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.

A while back I mentioned the 上海话大词典 published by 上海辞书出版社, Shanghai Dictionary Publishing. What I didn’t mention was that they actually publish the same dictionary in two forms. The one mentioned earlier was the “cihai edition” 辞海版. The other is called the “pinyin input edition” 拼音输人版 which uses a sort of adapted pinyin in place of IPA. The entries are the same with only the Romanisation changed.

The other feature of the pinyin edition is the inclusion of an audio CD and dialogues at the back of the book. The following is the first dialogue. The transcription is the pinyin used in the book as well.

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The book advertises 900 sentences. I believe it. Page after page of dialogues fill the back of the book.

Keep “shang² yhu⁵ fhak³ ji¹” [zã˨ ɦyø˥ vəʔ˧ ʨi˩] handy. It’s the equivalent of 好久不见 and almost as useful as “have you eaten?”

The majority of letters are the same as in pinyin for Mandarin. The extra h, as in “shang yhu fhak ji” marks voice. So p is [pʰ] and b is [p] as in Mandarin but then bh is [b]. Same for dh, gh, sh which is [z] (not to be confused with pinyin z), and fh which is [v].

Others are as follows:

Finals are the same as Mandarin pinyin with some exceptions. They are as follows:

I couldn’t resist going back to the Moka Garden Embroidery Mission documents. There’s just too much there to be limited to a couple posts.

In addition to the book of short stories, they also recorded a staple of missionary linguistics, the Lord’s Prayer. The following is from Inductive Lessons in Soochow Phonetics.

Some of the zhuyin glyphs used to represent sounds in Suzhou dialect are not standard zhuyin. If I’ve read correctly, they were created in their final form by the missionaries themselves, based of course on other glyphs or characters. Since these aren’t standard and thus not covered by Unicode, I’ve had to do some borrowing. The following characters are used in the Moka Mission texts, here borrowed from Mandarin hanzi and Japanese katakana. Romanization is from the Moka publications.

　卄 – oong　ノ – eh　ウ – ien　干 – oen [øn]　丄 – aung　ト – auh
　ム – z　广 – ny [ɲ]　乙 – ah　兀 – ng [ŋ]　万 – v　ナ – o　久 – eh

As far as the hanzi in the prayer goes, you may have noticed it’s also not standard. The text is in traditional characters, as would be expected for 1920. However there are a fair number of occurrences of 个. Here it’s been re-appropriated standing in for 得 and 的, both being pronounced “ge” in most Wu dialects.

The text of the prayer transliterated using the Moka Mission’s system is as follows:

Those familiar with early Romanisation of Chinese will be able to muck through it fairly effectively. To get an idea of more modern language since the Lord’s Prayer is hardly the typical conversation, the following is from the book of short stories published by the mission. It’s the first sentence of the first story.

The second is from the Wu Association online mini dictionary which uses another non-standard system of transcription but one which matches the Moka system well enough. The vowel in “taung” ought to match the one in the “daon” on the modern Suzhou dialect version, both corresponding to 糖.