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.

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 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).

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

Anyway, we were talking about the Expo (big surprise there) and he mentioned this book the drivers were given in order to learn some English. He practiced a few phrases on me and I gave him a couple more to work on. The odd thing was this book, which unfortunately he didn’t have with him, was written in Shanghainese. Really, I asked. Yep. All in Shanghainese in order to teach the drivers English. I didn’t think to ask him how exactly it was written, since it seems if it were going to use characters, then the choice of Wu certainly wouldn’t have been one for the sake of literacy. I mean, characters are characters. And I don’t think he was putting me on. Time didn’t permit me pushing the issue, so I had to get out with many an unanswered question. It’s something to bring up the next time I get in a taxi.

I’d love to get my hands on the booklet. More of a pamphlet really, as he described it. Has anyone heard of this?

It brings a tear to my eye.

So here you go, your filthy filthy outsiders with your Canadian salaries or Erhuayin. Either way, this week out theme is you⁑.

外地人　ŋɑ²² di⁵⁵ ɲin²¹
　　　　nga di nyin
外国人　ŋɑ²² koʔ⁵⁵ ɲin²¹
　　　　nga kok nyin
乡下人　ɕiã⁵⁵ ɦo³³ ɲin²¹
　　　　xia hou nyin

外头人　ŋɑ²² dɤ⁵⁵ ɲin²¹
　　　　nga de nyin

本地人　pən³³ ti⁵⁵ ɲin²¹⁂
　　　　ben di nyin

#xingqihu
- – -
* Hēllǒ!
⁑ and me too, obviously.
⁂ Re 地 as [ti] or [di], it’s hard to know if this is an error in transcription consistency or if there’s some sort of voicing sandhi going on. Either way I’ve left it as the difference between an un-aspirated /t/ and /d/ are minimal and not really worth crying over.

Aww yeah. The Lion King in Shanghainese. Not the whole film, of course, but you get the idea.

I gotta say I’m a little sad that Scar sounds nothing like Jeremy Irons.

Update: Just found Aladdin, or at least 16 minutes of Aladdin. They even do one of the songs. Have a look.

　”有点象 宁波话”

and

　”她的发音不标准”.

What’s the deal here? That’s a rhetorical question as I’ve lived here long enough to know exactly what they perceive the deal to be. I just don’t buy that it’s real.

Magnus of mandmx.com mentioned this in an interview we did here a while back. To quote:

Back to Youku. The videos are called 学说上海话. It stands to reason that anyone having grown up speaking 吴语 somewhere within the municipality could rightly be called a speaker of Shanghainese. What’s the difference if they’re from Baoshan or Jiabei or Minhang? Well, maybe not Minhang. The part that gets me is when people say things like “This isn’t standard pronunciation” in the comments.

Since when has Shanghainese been standardised?

As someone trying to learn Shanghainese, are you better off learning a ‘nonstandard’ “sounds like Ningbohua” pronunciation, or walking around saying it with a thick Texas drawl? Damned if you do etc.

This is one of three recordings I got in the 10 minutes I had to wait to add money to my transit card as I was on my way to Jing’an this morning. The shrill voice is that of one trapped behind glass while the other belongs to a woman buying a plethora of transit cards.

First the vocabulary:
　红　　ɦoŋ / hong
　黄　　uã / whang
　一百　iɪʔ pɑʔ / yik bak
　两百　liã pɑʔ / liang bak

Tones are being ignored because of sandhi. I wouldn’t be able to give you standard numbers, and I’m not going to figure out what they should be after the sandhi is applied, because well, that would take forever.

You’ll hear her quietly say “一起七” around 0:22, 七 sounding a bit like 切. Basically, she came with 700RMB and wanted to get a bunch of red (actually rather dark pink) cards and one yellow card, the yellow card having only 100RMB on it.

In case you’re dying to know, here are some more colours in case you yourself would like colour-coded transit cards..
　白　baʔ / bhak
　黑　həʔ / hak
　绿　lɔʔ / lok
　青　ʨʰin / qin
　蓝　lɛ / le

edit: Janky pseudo-pinyin just added. remember the bh marks a voiced b as in English (not to be confused with Mandarin’s unvoiced b) and a k at the end marks a glottal stop, i.e. like holding your breath a slight bit at the end of the syllable. And “whang” isn’t at all what you’d think it’d be. more like “wa” with a nasal [a], no real “ng” or “h” to speak of.