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.

I couldn’t resist going back to the Moka Garden Embroidery Mission documents. There’s just too much there to be limited to a couple posts.

In addition to the book of short stories, they also recorded a staple of missionary linguistics, the Lord’s Prayer. The following is from Inductive Lessons in Soochow Phonetics.

Some of the zhuyin glyphs used to represent sounds in Suzhou dialect are not standard zhuyin. If I’ve read correctly, they were created in their final form by the missionaries themselves, based of course on other glyphs or characters. Since these aren’t standard and thus not covered by Unicode, I’ve had to do some borrowing. The following characters are used in the Moka Mission texts, here borrowed from Mandarin hanzi and Japanese katakana. Romanization is from the Moka publications.

　卄 – oong　ノ – eh　ウ – ien　干 – oen [øn]　丄 – aung　ト – auh
　ム – z　广 – ny [ɲ]　乙 – ah　兀 – ng [ŋ]　万 – v　ナ – o　久 – eh

As far as the hanzi in the prayer goes, you may have noticed it’s also not standard. The text is in traditional characters, as would be expected for 1920. However there are a fair number of occurrences of 个. Here it’s been re-appropriated standing in for 得 and 的, both being pronounced “ge” in most Wu dialects.

The text of the prayer transliterated using the Moka Mission’s system is as follows:

Those familiar with early Romanisation of Chinese will be able to muck through it fairly effectively. To get an idea of more modern language since the Lord’s Prayer is hardly the typical conversation, the following is from the book of short stories published by the mission. It’s the first sentence of the first story.

The second is from the Wu Association online mini dictionary which uses another non-standard system of transcription but one which matches the Moka system well enough. The vowel in “taung” ought to match the one in the “daon” on the modern Suzhou dialect version, both corresponding to 糖.

Forgive my indulgences. The following is from the preface to Inductive Lessons in Suzhou Dialect. After that, proof that you can learn an entirely unfamiliar writing system in the course of a day.

There’s an additional note, dated October 1, 1920, stating that some changes have been made for the publication but that the content has otherwise been used to successfully teach hundreds to read. My assumption then is along the lines of “how hard can it be?”. As such I’ve begun transcribing and ultimately translating a section of one of the books.

To the point. The following is a transcription from zhuyin of the cover and first story from Simple Stories told in Soochow Phonetics. Footnotes are my understanding of some of the phrases. Hyphens exist in the original and have been left in place.

Time permitting, I’ll subject this to a couple hours with a good Suzhouhua dictionary and see if I can’t make sense of it all. The biggest problem at the moment is not knowing exactly what sounds are being attempted to transcribe with the Romanization system, as it seems to be neither Legge nor Wade-Giles.

I’m working on the translation or at the very least a transcription to something more representative of the appropriate sounds.

Anyone wanting to take a stab at this, leave your interpretations in the comments below.

Hat-tip to @kmlawson who inadvertently directed me to the National Library of Australia’s digital collections. I did a quick search for “Soochow” and got two hits:

Inductive Lessons in Soochow Phonetics (also 注音字母入門 or ㄗㄧㄣㄙ̀ㄇㄨㄙ̀ノㄇㄣ) by Frances Burkhead, published in Suzhou in 1920, and Simple Stories told in Soochow Phonetics (also 注音字母故事 or ㄗㄧㄣㄙ̀ㄇㄨㄍㄨㄙ̀) translated by Miss Wo Iung-Tuh.

Those of you able to make heads or tails of zhuyin fuhao might notice a few inconsistencies. The books, entirely 蘇州話, are written in a modified form of the zhuyin pinyin. For example ㄙ̀ and ノ, the second of which here I’m borrowing from katakana and marks Wade-Gilesesque “eh”. The example given for ノ is 盦 but it’s small and the jpeg compression is wreaking havoc on the legibility so I may be wrong.

The rest of the chart is as follows. I started making it all in text, but it was taking too long. When I finish it I’ll replace the image.

The footnote on the bottom states that Suzhou dialect doesn’t use those particular sounds. The table is otherwise labeled as sounds from “蘇滬”, Suzhou and Shanghai. The original image can be seen by clicking through the link in the first paragraph.

I knew zhuyin was used to write languages beyond Mandarin, having modified letters to cover Hakka and Southern Min. I had not ever heard of it being used for Wu.

One of the books, and based on the typeface and whatnot, probably the other as well, was published by the Moka Garden Embroidery Mission in Suzhou. The Embroidery Mission was originally called the Industrial School of Soochow and was opened sometime after 1901 by a missionary named Virginia Atkinson, a Methodist from Alabama. According to the book Taking Christianity to China*, one of the triumphs of the mission was alleviating the unemployment in Suzhou. Workers were paid $7.50 a month and worked from 8:30 to 17:00. Beyond affecting unemployment, it created “evangelistic opportunities for Methodist missionaries”. It stands to reason that included combating illiteracy**.

If you click through to the library site and can read zhuyin, be sure to check out the rubi for the books’ titles, the only thing otherwise in 漢字.

Thanks to @Tortue for his willingness to help decode.

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* page 166 from the Google Books edition.
** The same group of missionaries were also active in Changzhou and Shanghai, and as we know, no one works dialects and under-appreciated languages like the missionaries.
edit: I’ve removed the sample image. It wasn’t loading right and was causing a number of alignment problems on the main page.