Here’s one of the top ranked questions for Shanghainese, and one which I’ve touched on before:

Q: 上海话里面，“一刚”是什么意思，我怎么觉得像是“思密达”的意思啊？
A: 有三個意思，一是「她說」。放在句末則是語氣助詞，表示訝異，類似「竟然」。另外還有「她傻」的意思。（正確寫法應該是「伊戇」？）
所以有那句著名的「一剛一剛一剛」：她竟然說他傻。（伊講伊戇一剛。）

Roughly translated:

Q: What’s the meaning of “yi gang” in Shanghainese? Is it like “imnida”?
A: There are three meanings. One is “he/she said”. The second is as a modal particle affixed to the end of a sentence to express unexpectedness. The third is “he/she is stupid” (which might accurately be written 伊戇 yīgàng?). Thus the famous sentence “yigang yigang yigang”, 伊讲伊戆一刚.

思密达, from Korean 입니다 imnida which is a common form of the verb “to be”, deserves a post all of its own, and probably over on Sinoglot at that.

Check out 知乎 if you’ve got the time. I anticipate spending a fair amount of time on there in the coming months.

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’d exported the the whole Shanghainese IPA as a dictionary a while back but it wasn’t quite what I wanted. This seems like it might be the real fix. I’m going to try to mess with it this weekend.

Fingers crossed.

I may have mentioned a while back that just because there are a kabillion Wu speakers it doesn’t mean the language won’t be gone in a few generations. Looks like it’s happening sooner than predicted.

Here’s the direct link.

For anyone who has mastered a few basic Chinese commands and been stumped when your local street vendor doesn’t know what you’re saying since he speaks ‘Shanghainese’, you may be able to call his bluff next time! It seems that there are very few ‘pure’ Shanghai dialect speakers; whatever ‘pure’ means. The Shanghai government has had to rethink a recent recruitment drive to recruit Shanghainese speakers as they failed to find even a few qualified candidates. Of the 13 recruitment sites, only 2 found suitable candidates despite it being reported that there are over 14 million speakers of the dialect. The government are now turning to the media for help in preserving and researching the dialect. If you’re looking to brush up on your Shanghainese then visit Shanghai City’s very own ‘how to guide’ – complete with sound clips!

Click here to go to the original which has the proper hyperlinks.

In the mean time things will stay slow here for a little while. I’m finding some time to post on the main Sinoglot blog, so head over there for some Sinitic linguistics discussion.

In the mean time, We’re open to guest posts here at the Annals as well as over at Sinoglot. If you’re interested and have something to say about language in China or Jiangnan, shoot me an email or leave your email address in the comments and I’ll get back to you shortly.

再会！

A snippet:

In one recording, Lloren captures the hum of the city and the snippets of conversations from people walking by. Jackhammers ring in the distance. The sounds of bicycle gears pierce the layers of sound. Buses come screaming to a halt in a wave of horns. There is something strangely intimate about focusing on these sounds up close, as if one can really feel the pulse of Shanghai. Lloren’s has used these recordings to create soundwalks of Shanghai that focus on authenticity, offering listeners a way to experience Shanghai that they wouldn’t get by simply taking a tour.

Take a look.

Liang Yiwen of Shanghai Daily recently wrote an article called In search of pure Shanghai dialect which is available to read online. Here’s a snippet:

ONCE Shanghai dialect was widely understood in the region and known for its rich idiomatic speech, its memorable slang. But now even local Huju Opera has trouble finding speakers of pure and coherent Shanghaihua. Liang Yiwen reports.

In a race against time to rescue fast-fading Shanghai dialect, the city is putting out the call for native speakers whose pure and idiomatic speech will be recorded and used for research, preservation and promotion activities.

Have a look.

First, I’m leaving Shanghai for a while. I’ll be heading west to present a paper on the written standardisation (or lack thereof) of the Wu dialects at a linguistics conference this July. Unfortunately I still have a bit of work to do on the paper itself and so that’s likely to take up a bit of my time.

Second, other papers. I am a graduate student after all. However, one is likely to surface in the next few weeks, over at Echoes of Manchu of all places.

In addition to all of this, my light summer reading this year will mostly be 钱乃荣’s《上海语言发展史》which I picked up not too long ago along with his grammar of Shanghainese. I’m planning on writing chapter reviews to give an idea of the contents for those not wanting (or able) to read through the Mandarin text. There’s plenty being said on Shanghainese, but not always in a way accessible to the English speaking world. So while I may not be in Shanghai to report on the language, I will still make an attempt to do so from overseas.

I’ll try to keep 星期沪 going but I can’t make any promises as I’ll likely be without internet for long stretches.

That’s the latest. Regularly scheduled programs to resume this autumn.