This is probably the first and last time I throw a full out Mandarin recording up here. It’s more for the accent anyway.

I spent the last year in Changzhou, a part of Jiangsu that In many cases hasn’t been fully penetrated by Mandarin. Despite it being 2009, there are a number of encounters one would have in that city and I’m sure many cities like it where Mandarin is of little use. This is especially true of conversations with the elderly, but much to my surprise, not just with the elderly. I’ve had more than one conversation where Wu was translated to Mandarin for me while my responses in Mandarin were left as is, i.e. the conversation was only half-translated. It’s forced my own speech into the softened realm of h-dropping, e.g. saying things like “Sanghai”, and probably ruined me forever regarding getting the hang of the Beijing dialect. But there are still plenty of times when the local accent still throws me off, as in the first recording below.

This is from a conversation that took place on the way to a university area in Shanghai. The clips have been edited, mostly to remove myself, so don’t expect the flow to be what it really would be. For anyone living in Shanghai, it will be immediately familiar. This is more for those outside of Jiangnan.

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　SJ:
　你在学校里教书的？
　nǐ zài xúexiào lǐ jiàoshū de?
　Are you a teacher at that school?

　Me:
　hmm?

　SJ:
　教书的…　这…　老书的？
　jiàoshū de… zhè… lǎoshī de?
　A teacher, er, do you teach?

I was baffled for a moment by the “jiao su de”. The exaggerated tones on lǎoshī were clearly an attempt to help me. I don’t know if this points to an awareness on his part of how he sounds or if he just thought I had embarrassingly poor Chinese. Both could be true.

For comparison, 老师 in Shanghainese is [lɔ²²sẓ⁴⁴]^† and 教师 is [ʨiɔ³³sẓ⁴⁴]. For the first one, think something 我 with an L in place of the W followed by 四 but all with different tones. Again this is Mandarin and he’s obviously not doing that. I think Jason nailed it. I was thinking it was 教师 but 教书 makes all the difference in the world.

The longer clip below is of less relevance to the Shanghai accent, but I might as well include it. I had said something about how students here are required to study English from an early age but in America we don’t really have it the same way.

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　SJ:
　现在提倡。
　xiànzài tíchàng.
　Now the government requires^‡ it.

　现我的儿子，这么小，八岁，学英语。
　wǒ de èrzi, zěnme xiǎo, bāsùi, xúe yīngyǔ.
　My son is, how old, 8 years old and he’s studying English.

　他们学英语对吧。
　tāmén xúe yīngyǔ dùiba.
　So they study English, right.

　和现在英语成通用语了呀，
　he xiànzài yīngyǔ chéng tōngyòng yǔ le ya,
　And now English has already become a common language.

　没办法。
　méi bànfǎ.
　So be it.

For the record I’m not a total jerk and was in fact responding to him and taking part in the conversation. I just don’t need to subject you to my crappy Mandarin so it’s been removed.

Apologies for the quality, as usual. It would have been awkward to attach my external microphone mid-conversation, again as usual. There were a few words that I couldn’t make sense of when I came back to the recording. Suggestions are welcome.

- – -
† Alternatively transcribed as [lɔ22sɿ44] and [ʨiɔ33sɿ44] though it’s non-standard IPA
‡ Possibly should be ‘advocates’, but in truth it’s much more a requirement

The following was previously posted on my personal blog on the 13th of January, 10 days before the launch of this site. I will be re-posting another from that site in the following two weeks. The original post was titled “Wu & Mandarin”. I have updated formatting for this blog and removed a paragraph of superfluous examples.

- – -

In a previous post on xiaoerjing, syz over at Beijing Sounds left a comment on the distinction of Wu as a language vs a dialect of Mandarin Chinese. He said essentially that his “doubt expresses itself in the form of: ‘if one were just to complete the sound mapping would Wu and Mandarin then become mutually intelligible?’” It’s a question i’ve asked myself a number of times since first hearing about Wu. After writing a few paragraphs in the comments of that post I decided it’d be better off as its own.

I’m in the very very early stages of compiling just such a sound mapping. I don’t expect it to be too complete, for a number of reasons. Instead I see it more as a basic guide/crash course in the local dialect. The biggest reason for it’s inevitable incompleteness (can a lack of something be inevitable?) is that there is not really a 1 to 1 correlation between words in Wu and their mandarin counterparts. 劳 láo in changzhou is lào, however 落 which in Mandarin is also láo becomes lɔʔ. Two words that are the same pronunciation in Mandarin differ beyond just the tone in the Changzhou dialect of Wu. This means you would not be able to just say “lao^† is always lɔʔ, meaning that even with an understanding of most of the common mappings, a lot of things would still be left out.

