User talk:Wuuster

Response
I'd say almost, but not all the time. For the most part, most Northern Wu dialects are mutually intelligible to the point until there are some slight pronunciation issues and significant vocabulary differences. So Written Wu across Wu dialects would be quite similar to one another, but not identical. So they'd be almost the same and pretty much mutually intelligible, though there are some cases of false friends and false cognates between Taihu Wu dialects. As to your second question, I think I've answered it already, but not exactly. Not all Wu Chinese dialects use 阿拉, even some suburban parts of Shanghai use 我伲 ngu nyi, which is similar to some Suzhou dialects that use 我喱 or 我俚 ngu li. Or look at the case between Mandarin 你們 and Shanghainese 㑚 na, which is actually a reduction from 爾拉 n la. Other Wu dialects, for example, some Ningbo dialects, use 爾嗰 n ko. I can't vouch for 曉得 though. I honestly don't know much about other Taihu Wu variants aside from a few instances of other dialects (through research) as the only language that I grew up with was Shanghainese with some Ningbo/Zhoushan accent and English (and a little Mandarin). In short, I can understand other written non-Shanghai Wu Chinese, though it does take some time (longer if it's simplified). Much easier if it's similar to Ningbo dialect or Suzhou dialect. And very, very few people (usually scholars) can actually read and write orthodox Wu Chinese. Bloodmerchant (talk) 17:00, 18 March 2011 (UTC)

Response -1
>Can't a Mandarin speaker with a good grasp of Wenyanwen figure out corresponding characters in a wu dialect easily if he/she hears wu spoken out loud and knows the meaning?

No, unless if he has prior experience around Wu speakers and is somewhat proficient in it. I mean, phonetically, Wu and Mandarin are quite different from one another and there's also bound to be a lot of lexical difference. I mean, a Mandarin speaker can find cognates in Written Wu, but he could also find false friends or false cognates.

>Aren't southern dialects like wu closer to wenyanwen than mandarin, so a high corresnpondence should exist between written wu and wenyanwen.

Well, sort of. Southern dialects are closer to each other in terms of vocabulary than to wenyanwen. I honestly don't know the answer to it, because even if you do know both Wu and wenyanwen, there are still some irregularities. A lot of Wu vocabulary and that of other southern chinese dialects are derived from wenyanwen, but they aren't used in wenyanwen. Some of them have found its way into literature, but they usually are only used to write Wu Chinese literature, to my knowledge.

>I'm descended from one of the Ningbo families who lived in Shanghai, I know almost zero Shanghainese, most of my knowledge of wu is ningbo

My father's side of the family is almost entirely from the Ningbo area, more specifically, from Dinghai district (定海區) on Zhoushan Island (舟山). Maternal side is half native Shanghainese and half Ningbonese. I don't know much about Ningbo dialect other than some pronunciations and a slight accent that I use in Shanghainese. Ningbo dialect use in my family is literally extinct, because my parents don't speak it and they can't understand Ningbo dialect, just some words.

> ''And by the way I think romanzation is pretty usless, since there appears to be an extended set of bopomofo here- Zhuyin#Other_languages, some of which can easily represent Wu sounds not found in Mandarin, like ㄪ for v and ㄫ for an "ng" initial. the other extended ones like ㆯ and ㆢ may be useful too.''

I haven't used Zhuyin Fuhao in more than ten years, and that was when I was learning 國語. And I've never seen most of those symbols for extended Zhuyin, and many of them can be useful in Wu (ㆩ ㆬ ㆭ ㆷ ㆠ ㆡ ㆣ ㆢ ㆤ ㆦ), and there are much more different sounds in Wu than the ones listed in extended Zhuyin, so one can always make more. Though it would be useful, I tend to use romanization most of the time now as a gloss for pronouncing certain words (and almost everyone who knows how to write Wu uses it). To be honest, I had to get used to romanization for a while, until it caught on with me. And I am literally using two slightly different romanization systems at the same time. The one I use on wiki is http://wu-chinese.com/romanization/ and another romanization system used as a Wu input method. I'm working on an alternate romanization myself, but it'll take me quite a while. Bloodmerchant (talk) 02:53, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

