YR Chao (赵元任) wrote a book called 《北京,苏州,常州语助词的研究》 back in 1926 that i was hoping would have notes on phonemes of the changzhou dialect. unfortunately i’m unable to find a viewable version online. i was looking because i’m rather dissatisfied with the transcriptions of other tables (namely from “Aspects of Chinese Sociolinguistics”, published in 1976) of his i’ve recently made, converting his phonetic system to ipa. i’m ok with the initials, but the finals and actually just a better set of what the vowels are are what i’m really looking for.

here’s my version of his initials:

while looking for 《北京,苏州,常州语助词的研究》 or even just snippets of it, i came upon a forum post directed toward non-changzhou, non-wu chinese speakers. it gives a number of examples of how the dialect sounds, though limited to a pinyin transcription with characters that have been assigned to represent the sounds for non-IPA readers. some of the examples are pretty good though. 那个becomes 够个, gou ge, which really threw me off when i first got here. i’d constantly hear what sounded to me like [go.gə.li]. now i know. consistent with that, 这个 is given as 噶个, [ga.gə]. 我不知道 would be 偶佛小则列 using the characters, but 偶 really should be read /ŋəu/, 佛 /fə̆/ and 列 isn’t said when i hear the phrase. so wǒ bù zhīdào is [ŋəu fə̆ ɕi̯ɑʊ̯ z̥ɛˑ]

vowels, or rather the transcription of vowels, have been giving me some trouble. 《江苏省和上海市方言概况》, written in 1960 gives something like the folowing as all possible vowels in changzhou hua:

/ɑ/ /ɐ/ /ɔ/ /o/ /æ/ /ə/ /ɥ/ /ɤɯ/ /e/ /l/ /i/ /u/ /y/

however you’ll notice /l/ which actually isn’t l but something that looks somewhat like l but that i couldn’t otherwise identify. /y/ was written not in IPA but as ü which i’ve changed since ü is in fact /y/ in chinese. the author also gave a few other sounds in other wu dialects using unconventional symbols. and when i say i couldn’t find it, i mean i then asked someone with a PhD in linguistics and they couldn’t find it either.

i’m heading to the village on sunday and will be offline for the week. in the meantime i’m downloading relevant parts of texts on wu and, if available, changzhou wu. the village is on the way to wuxi so it’s not quite the downtown 话 but so be it. i’m particularly hoping to record the hell out of some conversations so i have something to listen to ad nauseum without asking my few local friends to repeat the same thing to the point that they’re ready to disown me and send me packing back to nanjing.

update:
i realised i still had Praat installed so i fed it 我不知道 [ŋəu fə̆ ɕi̯ɑʊ̯ z̥ɛˑ] from a native speaker to see what sort of tone contour it’d give me. after some tinkering of the display, here are the results.


click the image to be redirected to a larger size hosted on flickr. blogger doesn’t like images as big as 700 pixels, apparently regardless of the actual file size.

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note: it was really late when i started this, despite finishing it in the morning