As mentioned in the last post, I bought a Shanghainese dictionary. It’s pretty much awesome.

The entries seem to be evenly split between having simply the IPA transcription in the case of words or phrases that are the same as in MSM (Modern Standard Mandarin), and those entries which include explanations. Below are examples of each kind as they appear in the book itself.

早饭 tsɔ33vᴇ44

… meaning “breakfast” and …

夹生饭 kᴀ33sã55vᴇ21 （名）煮成的半生半熟的饭。

… which is a rice dish of which half the components are cooked and half are raw. My assumption is that 夹生饭 (MSM: jiā shēng fàn) is a fairly Shanghainese food that hasn’t gained wide popularity outside the delta. But I digress. My Chongming Dao driver certainly knew it well enough. This is also the 夹 entry I mentioned in the last post for which the driver gave a distinctly different pronunciation. But again, I digress.

Another nice feature of the dictionary is the category-based organisation. WIthin each category the order breaks down pretty immediately, for example the “教” section starting with “文化” followed by “新闻” and soon progressing into “笔画” and “书”.

Speaking of 笔画, the index at the end is done in the typical Chinese dictionary searching by radical, but then for each radical it’s broken down not by number of additional strokes as is usually the case, but by the strokes themselves as though you were typing them using the wubi input on your phone. It’s not something I’ve seen before and will take a little while to get used to.

Perhaps the best thing of all is that tones are dealt with in a manner that’s both comprehensive and practical. When the sandhi changes the tone, it’s reflected in the entry, for example in the two entries above where 饭 is first rendered as vᴇ44 and then as vᴇ21. There’s a sandhi chart at the end of the book which explains the rules, but the work is mostly done for you in the way each entry is given.

There’s also a good collection of 成语 at the end. Not a master of chengyu myself, I can’t say if any of them are Shanghai-specific or if they’re just renderings of common phrases. Either way it’s appreciated. The only drawback, if it is a drawback, is that you have to understand enough Mandarin to read the definitions. I don’t personally have much of a problem using a dictionary in order to read a dictionary, especially since it probably helps solidify some of the Mandarin.

In the end I wouldn’t recommend the book for someone looking to learn Wu without learning Mandarin, if there is anyone with such an impractical esoteric approach to life. Though if there is, email me. We should hang out. Otherwise, I’d say this should be a required text for anyone learning Shanghainese.

A quick note on the transcriptions above: The system being used is not standard IPA but rather includes a number of obsolete symbols. “ᴇ” should be rendered as “ɛ” in the current standard and “ᴀ” as “ɑ”. These variations seem to be pretty common in Chinese linguistic words, among a others. The most common one and the only one I think really should have really been left alone is “ɿ” which is now instead “ẓ”, making 子 rendered as “zẓ” whereas in older texts you’ll find “zɿ”, something I find much more intuitive and visually pleasing.

Well I never made it to America. My dog got sick and so I’ve spent the last three weeks making vet trips and injecting interferon. Had I gone I would have picked up my digital dictaphone so that I could do some quick guerilla recordings as I travel around. A Danyang trip is in the works as the first trip into the surrounding villages. I chose Danyang first because they’re famous for glasses and I could stand to get a couple more pair.

So while I haven’t yet been out recording beyond the confines of Changzhou proper, I have made a few more bookstore trips. Xinhua is doing right by me lately. This time I managed to find a copy of 《常州闲话》by Fan Yanpei (范炎培). There are two big plusses here. First, chapters are arranged by single characters or character pairs e.g. one on 老 and one on 爿, going into pronunciation and use of each. Some are more along the lines of 成语, consisting of four or six characters. The second big reason I grabbed this particular book is in the end it has a few pages of characters with not only the proper IPA transcription for Changzhou dialect but also tones. And not just tones in the sense of first, second etc., but marked as “Yang Ping” or “Yin Ru”, following the system of tones used in classical Chinese and most Wu dialects. I finally have some sort of record of what tones different words ought to be.

At first the tone markers confused me. I wasn’t really sure what I was looking at. Yin Ping is written as U rotated 90° clockwise while Yang Qu is written IU rotated 90° counter-/anti-clockwise. There are glyphs set up in Unicode to cover the eight tone markers, but I’d be surprised if a great many fonts included support. Here’s a quick list of the glyph with their corresponding tone. The list is in Helvetica or Lucida Sans Unicode with the glyph on the left followed by the name.

꜀ yin ping
꜁ yang ping
꜂ yin shang
꜃ yang shang
꜄ yin qu
꜅ yang qu
꜆ yin ru
꜇ yang ru

In the book it gives something like this:
埲 [꜁boŋ]: 灰尘扬起。
忒 [t'ɤʔ꜆]: 太。脱音。
毻 [t'ɤɯ꜄]: 毛，皮等脱落，如毻毛。音通话〝透〞音。

Yang Ping, as in 埲, is a low rising tone. Yin Ru, as in 忒, is a short high tone. Yin Qu, 毻, is a dipping tone similar to the third tone in Mandarin but starting higher and ending lower. You can see how the other of 7 of the 8 used in Changzhou dialect would work out in terms of the tone contour over at the Changzhou dialect wikipedia entry. I transcribed the table on the wiki entry from a book by YR Chao, in case you’re hesitant to trust things wiki without knowing the source.

Over lunch with John from Sinosplice/ChinesePod a few days ago he mentioned my apparent love of phonetics and transcription. I’d not thought about it much before then but thinking about it now I’d say the interest is in being able to accurately write something beyond meaning. One of the things that’s bothered me most as I try to sort out Wu dialects is an inconsistency from one area to the very near next. This is never more obvious than when trying to write things down. I don’t have a dictaphone so I must write things down. That’s what I’m telling myself anyway. In truth I’m just a big nerd.

The book cost 30RMB and is published by Zhuhai Publishing Company, 珠海出版社. It’s readily available at the Changzhou Xinhuas but probably not anywhere else. I’m really hoping to find similar books in the other cities in the area as I begin to travel around.

Expect more recordings soon.

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.