Re: Chinese 'Dialects'

From: W Yin (sh_at_zanhe.com)
Date: 08/24/04 

Date: 23 Aug 2004 23:03:58 -0700

LEE Sau Dan <danlee@informatik.uni-freiburg.de> wrote in message
> Cantonese has kept the final -m in the second syllable.

Wu Chinese dialects in general have nasal vowels for the nasal
consonant finals in Mandarin and Cantonese. The Taihu Pian dialects
such as Shanghainese and Suzhou-hua have lost most of the nasal
vowels, so there are no consonant finals today for "three",
"mountain", "to chat", "to look", "face", "sky", "food", etc.
However, Shanghainese 150 years ago still had the nasal vowels.
Generally, Wu dialects have the most consonants and vowels of all
Chinese forms.

> Jacques> And I'm leaving the tones out. And "snake" and "tea"
> Jacques> being homophonous!
>
> But has Shanghainese kept the voicing of the initial sound of these?

Yes, very clear voiced [z]. Voiceless [s] would be "sand" (53) or "to
bask" (34). Snake, tea, to search, shrine are pronounced the same
[zo] or [zU]. All syllables with voiced consonants have the same
citation tone in Shanghainese. The likelihood of homophony and the
lack of diphthongs in Shanghainese pushes it to be more polysyllabic
than Mandarin and Cantonese. Citation tones in Shanghainese are quite
irrelevant in speech, and there's high tolerance for pitch variation.
Shanghainese is rapidly heading in the direction of being non-tonal;
for multisyllabic words it is *already* on par with Japanese pitch
accent. There is also a whole new class of words that are completely
flexible in pitch pronunciation; its syllables can also be prounounced
throughout with a flat 44.