On second thought, I cannot understand those romanization systems at all, it looks very convoluted and confusing to me. Honestly, at first, the first time I came upon the Min Nan and Min Dong wikipedia, I thought that I was reading some kind of Vietnamese. And Hakka is noted as well, even though they use Hanzi in most of their articles. I still prefer to use Hanzi, of course. Though I do support your suggestions regarding Zhuyin, most online Wu-speaking communities would not agree to it (as they are used to 通用拼音) And it's interesting if I were to use a stroke-based input method to write Wu, but most stroke-based input methods don't support Hanzi used for Wu. Though the aims of the Minnan wikipedia and the Mindong wikipedia is not to provide an alternate transliteration method as we want for Wu, but an actual writing system to replace Hanzi, which is quite baffling and I don't understand their excuses.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/59/ShanghaiBible1.JPG http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/32/Ningpo.gif The two images above show Church romanization systems of Wu Chinese, and I can't read it at all. Maybe if I try to recite it, but I still don't understand using Latin letters to replace a native writing system. Bloodmerchant (talk) 00:14, 25 March 2011 (UTC)

Second response
>ㄧㄝ ㄋㄧ ㄙㄝ ㄙ ㄫ ㄌㄛ ㄑㄝ ㄅㄜ ㄐㄨ ㄙㄛ >yeh ni seh si ng lo cheh buh ju so Yes, I understand it perfectly. First ten numbers, right?

Instead, I often use 兩 lian (though I don't pronounce the n, and the a comes of as a nasal vowel) in addition to 二 nyi. yih lian (also nyi) se sy ng loh chih pah ciu zah ... ... ne (twenty 廿 but some times 二 r seh) I mean I can say something like lian 兩, but not usually such as zeh lian 十兩 or ne lian 廿兩, but more like ne nyi 廿二 or zah nyi 十二.

>ㄫㄛ ngo (I) 我 ngu/wu

>ㄪㄜ ㄙ vuh si (not) 勿是 veq/veh zy, this I already know.

>ㄇㄛ ㄎㄧ ㄍㄜ mo ki ge (don't look at it) By my understanding, it should be m/mo khi ke/ge or something according to Wu Chinese Tongyong Pinyin. I can't understand by hearing it, but if I were to carefully analyze it, I know mo is a negative (something along the lines of 嘸 or 無), but ki would most likely be 看, and ge might be 見(though I'm not too sure) or 該, I don't know. If it is 無看(見?) (mo khi ge), it should mean, "Don't look!". If it means 無看該 (mo khi ke), "(You) shouldn't look!"

>ㄗㄝ ㄨㄟ tseh wei (good bye) 再會 tse we, this I know, it literally means 'let us meet again'.

廖修廣 also uses some latin transliteration, which does mean that he doesn't eschew it entirely. I only support the use of Hanzi only, and the use of Zhuyin for transliteration amongst Chinese and Latin as a gloss.

This is what I would do if I were to write an article in Wu (well, Shanghainese specifically): wuu:鱷魚 Bloodmerchant (talk) 02:22, 26 March 2011 (UTC)

-m'meh would be 嘸沒, m would be 嘸 and meh would be 沒. The input method that I use for Wu helps me quite a bit.

>and is there any reason you speak shanghainese instead of ningbo dialect? And when you say your mom is half shanghainese, do you mean "real" shanghainese? Everyone from shanghai that I know seems like their family came from 800 miles away like from tianjin and they're all "fake".

I speak Shanghainese because everyone in my family speaks it, they've already lost knowledge of Ningbo dialect(they've been living in Shanghai for at least 100-150 years now).

Well, my mother told me that her father's family was a rural peasant family still living in Shanghai for generations back when it was still part of southern Jiangsu. The 'Old Shanghainese' in Shanghai are very small in population compared to those living in Shanghai, less than 1% of Shanghai's population. Most of my knowledge of Shanghainese comes from my mother's speech. Almost my entire paternal family is ancestrally from Zhoushan Island (when it was still part of Ningbo).

>儂講英文? That is not acceptable, because it simply means 'You Speak English?', implying that the asker did not know the person was speaking English before. If I asked that to my parents, they would still think I don't speak Shanghainese well enough. But I think you mean 儂會得講英文? 'Nong we teh kaon yin ven?', which actually asks 'Can you speak English?' 侬英文讲得来𠲎 is more like 'Do you speak English'? Wu Chinese was never a language that had strict rules. There are slight differences between 儂會得講英文? and 侬英文讲得来𠲎 (nong yin ven kaon teh le va?), but I tend to use both myself.

>If you want to lure more wu heritage people into learning their native language, you should try it with Wu readings and pronounciation of Wenyanwen literature first, to get familiar with the right Hanzi, then get onto real wu writing, when we see wu characters and we are only literate in Mandarin our brain freezes and goes blank.

