in a post dating, well, three hours ago, syz over at beijing sounds left a comment on the distinction of wu as a language vs a dialect of some mandarin based chinese language. he said essentially that his “doubt expresses itself in the form of: ‘if one were just to complete the sound mapping would Wu and Mandarin then become mutually intelligible?’” it’s a question i’ve asked myself a number of times since first hearing about wu. after writing a few paragraphs in the comments of that post i decided it’d be better off as its own post.

i’m in the very very early stages of compiling just such a sound mapping. i don’t expect it to be too complete, for a number of reasons, but more just a basic guide/crash course in the local wu dialect. the biggest reason for it’s inevitable incompleteness (can a lack of something be inevitable?) is that i think there is not really a 1 to 1 correlation between words in wu and their mandarin counterparts. 劳 láo in changzhou is lào, however 落 which has the same sound in mandarin becomes ló? with the o being the same backwards-c vowel as in mandarin 我 wǒ and the ? marking a glottal stop which blogger ate. two words that are the same pronunciation in mandarin differ beyond just the tone in changzhou wu. this means you would not be able to just say “lao¹ is always lo?, meaning that even with an understanding of most of the common mappings, a lot of things would still be left out.

as for mutual intelligibility, i’m not sure it’d be there even if you could map the sound change from one to another. there are a number of lexical changes to deal with as well. the first i’d ever learned was 左拐 zuǒguǎi, turn left, being something like duzwei in shanghainese. zwei is cognate with guǎi and can be accounted for by a sound shift. what i typed as du would be cognate with 大 dà, big. big turn is left, small turn is right. in changzhou, the left and right are kept in favour of big and small, but guǎi is once again more like zwei. another instance would be thirsty, 渴 kě in mandarin, becomes 口干 kougan in changzhouhua. kǒu in chinese in ‘mouth’ while gān is dry or empty. this could also be explained as slang or a regional difference like people in michigan saying ‘pop’ for soda, but i think it’s not that simple. there are plenty of things that have come into changzhou wu from mandarin based on tv and pop culture, but then there’s plenty that has little relation.

for example if the weather suddenly becomes cold, a mandarin speaker would say
冷空气来 lěng kōng qì lái, basically ‘cold weather approaches’

however in changzhou you would hear
起冷星 qe lang xin

in this case qe is the soft q quality of mandarin followed by the i sound found in mandarin’s si. i’ve given that with the characters with which it’d be written, and so we could see some shared concepts. 起 would be ‘become’, 冷 is ‘cold’ and 星 is ’star’, which in this case would be the sky or atmosphere. note the vowel change in lěng as well.

i studied latin in high school and italian in college in addition to growing up in america. so even though i’ve never studied spanish, i can read a spanish language newspaper and get the general idea of a spanish language movie. but any serious attempt on my part to make an understandable sentence in spanish beyond ‘me llamo es brian’. further no one would argue that italian and spanish are the same language. perhaps portuguese is a better example.

during college i spent about two years in a half-assed attempt to learn portuguese at least to the point of being able to have a conversation with the few brasilians i knew at the time. i was focused on the soft syrup that is the carioca dialect, but was also trying to learn a standard portugal pronunciation and the few grammatical differences. it took a while to learn the sounds, and i was often told i was speaking with an italian accent and intonation. there were some things i never was able to manage like nasalisation of vowels not otherwise connected to a nasal consonant (não was always ‘now’ when coming from my mouth). i have the same problem in changzhouhua where many many vowels suffer (yes, suffer) from nasalisation. remember now, portuguese is not spanish. my friend from rio who had never taken a day of spanish classes tested into an advanced level in college based mostly on cognates and share heritage. she was able to understand pretty much anything said in spanish but could not speak hardly more than a handful of phrases. yet mutual friends from nearby spanish speaking countries couldn’t understand a word of her portuguese. i bring this all up because that’s where i see the relationship between mandarin and wu. i guess in this example cantonese would be romanian.

as we all know there is no actual point where a dialect is different enough to suddenly be a language, so maybe this post is pretty pointless. and there are plenty of people who know more about this than i do, but since i don’t know them and if you’re reading this blog i’d assume you don’t either, i’m left to wonder this stuff on my own, quietly prodded along at times by syz and the rest of the commenters. as i get more instances of mostly consistent sound changes i’ll document it here. at the very least it should help me to understand a bit more of what i hear.

on a final note, i just poached the wuxi hua wikipedia page into one for changzhou hua that was previously lacking. there’s a page for it on the chinese wikipedia that gives a dozen more examples of changzhou hua, however almost all of them need the sound mappings to really resemble what’s really said. my favourite has got to be what they wrote as 或呐哒 which actually sounds more like wea ne da, “very filthy”.

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¹it’s worth mentioning that i’ve heard 老外 lǎowài as louwēi but i’ve also been told that may be a northern jiangsu thing and not actually wu. not sure if this is true but i do hear louwēi all the freaking time here.