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).

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.

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.

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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

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

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.

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:

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.

There’s an additional note, dated October 1, 1920, stating that some changes have been made for the publication but that the content has otherwise been used to successfully teach hundreds to read. My assumption then is along the lines of “how hard can it be?”. As such I’ve begun transcribing and ultimately translating a section of one of the books.

To the point. The following is a transcription from zhuyin of the cover and first story from Simple Stories told in Soochow Phonetics. Footnotes are my understanding of some of the phrases. Hyphens exist in the original and have been left in place.

Time permitting, I’ll subject this to a couple hours with a good Suzhouhua dictionary and see if I can’t make sense of it all. The biggest problem at the moment is not knowing exactly what sounds are being attempted to transcribe with the Romanization system, as it seems to be neither Legge nor Wade-Giles.

I’m working on the translation or at the very least a transcription to something more representative of the appropriate sounds.

Anyone wanting to take a stab at this, leave your interpretations in the comments below.

Inductive Lessons in Soochow Phonetics (also 注音字母入門 or ㄗㄧㄣㄙ̀ㄇㄨㄙ̀ノㄇㄣ) by Frances Burkhead, published in Suzhou in 1920, and Simple Stories told in Soochow Phonetics (also 注音字母故事 or ㄗㄧㄣㄙ̀ㄇㄨㄍㄨㄙ̀) translated by Miss Wo Iung-Tuh.

Those of you able to make heads or tails of zhuyin fuhao might notice a few inconsistencies. The books, entirely 蘇州話, are written in a modified form of the zhuyin pinyin. For example ㄙ̀ and ノ, the second of which here I’m borrowing from katakana and marks Wade-Gilesesque “eh”. The example given for ノ is 盦 but it’s small and the jpeg compression is wreaking havoc on the legibility so I may be wrong.

The rest of the chart is as follows. I started making it all in text, but it was taking too long. When I finish it I’ll replace the image.

The footnote on the bottom states that Suzhou dialect doesn’t use those particular sounds. The table is otherwise labeled as sounds from “蘇滬”, Suzhou and Shanghai. The original image can be seen by clicking through the link in the first paragraph.

I knew zhuyin was used to write languages beyond Mandarin, having modified letters to cover Hakka and Southern Min. I had not ever heard of it being used for Wu.

One of the books, and based on the typeface and whatnot, probably the other as well, was published by the Moka Garden Embroidery Mission in Suzhou. The Embroidery Mission was originally called the Industrial School of Soochow and was opened sometime after 1901 by a missionary named Virginia Atkinson, a Methodist from Alabama. According to the book Taking Christianity to China*, one of the triumphs of the mission was alleviating the unemployment in Suzhou. Workers were paid $7.50 a month and worked from 8:30 to 17:00. Beyond affecting unemployment, it created “evangelistic opportunities for Methodist missionaries”. It stands to reason that included combating illiteracy**.

If you click through to the library site and can read zhuyin, be sure to check out the rubi for the books’ titles, the only thing otherwise in 漢字.

Thanks to @Tortue for his willingness to help decode.

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* page 166 from the Google Books edition.
** The same group of missionaries were also active in Changzhou and Shanghai, and as we know, no one works dialects and under-appreciated languages like the missionaries.
edit: I’ve removed the sample image. It wasn’t loading right and was causing a number of alignment problems on the main page.