Traditionally, most people learned Wenyanwen along with their local language before 1949. They simply read Wenyanwen in their native language. A lot of Shanghainese/Wu Chinese today can't read Shanghainese/Wu or tell 文讀 readings from 白讀 readings, so they think a character in 文讀 is written this way and their respective 白讀 is an entirely different word. Some people in the older generation can still distinguish. A lot of my written Wu Chinese is 'reconstructed' from internet sources, from other Wu speakers literate in Wu (which are rare), along with analogies from wenyanwen and modern Chinese that I have to learn myself. Also, in order to improve fluency, I sometimes read classical texts in Wu Chinese 文讀 reading. I'm still not entirely fluent in Shanghainese.

1) Wu Chinese pronunciation dictionaries. http://wu-chinese.com/minidict/ It's the most reliable, but not 100% reliable. As in some dialects, some pronunciations went defunct and aren't used in Wu anymore. Like in the case of 魏, since searching with Ningbo dialect gives a value of 'wei'. Shanghainese gives two values: 'ngue' and 'we', in which 'ngue' fell into disuse. So I assume that 魏 used to be pronounced as 'nguei' in Ningbo dialect, in addition to comparing to other dialects that have the 'ngu'-'w'/'v' distinction.

2) Middle Chinese 'pronunciations', since Wu Chinese is descended from Early Middle Chinese (if I'm not so sure what the pronunciation sounds like, then search both the 中古声母 and the 中古韵母 values in Wu Chinese dictionary (It helped me for Shanghainese pronunciations (Wuyue) the names of 錢鏐, 錢元瓘 and 錢俶, since 鏐, 瓘 and 俶 can't be found there) Though it usually works 99% of the time for readings that don't exist in http://wu-chinese.com/minidict/. Other readings of a certain character can be just innovations. It's not perfect, though, so it's best to use http://wu-chinese.com/minidict/ http://www.eastling.org/tdfweb/midage.aspx

3) Colloquial Shanghainese dictionary (a lot of terms there I'm very unfamiliar with)

I don't go on here but I think this'll help.

http://wu-chinese.com/bbs/

http://www.nbcsxf.com/ningbohua/ Bloodmerchant (talk) 15:23, 29 March 2011 (UTC)

侬好！You may check the shanghainese corpus on tatoeba.org http://tatoeba.org/eng/sentences/show_all_in/wuu/none/none/indifferent if you feel interested in. This corpus may include sentences in any Wu language, as well. Cheers! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 88.161.197.86 (talk) 10:34, 27 April 2011 (UTC)

Kings of Wuyue
Indeed, their capital (and their main court, by extension) is in modern Hangzhou, but Shanghainese is now the prestige dialect of Wu and its main representative. I could transliterate them into Hangzhou dialect, but most Wu speakers are familiar with Shanghainese as opposed to Hangzhou dialect. I didn't mention this, but now the new pronunciations of Northern Wu dialects have been shifting towards pronunciations that reflect Shanghainese pronunciations.Bloodmerchant (talk) 20:07, 2 April 2011 (UTC)

Tones
Phonologically, Shanghainese is closer to Ningbo dialect than to Suzhou dialect. And it's all pronounced the same way in both Shanghainese and Ningbo dialect. I'm not too keen on tones, since the average Wu speaker doesn't notice tones and such at all. Not to mention that Wu dialects tend to change tones quite a bit through complex tone sandhi systems.Bloodmerchant (talk) 18:25, 20 April 2011 (UTC)

Ningbo dialect
Apparently, only a few relatives of mine could still speak Ningbo dialect. She's (a cousin of my father's) somewhere in her 80's and moved here to the US somewhere in the 40's-50's. Her Ningbo dialect is very fluent like that of a native speaker and she doesn't speak much Mandarin. I may not understand Ningbonese like my parents, but it's still comprehensible to me. She speaks it with a strong Ningbo accent like that of Chiang Ching-kuo and Chiang Kai-shek and she was probably born in Zhoushan, just off the coast of Ningbo. Sadly, none of her descendants can ever speak Wu Chinese and could only speak English. Do you have any friends from Zhoushan? Do they know that they're Ningbo people? My father told me that anyone who has roots from Zhoushan or came from those islands are indisputably Ningbonese just like those from mainland Ningbo. Bloodmerchant (talk) 18:30, 29 August 2011 (UTC)