incidental pitch difference may be left over to carry the distinction that the voicing had carried, and thus becomes meaningful (phonemic).

So Mandarin without voiced consonants has tones and they matter a great deal. Wu, or specifically Shanghai Wu, has voiced consonants in addition to the aspirated and un-aspirated consonants and tones matter a lot less. If I remember correctly, there are only 412 different syllables in Mandarin. Wu not only has initials not found in Mandarin, but finals as well at least in the form of [ʔ]. Granted, in the case of [ʔ] it always takes 入声, but then maybe that’s the point. As long as that stop is evident in speech, you wouldn’t really need to hit the tone right. Again from the Wikipedia article:

We can see this historically in Panjabi: the Panjabi murmured (voiced aspirate) consonants have disappeared, and left tone in their wake. If the murmured consonant was at the beginning of a word, it left behind a low tone; if at the end, a high tone. If there was no such consonant, the pitch was unaffected; however, the unaffected words are limited in pitch so as not to interfere with the low and high tones, and so has become a tone of its own: mid tone. The historical connection is so regular that Panjabi is still written as if it had murmured consonants, and tone is not marked: The written consonants tell the reader which tone to use.

In the Moka texts³ we have the same deal. The tones were not written in those books (unfortunately) but the words which would be pronounced with the entering tone are marked in their spelling. One of the characters in the story 《ㄐㄧㄉㄢㄍㄠㄌナㄌㄧㄑㄧㄗオ》 is named ‘Li-tok (ㄌㄧ-ㄉㅏ), the letter k in “-ok” (here ㅏ) marks the stop [ʔ] meaning we can tell that syllable was either 阴入 or 阳入.

With tones tied to consonant voicing in this way it would be one more point for the “tones are irrelevant in Wu” people. Or at least, the “mostly irrelevant in Wu” people.

- – -
1. I know because I did just that when I first got to China. At fast food joints I said “一号套餐” with 号 as 好 for the first six months and never once had it matter. Now in a grad program the distinction is rather important and with much of the context stripped by the miserly use of words that is 文言文, tone matters a whole lot more.
2. Worth noting for Wu, in Middle Chinese 入声 was taken by syllables ending in [p], [t] and [k], now a glottal stop [ʔ] in most modern Wu dialects. You can see this in the transcription in Wang Ping’s book on Suzhou dialect, the Moka Mission texts of the 20s and the Shanghaihua Da Cidian, pinyin edition.
3. The bopomofo used in the Moka texts was a modified form of the bopomofo used today. For the additional letters, see this old post. I’m using ㅏ here and ト there but they’re actually the same letter. The typeface used in the original text makes it unclear what the form really ought to be, and I have yet to find other texts using the symbol that are not from the Moka Mission.

Updates to the Site

Kellen — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 14:26:11 +0000

I’m in the process of cleaning up some of the images and CSS. Expect things to be visually glitchy for the next 16 hours.

Interview with YR Chao

Kellen — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 11:42:19 +0000

There’s a great interview with YR Chao up on the USC library site. It’s part of their China Scholars Series and is called Chinese linguist, phonologist, composer and author, Yuen Ren Chao. All in all it’s about 240 pages or more, which includes the index, all hyperlinked together, which is nice.

Here’s a quick sample:

Schneider
Later, when you were making decisions about which course of academics to follow–and of course you talked about these things with fellow-students–I wonder to what degree questions of national obligation entered into your decision making.

Chao
I think very little. We thought that with so many of us, probably our different interests would cover most of the needs. [Laughter] As for myself, I was just self-centered; I just followed the interests I had.

Schneider
What about your interest in language?

Chao
That started very early because of the early language experience I had. My people came from what we call the South, which means the Kiangsu, Chekiang region–the Wu dialect region. My grandfather spoke Mandarin very poorly, and so did my father. I think my mother was the only one who spoke a fairly good Mandarin. At home, we children always spoke Mandarin.
Then, as soon as we started to learn to read and write, we were taught the Changchow pronunciation in the Wu dialect, so that at one time I could only speak in the northern dialect and read in the southern. Moving about, even within what’s now called Hopeh province, we were exposed to various kinds of accents. When we went back to Changchow later, we were exposed to even more varieties of dialect. That’s how I got interested in all these different matters of pronunciation and matters of vocabulary among different dialects.

I’m slightly biased, what with his excellent work on the Changzhou dialect and Chinese linguistics in general. That said, if you’re interested in the history of language reform in China or Chinese linguistics in general, I recommend the read. There’s a bit on Gwoyeu Romatzyh, Chao’s attempt at a Romanisation system and more on his own dialect studies.

So take a look if you’ve got the time. The things you find when killing time on library sites.