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.

So far all of the books I’ve been able to find specifically covering 常州方言 have been without any real phonetic transliterations, IPA or otherwise. Instead characters are used and loosely at that. 《常州方言》which I bought last week has about 4 occurrences of Latin letters in the whole book, usually of little value. In other places it tells you that “我读罗音” which I’ve not once heard from all the people of whom I’ve asked to speak for me, leading me to believe the authors may not have been cut from the same cloth as my available speakers. See the 丹阳 comment below to see what I mean. At any rate, below are a few more common variations, some from the above mentioned book and some from other sources.

我 can be written 吾 or in the case of Shanghainese can be 阿拉^[1]
你 or 您 in Shanghai is written and said as 侬 (though apparently in 新昌 it can be 倷, nǎi)
不 is written 弗^[2]
太 is written 忒^[3]

What’s more, 呢 is written 唻 and 吗 is written 口伐^[4] or just 伐. There’s a whole chapter in 《常州方言》on modal particles though many of the characters used are not otherwise covered by Unicode.
口格 is used for what would be 的 in Mandarin. Thus 有的 is 有口格 and 好的 becomes 好口格. In some cases 嘚 takes the place of 的 as an adjectival marker. It’s been suggested to me that 嘚 is likely a 丹阳 thing, really just meaning it’s not 市中心 Changzhou dialect. Having not been to 丹阳 I can’t really say one way or another. update: A possible answer to that has come up. 家开, pronounced by the ever-helpful 婷婷 as gu kaⁱ where the i is almost not there, is a phrases meaning 回家. However, as she also tells me, it’s really only spoken in the southern parts of Changzhou. So perhaps it’s not about 丹阳 afterall.

There are plenty of times when a character that may no longer be widely used in Mandarin is used for the Wu equivalent, e.g. 姊 for 姐，囥 for 藏 etc., or even multiples replaced by one as with 什么 becoming 嗲 (so 做什么 is 就嗲).

There’s also something going on with tones being represented by different characters. Iit gives 二 being 两, which happens pretty consistently in Changzhou. However it goes on to say that in some cases 二 should be said as 腻 nì, not nī, ní or nǐ.

I must admit this whole character-only thing is far more taxing than I had predicted. This whole project is moving from the realm of practical proficiency to scholarly pursuit one day at a time. I’m making a trip to Wuxi soon at which time I’ll be hitting up the local bookstores in search of a proper text on that dialect. In the meantime I’m still searching the city for a copy of any of 赵元任’s works or anything that may have a transliteration system I can map on to IPA. In the mean time I’ve reached the point where I need to head back to Xinhua where I bought the one I have to re-evaluate the books they otherwise have to see if I can pick anything of greater value out of those, though I’m not holding my breath for anything that comes out of Xinhua.

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1. which is also a transliteration for “Allah” in Mandarin. See the Glossary of Chinese Islamic Terms which I compiled a couple months back.
2. or, occassionally online, 佛. this however is less accurate in both sound and meaning.
3. pronounced as [te] or in Changzhou as [d̥eɪ̯]
4. unable to find a proper character, i’ve resorted to using HTML to make my own.

I had an epiphany. I’ve been using /ʒ/ for a sound in 常州话 that i’m now sure is wrong. It’s been a while since I’ve used IPA this extensively and so I’ve caught a few minor mistakes in my notes.

In the second personal singular pronoun what I’d previously written as [ɲʒɛə] should instead have /ʑ/, making it [ɲʑɛə]. The /ʒ/ doesn’t really work as I think it would be too far back. I’d like to think it’s really neither but instead just an adding of voiced friction as the nasal sound releases. Whoever wrote the article on the Wu language version of Wikipedia (常州言话) uses [ʔɲi] which I don’t buy at all. I asked 3 people today, all from either 钟楼区 or 天宁区, i.e. right downtown, how they said it and then made them give it in a couple sentences. Not a one was lacking the buzz. For two of them the buzz was even more distinct. No distinct glottal stop (ʔ, the stop called for by the apostrophe in Xi’an 西安) either. So if anything I’d have to change it to [ɲʑ̩], which makes my head spin a little to recognise that as a word but then completely sums up the dialect for me in one syllable.

The other epiphany in my household was had by my translator, who tends to be pretty steady with her own transcription abilities, suddenly realised she has an accent like the 乡下人 that deep down she knows she is. It came while watching 生活369 which is all 市中心 accents. That means that [ʔɲi] may be more right if I’m surveying the city center, though he still buzzes. Still not sure on the glottal stop (ʔ) but it seems quite reasonably accurate. As usual time will tell.

This all got me thinking about pinyin. It’s allegedly based on the Beijing pronunciation, and even though I’ve yet to hear a Beijinger sound like that, I get the point. When you’re in a place like China trying to speak Chinese, you figure out pretty quickly that there’re thousands of different ways of saying things when people are speaking Mandarin. “shí sì kuài” becomes “sí sì kuài” and you just need to pay extra attention to the tones or, more often since tones are less stressed as well, you just guess based on the item you want to buy.

Were you to write out any given person’s actual pronunciation using IPA, you’d end up with something far removed from what pinyin represents. But, since it is standardised, that’s fair. It does make me wonder if I should change how I’m transcribing things. One possibility is to just take one of the better known scholars of Wu at their word and adapt what I hear to what they’ve given as the sounds of the language or particular dialect. Something tells me that isn’t really a good idea.

So then the next thought would be to try to log only the most central urban pronunciations, so that everything else would be a variant of that. As you head east you’d hear more Wuxi and west would hear more Southern Mandarin and Gaochun. The variations within any given dialect shift with geography and pockets show greater variation, e.g. Gaochun hua. That would most clearly represent Wuxi as Wuxi and something distinct from Changzhou or Suzhou, which it is. I know that I do not want to get away from IPA as the method of writing. Correcting that is exactly the kind of thing I’m trying to do with a number of my sources, most of which used some sort of pseudo-IPA with alternative characters. This would give me pronunciation of downtown, but then means I may have to abandon a number of the rural samples I’ve already taken. I don’t like that either.

The last option, and the one I’m likely to do since it will be the easiest and the one requiring the least sort of commitment, is to write down each form I hear. If an urban accent says it one way and an eastern rural accent says it another, i just include both with a reference telling which is which. This has it’s own problems but seems to best preserve the information I find.

Or i could just use the substitute characters and cry a lot.