I came across a few lessons on Changzhou dialect. They’re nice and slow and it’s a nice way to hear clearly some of the different pronunciations from someone who clearly knows what they’re doing.

lesson one
lesson three
kesson three

Looks like there are only three lessons. Part one goes over the basics like “hello” and “are you from Changzhou”. Part two is for numbers, and part three goes into more complex sentences, such as in the image above.

Good stuff. I’d love to see more.

I had heard rumours…

Finally, we recognize that in many places in China Mandarin is not the only spoken language. In fact, nearly every part of China has its own local dialect. To address this, and to help foreigners get the most out of their daily interactions here, we plan to launch mini-series focusing on local dialects. We could not have covered these dialects in our newbie lessons, as they do not constitute high-frequency language for Chinese learners (a person in Beijing wouldn’t need to know how to ask for a bathroom in the Xian dialect, for example). Thus they will be (language-focused) extra content aimed at bringing more insight to Chinese life and culture. In honor of the city ChinesePod calls home, we will begin with Shanghainese. We hope to move on to beijinghua and more, but we’ll need your input to help decide which dialects deserve a close look!

That’s from the ChinesePod blog post on what to expect from them this year.

A couple things I noticed based on the 30-some comments to the post: Cantonese is something a lot of people want to see. One persons says something along the lines of “Isn’t it a different language?”, but no one is saying that about Shanghainese. Sad, but not surprising. One commenter wants to see Sichuan hua based on the number of people from Sichuan to be found elsewhere. I couldn’t agree more. I can say that because they already said Shanghainese was first.

In case you’re looking for other Shanghainese podcasts, check out MandMX.com for a podcast by M and MX who have been doing these for a while now. They tend to be short little bursts of phrases but it’s a good way to hear some of the more common phrases of Shanghainese spoken in a controlled environment.

From the Wikipedia article on Cantonese phonology:

The numbers “394052786″ when pronounced in Cantonese, will give the nine tones in order (Romanisation (Yale) saam1, gau2, sei3, ling4, ng5, yi6, chat7, baat8, luk9), thus giving a good mnemonic for remembering the nine tones.

And I’m thinking, “That’s cool! Does Wu do that?”

Of course, Shanghainese only has 5 tones. You could cover them all in order by saying “34126″, but that’s not nearly as neat as the Cantonese version, mostly just because there are so few to be covered. So I started looking in Wu dialects that had more tones. Specifically I looked at the Suzhou dialect, which has 7 of the 8 otherwise found in Wu. Actually I also got into Hangzhou and Lüsi dialects, but was swamped with information. More on that in another post.

In Suzhou, the numbers are as follows.
1　[iəʔ] (1st tone)
2　[ni] (二, 6th tone), [liã] (两, 2nd tone)
3　[sɛ] (1st)
4　[sɿ] (3rd)
5　[ŋ] (6th)
6　[loʔ] (7th)
7　[tsʰiəʔ] (4th)
8　[boʔ] (4th)
9　[dʑiu] (2nd)
0　[lin] (5th)

Were one to say “一两四七零五六” (1247056) in Suzhou dialect, this would cover the 7 tones in order. Some of these number have two pronunciations: one colloquial and one literary. I’ve gone with the colloquial in those cases. Also, 二/两 appears in both forms but more often than no 两 is used. Also, the tone on 两 is different depending on if you’re counting or if you’re saying two of something (”两个…”). I went with the counting version here.

See the earlier post A Survey of Numbers in Wu for other examples of numbers in Wu.

It’s come up a few times in the last couple months so it seemed as good a time as any to run a quick outline. We’ll file this somewhere between “arbitrary rules that no one follows” and “totally irrelevant pieces of information”.

In written Wu, and this is strictly a writing issue, there are a number of possible characters used to negate verbs. In Mandarin it’s pretty much 不 and 不 alone. 没 doesn’t count here since that’s really more an equivalent of 文言’s wèi 未 (”to have not [done s.t.]“). Look at E.G. Pulleyblank’s grammar on Classical Chinese or Li and Thompson’s “Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar” (page 415) for more on either of those. Since this is neither a Mandarin blog nor a 文言 blog, we’ll just move along.

The basic characters you’re going to see are: 不, though it’s probably the least common of the bunch, 勿 which tends to be the most common, 弗 which I use almost exclusively, and 佛 which is actually Buddha and something I’ve only ever encountered online in BBSs and blogs. I’ve also seen another character, 拂, which is the word of choice for the Wu version Wikipedia. I hate it. It’s just as bad as 佛. The main difference is that it, just like 弗, is “fú” in Mandarin. I normally defer to the Wukipedia on these sorts of things, since the articles/stubs are written by native speakers, but in this case I think I have to reject it outright.

佛 shouldn’t be used. The sound is ok for some dialects, but it’s also a pretty common character otherwise and has a fairly unambiguous meaning. The other three all really do mean “no” and so people really ought to stick to those.

不 I also don’t recommend. It’s my opinion that one of the features of writing Wu ought to be an immediate recognition that we’re not reading Mandarin. Therefore I think in any case where there’s a commonly used alternative for certain words, they should be used. I tend to use 吾 for 我 for that reason alone.

勿 and 弗 could both work just as easily. The benefit of 勿 is it’s more common and so everyone will immediately get the meaning without necessarily thinking it’s Mandarin. 弗 on the other hand has the advantage of sound. In every Wu dialect in which I know the word for 不, they all start with something like [f].

Between those two it ultimately comes down to taste. There is one more point on the side of 勿, which is its use in characters marking contractions such as 覅 fiào, a contraction for 勿要.

For those interested, pronunciation is as follows for the Shanghai dialect: 弗，佛 and 勿 are all [və˩˨], entering tone. 不 is pronounced [pə˧˧] and 覅 is [viɔ˨˧].

好好学习，天天向上。
hɔ hɔ ɦo ʑiɪ, tʰi tʰi ɕiɑ̃ zɑ̃.

edit: I forgot 伐 which is also fairly common online.