I had heard rumours…

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.

If you head over to the Wikipedia page for Ningbo dialect, you’ll notice the image is the first page of Genesis, written in colloquial Ningbo dialect from a text compiled by missionaries a century ago.

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.

The following is a page from “A Syllabic DIctionary of the Chinese Language; Arranged According to the Wu-Fang Yuen Yin, with the Pronunciation of the Characters as Heard in Peking, Canton, Amoy, and Shanghai”. Apologies for illegibility. That’s just how it is in my copy.

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).

Published by 上海大学出版社, written by Yuàn Hénghuī 院恒辉 and coming with yet another diminutive audio CD which can’t be played on my slot-loading CD drive, “自学上海话” is a little red book of 184 pages long. I picked it up at the bookstore across the street from Cloud Nine mall. I figured my curiosity was worth 15元.

pros:
- close to standard use of IPA in the beginning pages¹
- detailed info on the tones and basics of tone sandhi
- useful phrases
- tones, thank God.

cons:
- abandonment of IPA after the introduction in favour of yet another janky pinyin system.

The abandonment of IPA is such a grave offence here simply for with that which it has been replaced. Their pinyin needs some explanation. I can’t really type it out here in Unicode with any hope that it will show up even close to correctly on other systems, so instead visualise a series of dots and carons below some of the syllables. Bilabial plosives are written as b or p, but then since Shanghainese has voiced (e.g. [b]) as well as voiceless un-aspirated (e.g. [p]) initials in addition to the voiceless aspirated initials (e.g. [pʰ]), distinction must be made. So [pʰ] is written p, [p] as b as in pinyin, and [b] as b but with a black dot below the letter/character.

Open dots (e.g. 。) are drawn below words/characters that end in a glottal stop [ʔ], though this is redundant since they’re also written with a final -k, much like you see in Cantonese.

Finally a caron appears below two characters that are to be read as one with heavy elision. One of the first instances of this is 好 which is written here as 合噢, linked with a caron below. That 合噢 is their glyphic interpretation of [hɔ].².

The audio content on the CD is still unknown as I’ve packed away my one external CD drive and can’t quite remember where it’s ended up. When I can find it, I’ll post a clip.

Verdict:
Bear in mind it’s Mandarin only, in case the title hadn’t made that clear, so if you’re not comfortable with characters you may want to skip it. Otherwise if you’re trying to learn Shanghainese anyway and already have a handful of books, what’s 15 kuai to you? At the very least it offers a few different sentence patterns than books you may already own.

- – -
1. The book includes ɿ which I can let slide, but also includes E and A, both of which are unforgivable in 2009 when it was published.
2. The other common example of this in other books is [ŋu] 我 written as linked 嗯无