Comprehensive reference book on chinese dialects?

[Guest bogstick]

Hi,

Can anyone recommend a good English book that covers Chinese history with particular coverage of the development of the various Chinese peoples and their dialects?

I am of Chinese descent but not from Mandarin or Cantonese lineage and find that virtually all the material on the web refect only those 2 dialects.

I am very interested in the linguinstic aspects of the Chinese although i have only a casual grasp of Chinese history.

Aside from the language side, what's the most comprehesive or well recommended book about Chinese history anyway? (i presume it's objective although history writing never can be totally...)

Thanks.

[Guest greenpine]

mandarin is probably the dialect least similar to acient hanyu, many sounds were lost, southern dialects keep different aspects of acient hanyu more or less. e.g. in shanghaian (subset of wu dialect), the sound of "v" is still used, whereas in mandarin and some other dialects, v is replaced with "w", 微小 is pronounced weixiao in mandarin, it is pronounced visho in shanghaian. but shanghaian still has the sound of "w" e.g. 威嚴 is pronounced weii.

using mandarin to read tang or song poems often results in no rhyme,but using southern dialects can most of the time conform to the ryhme. e.g.

遠上寒山石徑斜

白雲深處有人家

in mandarin, the last two characters are pronounced "xie" and "jia" which there is no rhyme, whereas in shanghaian, they would be pronounced "sha" and "ga" which conforms to the rhyme rule.

[skylee]

I have no linguistic knowledge.

But on Chinese History, I have found Ray Huang's "China: A Macro History" extremely interesting (in Chinese, the book is 中國大歷史 and the writer is 黃仁宇).

I have heard others recommend "中國人史綱" written by 柏楊. I have not yet read it, though.

These two books are on general Chinese history and may not cover your special interest.