{"id":25896,"date":"2016-05-25T13:21:47","date_gmt":"2016-05-25T18:21:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=25896"},"modified":"2016-05-25T13:22:05","modified_gmt":"2016-05-25T18:22:05","slug":"writing-shanghainese","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=25896","title":{"rendered":"Writing Shanghainese"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

The recent discussion of different ways of writing Chinese reminded Jeff K of two books of Shanghai expressions that he had come across.\u00a0 See here<\/a> f<\/span>or scans of a few pages.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The first only provides English and Chinese characters (Hanzi), and is nearly useless for anyone who wants to learn to actually speak the Shanghai topolect, while the second provides English, Hanzi, and two different types of pronunciation guides, so would be much more useful for someone who is serious about learning to speak Shanghainese.<\/p>\n

During the 80s, I was in touch with Dunwoody Press, the publisher of these books and many other dictionaries and textbooks for the study of less commonly taught languages.\u00a0 I visited their offices in Maryland and told them that, while I was very grateful for their works on Sinitic languages, I hoped that they would always provide transcriptions, not just give characters and English translations.\u00a0 Also, I encouraged them to use a single sort alphabetical order, which I had long advocated, but had not yet published on, nor had I realized it in any dictionaries or other reference works of my own.<\/p>\n

Not long thereafter, my call for a Mandarin-English dictionary in single sort alphabetical order went out as the very first issue of Sino-Platonic Papers<\/i><\/a> in February of 1986:\u00a0 \"The Need for an Alphabetically Arranged General Usage Dictionary of Mandarin Chinese: A Review Article of Some Recent Dictionaries and Current Lexicographical Projects<\/a>\" (free pdf). Not long thereafter, with the help of John DeFrancis and other friends, we published our first dictionary in that arrangement, the ABC Chinese-English Dictionary<\/i><\/a> from the University of Hawaii Press.\u00a0 There are now many other dictionaries in that series, including An Alphabetical Index to the Hanyu Da Cidian<\/u><\/i><\/a> (2004).\u00a0 For a description of the complete (and continuing) ABC Chinese Dictionary Series, see here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

While we can all be grateful to Dunwoody for the transcriptions in their second book on Shanghainese, they are too elaborate to be practical for use as a regular romanization.\u00a0 For that I would recommend the system of Richard VanNess Simmons described in this post and the comments thereto:<\/p>\n

\"Shanghainese<\/a>\" (5\/16\/13)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

See also Simmons' Shanghainese-English\/English-Shanghainese Dictionary & Phrasebook<\/i><\/a> .Those who would like to hear a good chunk of Shanghainese as read out by three different native speakers may listen to the recordings in the post cited above.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The recent discussion of different ways of writing Chinese reminded Jeff K of two books of Shanghai expressions that he had come across.\u00a0 See here for scans of a few pages.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[181,224,189],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25896","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dictionaries","category-topolects","category-transcription"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25896","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=25896"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25896\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25933,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25896\/revisions\/25933"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=25896"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=25896"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=25896"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}