It’s been a long long day. I have precious little time to get everything in order for my next visa before the current one expires. I was under the false impression that my health check would occur in Pudong at 2:00 this afternoon. I only realised it was in fact to happen in Changning, way way west of Pudong. This realisation occurred around 1pm as I arrived at the wrong place. Needless to say, I’ve spent much greater time on public transportation than off it today. Only at the end did I cave and use a taxi for anything other than time estimates.

Before the panic set in, before I even made it to Pudong, I was at 龍之夢. There’s a book store operated by Xinhua but not called Xinhua across Changning Road from the actual mall, within spitting distance of two different Starbuck’s. In the past they’ve had some decent but not great books on Shanghainese, but with what I thought was time to kill, I headed back. Their selection on Shanghainese materials has doubled to a grand total of 4 books, two of which are dictionaries. There were about the same with one major exception. One had IPA transcription next to the characters with tones for each one, and the other had some non-standard and difficult to figure out transliteration system, free of tones. So I bought the first one. At only 38RMB, I think it was well worth it. Here’s the link for the one I skipped.

I’ll get more on the dictionary later. I’d like to touch on the futility of learning Shanghainese for a moment. I had a decently long cab ride back from my health check during which the usual conversation topics were touched on (hey you speak chinese well (I don’t), shanghai is too big (he said), are black people in america decent people, etc.). We got to the topic of language as is the case with most conversations I have these days, and the book was still in my bag so I thought I’d give it a quick try. I showed it to him; he read while driving. He was rather amused and pointed at one entry, pronouncing it clearly in Shanghainese. Except it didn’t match what was written hardly at all. He said 夹 as jia though the book gave kA, the tones being a mismatch as well. The other words in the phrase were close enough, but that one difference is enough to bring things into question at least for me. Not wanting to lose the thread of the conversation, I shrugged it off. Only later did I learn he was from Chongming Dao, which while technically is Shanghai, doesn’t really speak Shanghainese. They speak Chongminghua, which is different enough to be considered a distinctly different dialect by most sources, places closer to the Wu dialects in the Nantong area.

Maybe calling this a point of futility is a bit strong. But it does hurt the motivation a bit when self-described Shanghairen aren’t quite hitting the Shanghaihua target I’d set up (stupidly) in my mind.

Very topical to hit on the black thing, I thought. Maybe he’s a reality t.v. fan.

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.