"Miss" in Shanghainese

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How do you say "Miss" (an unmarried woman) in Shanghainese? I'm looking for the basic Shanghainese version of 小姐 without any special connotations.

Thanks.

[anonymoose]

Listen to the first example here.

[abcdefg]

Thanks @anonymoose. So, it's 小姐 with a different (a non-Mandarin) pronunciation. 

 

What I'm actually trying to solve is a puzzling form of address in a manuscript I'm helping to edit. It's a package of recollections, a memoir written by an elderly Chinese lady who grew up in Shanghai a long time ago (she's 95 now.) 

 

Here are a couple of excerpts: 

 

Quote

 

Wong Sia Chia (Miss Wong) told me that I have a family in America....

-- two pages later -- 

Miss Wong or Wong Sia Chia (Chinese word for Miss Wong) was a handsome lady... 

 

 

I'm stuck on trying to figure out what this "Sia Chia" actually stands for. I've written to ask her for the Hanzi characters but she hasn't replied. I thought it might be a Shanghainese form of address. Guess not.

 

The writer lived a while in Hong Kong after leaving Shangai, but I don't think this "Sia Chia" is Cantonese. I suppose it could just be her own "offhand" rendition of how she thinks 小姐 sounds when pronounced in Shanghainese. 

 

Any ideas?

 

 

[Jim]

The only other Shanghainese thing I've heard of is 阿姐 but the pronunciation wouldn't sound at all like that.

[anonymoose]

10 hours ago, abcdefg said:

Any ideas?

 

I suspect this just refers to 小姐. I know "sia chia" does not seem to be a very good representation of the pronunciation on the recording, but bear in mind that Mandarin and Cantonese romanisations, when read as an English speaker, also often do not seem to correspond very well with their respective pronunciations.

 

Besides this, Shanghainese is not a standardised language, and I suspect this was even more the case 80+ years ago, so the pronunciation of 小姐 when and where this lady grew up may also not have been the same as on the recording.

[abcdefg]

7 hours ago, anonymoose said:

Besides this, Shanghainese is not a standardised language, and I suspect this was even more the case 80+ years ago, so the pronunciation of 小姐 when and where this lady grew up may also not have been the same as on the recording.

 

Yes, I agree with your explanation. It makes sense. Thank you. And now 80+ years later she is just making up her own Romanization of the sounds as she remembers them instead of trying to use a standardized system such as Pinyin or Zhuyin or whatever. 

 

When I look deeper into the story, it turns out that she spent some formative years in Taiwan as well as Hong Kong after leaving Shanghai during the war. Eventually the family migrated to Hawaii and then to the US mainland. So she doubtless picked up all sorts of accents in the course of that journey. She came from an affluent and scholarly family and received an education. But much of it was from private tutors hired by Dad, who went on to become one of the "Four Elders" of the Chinese Nationalist Party. 

 

I have spoken with her in Chinese face to face several times, the last being about 5 years ago, and found her fairly easy to understand. But I didn't really try to analyze any of her speech mannerisms. Just assumed she knew better than I did how things ought to be said. 

 

Appreciate the help @anonymoose and @Jim

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The puzzle has been solved. The odd form of address was actually 小姐, exactly like several of you have guessed. My friend was rendering the Chinese word phonetically according to the way she remembered it in Shanghai dialect as she was growing up. She, the author of this memoir, and her American husband don't know how to type Chinese characters, so the way we finally figured it out was to have her write "Wong Sia Chia" by hand using Hanzi. Then the husband photographed it and e-mailed me the photo.