Shanghainese accent patterns

[ala]

Three types total (in blue, green and orange). The romanization is systematic and the kana transcription is approximate (with hiragana used for aspirated initials, katakana for everything else).

[wushijiao]

Do you think it is worth it to memorize the rules for Shanghaihua's tone sandi? I've taken to just trying to reproduce the sounds as best as possible....

[wushijiao]

By the way, I think charts like this would be very valuable to nakonins trying to learn Shanghaiese.

[ala]

Tone sandhi and tones are really easy for Shanghainese,

you just need to know the first character's tone and rhyme length.

As you can see from the chart above, words starting with voiced consonants have either green or orange patterns. ONLY voiced initials with SHORT rhymes (in Cantonese that end with -k,-p,-t, or Japanese double consonants and -ku,-chi-,tsu) belong to the orange pattern. This makes the orange pattern automatic, you don't need to put extra effort in memorizing individual contrasts.

The only effort you need to add for tone sandhi, is in distinguishing the blue and green patterns. All voiced, regular length rhymes belong in the green pattern (just think that voiced consonants b,d,g,z etc are typically lower in pitch initially, as in English). So what you have left is in distinguishing the syllable with the voiceless initial. Most Shanghainese HIGH pitch voiceless syllables match Mandarin Tone 1 (flat), so words that start with Mandarin Tone 1 characters, would typically be found in the blue pattern. There a lot of exceptions because Mandarin tones are very random sometimes, but it's not too hard memorizing 2 contrasts for just the first syllable. Much much much easier than Mandarin.

In the romanization above, the high pitch initial syllable has an acute accent (not to be confused with the Mandarin Tone 2 contour symbol), and that's really all you need to phonologically distinguish all the pitchs and tones in Shanghainese. Since Japanese doesn't label the high accent, I think you could ignore all of this and just pick it up by feel as well, but the patterns are so systematic that having some idea of it becomes quite helpful.

[taibeihong]

Ala, didn't you mention in some previous post that Chongming island has moved completely away from a tone/pitch system into a stress one? Do you think this will happen to shanghainese too? And, if you don't pay attention to pitch when speaking shanghainese, will people still be able to uderstand what you say? or could confusion arise as when you mix up your tones when speaking mandarin?

One other thing, although not 100% related to pitch: do shanghainese vowels become unvoiced like japanese ones when between unvoiced consonants? For example, would "dusikeu" become "dus(i)keu" with an unvoiced "i"?