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Check out the soundwalks project, “Growing up with Shanghai“.
From the About page:
“Growing Up With Shanghai” is a series of soundwalks with young Shanghainese who were born and raised during the rapid modernization of their city in the 1980s and 1990s. These recordings capture not only their most intimate memories of the locations where they grew up, but also the progress and growth Shanghai has undergone in the past 30 years. The current sounds of Shanghai can be heard behind the dialog and also serve as an audio document for future generations of Shanghainese. All dialogue is in Shanghainese or in their local dialect.
There’s also a book available with photos of some of the places talked about in the audio.
Good stuff. Go check it out.
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Hat-tip to @kmlawson who inadvertently directed me to the National Library of Australia’s digital collections. I did a quick search for “Soochow” and got two hits:
Inductive Lessons in Soochow Phonetics (also 注音字母入門 or ㄗ
ㄧㄣㄙ̀ㄇㄨㄙ̀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.
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First, if you haven’t already, read “The origins of ràng’s svelte simplification” over at John B.’s Global Maverick.
To re-quote from Jerry Norman’s† book Chinese (Amazon, Google Books):
(transcription blatantly stolen from John’s site)
As I mentioned in the comments over at GM, the last sentence interests me quite a bit. I know in 1956 and again in 1964 lists were released by Beijing giving the simplified form of a number of characters. Then a final collection (called 简化字总表) was released in 1986. What I don’t know is when 让 was introduced. My suspicion is that it was already in wide use in the Delta long before the ‘86 collection, possibly before even the ‘64.
There were of course efforts toward simplification before that. One of the earliest and maybe most relevant to the inclusion of 让 was that of linguist Qián Xuántóng‡ 钱玄同 who published a list of around 2,400 simplified characters in 1935. The same year, the Nanjing government published their own list, though of only about 324 characters. A year before this, 中国图书馆服务社出版杜 published their own list of just over 350.
It may be of some relevance that Qián was from Huzhou, a town in northern Zhejiang where Wu is spoken.
update:
Killing time I thought I’d run through a couple dialects comparing 让 and 上 using the Wu Association online dictionary search, lacking any better resources while I couch-surf Jiangsu. Of course, they were unlikely to match since it’s neither of literary readings nor even 老派. But, at least according to their dictionary, the Hangzhou 杭州 readings do match, both being zan҂, tone and IPA unknown. Not that I really doubted Norman’s claim. See footnote 1.
update 2:
According to an article from the Journal of Huzhou Teacher’s College published 8/99, Huzhou dialect reads 上 as [zɔ̃] or [zaŋ] and 让 as [-ã] or [-aŋ]#. I believe the second of each pair is 老派, but I’m admittedly not at all sure. Unfortunately the chart at which I’m looking doesn’t give the initial for 让, and in fact the only intitial r- word it gives that would be either a [z] or [n]/[ɲ] is 肉 which it gives as [ɲ-], probably [ɲuəʔ]. The sample’s too small to know one way or another.
If it turns out that the second in the pair is either 老派 or the literary reading, and if 让 does in fact take the initial [z], it would support the likelihood of Qián’s influence on 让 from 讓. Of course, if neither of those are true, it wouldn’t really count as a strike against the idea.
update 3: 12/Oct
Last update, seriously. I found a rather cool book at the library today. It’s from 2007, which is æons more recent than anything else I have on 苏州话. It gives the following:
上－sɑ̃
上－sã (literary reading)
The difference between sã and sɑ̃ is minimal, so even if we ignore the literary reading, they’re still damn close.
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† Who could possibly not like someone who writes papers on things like “The Origin of the Proto-Min Softened Stops”?
‡ Of no relevance here but still interesting, Qián also once suggested that Mandarin be replaced by Esperanto.
҂ If you do go wandering through their dictionary search, it may be of some use to know their transcription “ny” corresponds to ɲ/ȵ.
# I’ve run out of daggers. According to another source, 湖州新派 gives 让 the tone curve ˧˥, taking 阴去声.
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My typical day has recently involved a lot of time between busses and subways, with a taxi thrown in on either end. When I am walking, it’s usual at high speed in order to get somewhere before one office or another closes or goes on arbitrary lunch breaks. I decided to take my own and spend it in the park.
Near a map (which acted as my cover for standing there so long) but far from the cicadas a man and a woman were discussing something involving a great deal of pronouns. The two most common ones were
我 ŋu23 and
阿拉 ɑʔ33lɑʔ44.
我 is easy enough and corresponds to the Mandarin equivalent. 阿拉 can also mean 我 but otherwise means “we” or “us”. I’m not sure exactly when that’s the case. I’ve heard different explanations for it but none that have seemed to lock it down.
There’s also another option for 我们 which is 伲 ɲi23, also occurring as 我伲 ŋu23ɲi23, though I believe both of these are rather old and not widely used today.
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This first recording is from that conversation, though through my phone’s internal microphone things didn’t come out so clear. I really need to start carrying around my external earbud microphone. You’ll hear the man saying “na, na ge, aiyou…” followed by her saying over him “niu214” which he then repeats. Not sure what’s going on there but it’s not pronoun-based.
The second recording is one that was started far too late. It’s not at all Wu related but instead something I like about China. People sing. The same day an older man leisurely passed me on a bicycle, passionately singing something unfamiliar to me but quite beautiful. This is two women, walking with a man who you’ll hear jump in causing them to stop. They had been singing for a few minutes before but too far out to be heard well.
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