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.

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.

The whole text (4 pages) is available from archive.org. You can find it pretty easily through Google as well. Turns out someone has typed out the first ten verses, diacritics and all, on the Hakka (客家) version of the same wikipedia page. Characters are there as well but for Mandarin, so they don’t match the Wu. Here are the first few verses.

1:1. Kyi-tsu Jing-ming ts‘ông-zao t’in teng di.̤ duâi. 1:2. Di m-neh soh-go siang-mao, tu z hyü k’ong-ko: ‘ong-shü min-teng heh-en: Jing-ming-go Ling yüing-dong læ shü-go min-teng. 1:3. Jing-ming wô, Kæ yiu liang-kwông; liang-kwông ziu yiu de.̤ng duŏh sŏ̤h iông gâu-gâu gì duâi-ĭ. 1:4 Jing-ming k’en keh liang-kwông z hao; Jing-ming ziu feng c’ih liang teng en læ.̤ sĕng gáe̤ cī ciéh nè̤ng gâe̤ng duâi-ĭ táung lâi gó̤, cêu sáung diê-nè̤ng buōng-sê̤ṳ duâi.

Also available on the Hakka Wikipedia is a handful of verses in Suzhou, Shanghai and Taizhou dialects.

There are a few other changes yet to be made, most of which are minor and should go unnoticed.

Meanwhile I’ll try to get more audio done but it may continue to be slow for the rest of March at the very least, in large part because I’ll be leaving Shanghai for a bit this month. Once back I’ll try to find the time to sort through the recordings I’ve already done but not yet transcribed as well as putting some time into making new ones.

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).

One of those minor instances of the language popping up in print around the city.

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.

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.

新年好

xin nyi hau

or

[ɕin ɲi hɔ]

Whichever you prefer.

I’ve been reading a lot the past few days on the status of Cantonese, most recently Julie Groves’ “Language or Dialect—or Topolect? A Comparison of the Attitudes of Hong Kongers and Mainland Chinese towards the Status of Cantonese” (available as a pdf from the Sino-Platonic Papers). I got to thinking on the idea of prestige within a dialect. I know there are people in Shanghai who consider one variation of the Shanghai parent-dialect to be more pure or more Shanghainese than others, but I’ve never really thought about other Wu dialects (though it could be argued Suzhou has historically held these distinctions, as it was formerly the prestige dialect for centuries).

So I asked a friend. Do you, in your local dialect of Wu, think there are people who speak a “better” form of it, and others who speak it worse? My intended meaning was lost, or rather deemed irrelevant. So I brought up Mandarin as an example. The answer: “With Mandarin it’s completely different, because Mandarin is never your first language“. Emphasis added. Of course in this case the rhetorical “you” could be said to stand strictly for Wu speakers.

I’m posting about this because it was a candid statement from a Wu speaker on the language-ness of Wu as separate from Mandarin. And for what it’s worth the above statement was given in English. So confusion on the definition of 方言 doesn’t really apply.