A dictionary of Wu?

[carlo]

I was wondering what is the definitive reference (if there is one) for Northern Wu dialects (esp. Taihu: Changzhou and Shanghai). I can more or less transcribe phonetically what I hear, and can ask native friends to translate,, but this is time consuming. I've seen books that teach spoken Shanghainese (and great websites like www.zanhei.com), but a comprehensive character pronunciation dictionary (or a glossary of polisyllabic words with romanization) would also be very useful. Where should I look for one?

Happy Year of the Dog everyone.

[Mugi]

You could start with the Chinese–English Dictionary of the Wu Dialect/汉英吴方言词典 by Thomas Creamer (上海外语教育出版社, 1991; RMB15.00).

Dictionaries in the 现代汉语方言大词典 (江苏教育出版社) series are quite useful too: there are separate dictionaries for 崇明, 苏州, 上海, 宁波 etc.

I have a few others at home - will get their titles over the weekend. The only problem is that all of these dictionaries only give dialect-specific words.

I'm sure ala will be able to give you plenty of leads though.

[ala]

All Wu dictionaries currently are in IPA transcription, because a standardized Wu romanization is still not available.

There are several Shanghainese dictionaries, one is based on contemporary phonology and is yellow and concise (mostly common words and slangs) called 《上海話口語詞典》, and another is blue based on Old Shanghainese called 《上海方言詞典》from Jiangsu Education Press I think (this dictionary though has a lot of now archaic Wu vocabulary, but it's interesting if you are curious). There is also a Chinese–English Dictionary of the Wu Dialect I believe, black.

You are probably looking for 《上海市區方言志》 Shanghai shiqu fangyan zhi which is certainly the best single source of information on modern Shanghainese available (all Shanghainese is presented in both characters and IPA). It has detailed info on phonology, basic grammar, a formidable frequent vocabulary list grouped by field (Animal, Transportation, Business, Weather, Emotions, Action, Idioms, etc), as well as a Mandarin-Shanghainese phonology conversion table. There is also a very valuable 20 pages of character pronunciation table (we call this Homophone Character Table 同音字表), which has Chinese characters grouped under each unique syllable and tone (Shanghainese has about 700 unique syllables).

Around 2007-2008, an online Shanghainese-English-Mandarin dictionary plus a Wu dialect Chinese character pronunciation database will be available.

[Yuchi]

I'm guessing this titles aren't available at your local Xinhua bookstore?

[horas]

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At the zanhei site Carlo gave I've found an interesting definition of a language (relating to the bashing and usurpation of dialects):

"A shprakh iz a diyalekt mit an armey un a flot" - Yiddish for "A language is a dialect with an army and navy"

This seems to be an extension of an original statement by Antoine Meillet: "A shprakh iz a diyalekt mit an armey" - "A language is a dialect with an army"

See the discussion on:

http://www.edu-cyberpg.com/Linguistics/armynavy.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antoine_Meillet

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[Ferno]

wow yiddish seems so similar to english

[ala]

Yiddish is closer to German:

German: Eine Sprache ist ein Dialekt mit einer Armee und einer Flotte.

Yiddish: A shprakh iz a diyalekt mit an armey un a flot.

English: A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.

Yiddish orthography is more similar to English because Yiddish was originally written in Hebrew alphabet, and was romanized during the 20th century.

[gato]

http://www.bergen.org/AAST/Projects/Yiddish/English/language.html

Yiddish Language, chief vernacular of Ashkenazic Jews, who are native to, or who have antecedents in, eastern and central Europe.

One of the Germanic languages, Yiddish is written in Hebrew characters (some of them used differently than for writing Hebrew). Yiddish (meaning "Jewish") arose between the 9th and 12th centuries in southwestern Germany as an adaptation of Middle High German dialects to the special needs of Jews. To the original German were added those Hebrew words that pertained to Jewish religious life. Later, when the bulk of European Jewry moved eastward into areas occupied predominantly by Slavic-speaking peoples, some Slavic influences were acquired. The vocabulary of the Yiddish spoken in eastern Europe during recent times comprised about 85 percent German, 10 percent Hebrew, and 5 percent Slavic, with traces of Romanian, French, and other elements.