As for mutual intelligibility, I’m not sure it’d be there even if you could map the sound change from one to another. There are a number of lexical changes to deal with as well. the first i’d ever learned was 左拐 zuǒguǎi, turn left, being something like duzwei in shanghainese. Zwei is cognate with guǎi and can be conceived through said mapping. Meanwhile du would be cognate with 大 dà. Big turn is left, small turn is right. Another instance would be thirsty, 渴 kě or 口渴 in Mandarin, becomes 口干 kougan in Changzhou.

Another example: If the weather suddenly becomes cold, a Mandarin speaker may say
冷空气来 lěng kōng qì lái, i.e. ‘cold weather approaches’

However in Changzhou you would hear
起冷星 qe lang xin

In this case qe is the soft q quality of mandarin followed by the z̩ sound written as i in 四.

I studied Latin in high school and Italian in college, in addition to growing up in a part of America with a fair number of Spanish speakers. So even though I’ve never studied spanish, I can read a Spanish language newspaper and get more than just the general idea. But any serious attempt on my part to make an understandable sentence in Spanish would be met with derisive laughter. No one would argue that Italian and Spanish are the same language.

On a final note, I just poached the Wuxi hua Wikipedia page into one for Changzhou hua that was previously lacking. There’s a page for it on the Chinese Wikipedia that gives a dozen more examples of Changzhou hua, however almost all of them require the previously mentioned sound mappings to really resemble what’s said. My favourite has got to be what they wrote as 或呐哒 which sounds a bit like wei ne da, “very filthy”.

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^†It seems worth mentioning that I’ve heard 老外 lǎowài as louwēi but i’ve also been told that it’s a Northern Jiangsu* thing and not actually Wu influenced at all. Not sure if this is true but I do hear it all the freaking time here.
^*confirmed

In a comment on the previously mentioned LanguageLog post, commenter Li Yu drops a link for the Wu Association (吴语协会). It’s a great resource and one I linked to for Chinese language pages on Wu. What I didn’t see before now was their downloadable Shanghainese dictionary. It’s available as a PDF, scanned from a text published by Jiaotong University in Shanghai. You can find it by clicking the link above and going to the download center (下载中心) or just get it directly here.

Another gem mentioned by Li Yu is the rather good attempt to come up with a uniform Romanization that would work for all Wu dialects. Each dialect page ends with the poem 咏鹅, “Goose Goose Goose”, by Luo Binwang (骆宾王). Figuring that since I have a native speaker handy, I decided to make a couple quick recordings of the poem. Here’s the Mandarin version:

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鹅鹅鹅，
   É é é,
曲项向天歌。
   Qū Xiàng xiàng tiān gē.
白毛浮绿水，
   Bái Máofú lǜ shuǐ,
红掌拨清波。
   Hóng zhǎng bō qīng bō.

Here is the Changzhou dialect version with transliteration provided by the Wu Association page:

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鹅鹅鹅，
   Ngou ngou ngou,
曲项向天歌。
   Chioh-ghan shian thie kou,
白毛浮绿水，
   Boh-mau vei loh-su,
红掌拨清波。
   Ghon-tsan peh tshin-pou.

I should mention that the speaker had some problems with how a couple things were transcribed, for example 歌 which has been written “kou” but she believes ought to be “gou”. For the record, she’s not from downtown but rather a suburb of a suburb (Wujin) and has a tiny but noticeable difference in her pronunciation. That said, I think she may be right.

I heard about an interesting hiring practice today. Apparently it’s somewhat well known by the locals. Most fast-food places, specifically McDonald’s, KFC and Pizza Hut, will not hire people who are not from the immediate area. The motivation seems to be largely based on mutual understanding.

Today I was talking to somone, we’ll call her Rachel, who’s mother is from Changzhou but married someone from Wuxi, the next city/county over. As such Rachel was born and raised in Wuxi, but now studies and lives in Changzhou. She is equally fluent in both dialects and isn’t detectable as an outsider when talking to people here in Changzhou. But, as the story goes, her national i.d. is marked with Wuxi, and so unless she wants to go through a long process (which if I understood correctly, involves blood draws and DNA testing), she will always be local only to Wuxi.

While in college, she applied to work at one of the many fast-food places downtown. She was told the Wuxi deal wasn’t really a deal at all since she could converse fluently like a native of Changzhou. Two days of flipping burgers later, she was let go. Another manager found out about the Scarlet 夕.

But, pretty much anyone who would go to McDonald’s speaks Mandarin, I though, and they certainly don’t do this sort of thing in the more typical restaurants. Unless a quite elderly grandmother decides to treat her grandson to a nice cold 新地, it seems like this would never really be a problem. And, as any foreigner in China knows, picture menus abound.

I’m pretty tempted to ask about this next time I’m at Starbucks to see if the same applies. I know they’re required to have some basic level of English in order to work there, which makes a bit of sense given the kinds of people I usually see ordering a [insert Starbucks joke drink here].

I then wonder where the line is drawn. I’d assume Wujin is close enough, but I’m not sure about Jintan and Liyang unless it’s based solely on the card.