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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:
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[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.
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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.
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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.
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* as used by 上海辞书出版社 in their pinyin Shanghainese dictionary.
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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.
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:
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 《ㄐㄧ ㄉㄢ ㄍㄠ ㄌナ ㄌㄧ ㄑㄧ ㄗ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.
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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.
