The following is a page from “A Syllabic DIctionary of the Chinese Language; Arranged According to the Wu-Fang Yuen Yin, with the Pronunciation of the Characters as Heard in Peking, Canton, Amoy, and Shanghai”. Apologies for illegibility. That’s just how it is in my copy.

The book was published by a presbyterian mission in the very early 20th century. In addition to the dialects listed in the title, Ningbo, Swatow, Fuzhou and Standard Mandarin are included. In addition to the transliteration in the image above, it goes on to give the same text in each dialect with characters substituted to better represent the sounds in those dialects.

Note the use of 个 for Shanghai and Ningbo in place of 之. In this case 个 is actually replacing 的, the non-literary equivalent of 之. The Peking column gives something much closer to modern Mandarin, while the far left column is the more scriptural “thou shall not” way of writing things.

In this way the book provides a pretty good example of the use of characters to transcribe something phonetically, ignoring the actual meaning of the characters used.

You may have noticed the little C or C on one of the corners of each character. Those are the tones. See this earlier post for an explanation. The short version is that each of those marks one of the 8 tones without giving any specific indication as to how that tone should be pronounced. I’ve seen the system used in newer books as well but thankfully most use numeric notation which is a bit easier to follow without having to do a lot of memorisation before.

If I have some time this weekend I’ll type out the Shanghai and Ningbo texts in full (they’re not that long).

I’ve been reading through Bernhard Karlgren’s “The Reconstruction of Ancient Chinese”. I’m operating entirely off of a digital version, but I can tell by the coloration of the pages that the original must smell fantastic.

Karlgren is speaking on page 4 of how Wu (well, Go-on) was rejected by Henri Maspero as being of little historical importance for reconstruction of ancient chinese phonetics. Karlgren disagrees with Maspero, saying this:

A striking example of the importance [of Wu for this purpose] is the word group placed under rime 江 in Ts’ie yün. Go-on (Wu) is the only one of all the dialects which treats its vocalism differently both from rime 唐 and time 陽, and thus it is just the Wu dialect that gives us the key to the old head vowel in Northern Chinese: 江 kâng.

Not bad. Bolding is mine. Italics are in the original.

Published by 上海大学出版社, written by Yuàn Hénghuī 院恒辉 and coming with yet another diminutive audio CD which can’t be played on my slot-loading CD drive, “自学上海话” is a little red book of 184 pages long. I picked it up at the bookstore across the street from Cloud Nine mall. I figured my curiosity was worth 15元.

pros:
- close to standard use of IPA in the beginning pages¹
- detailed info on the tones and basics of tone sandhi
- useful phrases
- tones, thank God.

cons:
- abandonment of IPA after the introduction in favour of yet another janky pinyin system.

The abandonment of IPA is such a grave offence here simply for with that which it has been replaced. Their pinyin needs some explanation. I can’t really type it out here in Unicode with any hope that it will show up even close to correctly on other systems, so instead visualise a series of dots and carons below some of the syllables. Bilabial plosives are written as b or p, but then since Shanghainese has voiced (e.g. [b]) as well as voiceless un-aspirated (e.g. [p]) initials in addition to the voiceless aspirated initials (e.g. [pʰ]), distinction must be made. So [pʰ] is written p, [p] as b as in pinyin, and [b] as b but with a black dot below the letter/character.

Open dots (e.g. 。) are drawn below words/characters that end in a glottal stop [ʔ], though this is redundant since they’re also written with a final -k, much like you see in Cantonese.

Finally a caron appears below two characters that are to be read as one with heavy elision. One of the first instances of this is 好 which is written here as 合噢, linked with a caron below. That 合噢 is their glyphic interpretation of [hɔ].².

The audio content on the CD is still unknown as I’ve packed away my one external CD drive and can’t quite remember where it’s ended up. When I can find it, I’ll post a clip.

Verdict:
Bear in mind it’s Mandarin only, in case the title hadn’t made that clear, so if you’re not comfortable with characters you may want to skip it. Otherwise if you’re trying to learn Shanghainese anyway and already have a handful of books, what’s 15 kuai to you? At the very least it offers a few different sentence patterns than books you may already own.

- – -
1. The book includes ɿ which I can let slide, but also includes E and A, both of which are unforgivable in 2009 when it was published.
2. The other common example of this in other books is [ŋu] 我 written as linked 嗯无

John at Sinosplice has posted once more on Shanghainese. Be sure to head over and check it out if you haven’t already. It’s a great post on some common issues facing the Wu learner. He brings up a lot of the problems with replacement characters as well as transcription of Wu/Shanghainese.

I’m out of town for a bit, thus the slowing of posts. Semi-regular posts will resume in a couple weeks.