Yiddish is a highly plastic and assimilative language, rich in idioms, and possessing remarkable freshness, pithiness, and pungency. Since it was spoken by ordinary people rather than by scholars, its vocabulary is weak in abstractions. By the same token it has few items descriptive of nature, with which the Jews of eastern Europe had relatively little contact, and a wealth of words and expressions descriptive of character and of relations among people. It makes liberal use of diminutives and terms of endearment and exhibits a variety of expletives. The use of proverbs and proverbial expressions is considerable. These qualities and usages give Yiddish a uniquely warm and personal flavor.

[carlo]

Thanks a lot for the suggestions. For the record, I bought 常州方言 (黑龙江人民出版） in Changzhou today, a glossary of 3,000+ dialect words with extensive audio recordings. Unfortunately no 同音字表, I guess a homophone table for Shanghainese could be used to derive the Changzhou readings by analogy?

[Mugi]

For a 同音字表 for Shanghainese, you might want to get your hands on:

上海語常用同音字典　(宮田一郎 編著, 光生館 1988; 3,200 yen + tax)

(Explanations are in Japanese, but pronunciation is given in IPA)

[Mavericker]

Hello. Can someone please post the titles of those dictionaries in English? I'd be interested in buying them.

[Mugi]

Forgive my ignorance, but what good would having a translation of the titles in English be? The only dictionary that includes any English has been listed with its English title - all the others are either in Chinese only or Chinese and Japanese.

[Mavericker]

Hello Mugi-I don't speak or read Chinese or Japanese. I'm interested in Wu dictionaries-having thier titles in English would make them easier to search for.

I found this title:

"A Chinese-English Shanghai Dialect Dictionary" contains everyday words and current slang for Shanghainese, also known as "Shanghai Dialect", as well as International Phonetic Alphabet transliterations, tone marks, and translations into both Mandarin Chinese and English. It's a gold mine for learners of this unique language, which is spoken natively by 80 million people in Shanghai and surrounding areas but has very few learning materials in print.

Do you know of any other Shanghainese-English or English-Shanghainese dictionary titles?

[Mugi]

I'll have a look at home again, but I think the only two I have come across are the one you have mentioned (small pocket sized, right?) and the one I mentioned in an earlier post.

There are actually quite a lot of learning materials for Shanghainese, comparatively, but most assume a knowledge of Modern Standard Chinese (Putonghua).

[Niklas]

but a comprehensive character pronunciation dictionary (or a glossary of polisyllabic words with romanization) would also be very useful. Where should I look for one?

Yes, now we have an simple pronunciation dictionary here for the Chinese characters in various dialects of Wu.

http://wu-chinese.com/minidict

The pronunciation is denoted by the romanization without the indication of tones. Since Wu dialects have strong tone sandhi and that makes the tones for single characters not so important as it is in Mandarin. The romanization is more or less similar to IPA. If you are familiar with the phonetic system of Wu dialects, it won't be difficult to work out a correspondence between the pronunciation and the romanization. For further questions you can post a thread in the following forum:

http://wu-chinese.com/bbs

[Mavericker]

Niklas, are there English language versions of these sites you posted? What if I want to input words in Englsih that I want translated to Wu? Can I post questions in the Wu forums in English?

[Niklas]

Niklas, are there English language versions of these sites you posted? What if I want to input words in Englsih that I want translated to Wu? Can I post questions in the Wu forums in English?

Hey Mavericker,

sorry to say that although we have some English articles on our site, it's far away from a "site". We're thinking about making the site bi-lingual in the future.

Concerning a online dictionary that translate English words in to Wu, we don't have it now but we are currently working on a dictionary project. Maybe bad news to you, we are going to set up a Wu-Mandarin version at first since our main aim is to promote mother tongue among young Wu people. But we will definitely add English and maybe as well as other language translations to the on going dictionary project.

The problem for us is, we don't have enough time and people working on this. We are all volunteered students who care about our mother tongue. So, please don't expect it to proceed so fast as you wish.......

Yes, you can definitely post English threads in the forum. If you have any problem, e.g. registration of forum, you can send an email to the administrator's mailbox:

wu.chinese@gmail.com

[Mavericker]

HI Niklas-thank you for responding. If I go to the dictionaries, and post any word in Mandarin, it will give me a Wu translation?