As Mother tongue:
Mandarin = 800 million speakers
Wu/Shanghainese = 80 million
Cantonese = 75 million
Min/Taiwanese = 50 million
Hakka = 45 million
Does anyone know how Mandarin got to be so large and why does Shanghainese sound so different from the other Chinese languages? Is it true that Wu/Shanghainese is the oldest Chinese language? Shanghainese to me sounds like a cross between Japanese, Chinese and English.
I found these links from another forum,
Audio clips in Shanghainese:
female voice
http://www.zanhe.com/22jun2004b.wma Monologue, online radio program
http://www.zanhe.com/05jul2004b.wma
male voice:
http://www.zanhei.com/dialogue02.mp3
http://www.zanhei.com/dialogue3.mp3
http://www.zanhe.com/drill1-2.mp3
Are the Chinese "dialects" as different as European languages? Do Mandarin speakers understand the audio clips of Shanghainese above? If not, why are Cantonese and Shanghainese considered dialects? What language are they dialects of? Certainly not Mandarin, right?
I went looking for information about the Shanghai dialect and came across this page.
http://language.school-explorer.com/info/Shanghai_dialect
Right off, I learned two things about Shanghainese that make it different from other major Chinese dialects:
(1) it has voiced initials
(2) it has only 2 live tones (I don't know what "live" means in this context)
What struck me about the sound of Shanghainese in the voice clip I listed to (the first female voice) was the relative lack of tones. And, zachary, I thought she did sound a bit Japanese. I think there may be a certain accepted "feminine" way of speaking in both languages, and without the obvious tones to indicate that it's Chinese, I automatically thought of Japanese.
My friends who speak Mandarin generally cannot understand much Cantonese (those are the two largest Chinese languages spoken here in California) and vice versa. European languages like Spanish, French, and Italian are generally considered closer than the Chinese languages, which have been spread out and separated for far longer than many current European languages.
>> why does Shanghainese sound so different from the other Chinese languages? <<
1. Shanghainese has voiced consonants, including English z, v, j [dzh], b, d, g, and French j [zh]; and voiced approximants w [w] and y [j]. Mandarin and Cantonese have none of these phonemes.
2. Shanghainese has no diphthongs (not counting medial combinations), but it has a large inventory in monophthong (pure) vowels. For example, it has the eu [o with slash] in Dutch and French (German long oe), schwa, it also has the open schwa in German "-er" (aber, Amerikaner), the short vowel [I] as in English i for "itch", and the o [U] in Swedish (ort), oo in English book.
3. "light syllables" compared to Mandarin and Cantonese syllables which are all quite stressed or "heavy."
4. Syllables in conversational Shanghainese have flat/leveled contour (except in questions, where there is rising intonation like in English).
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>>> Is it true that Wu/Shanghainese is the oldest Chinese language? <<<
Wu was the first historically recorded southern Sinitic language; most Chinese linguists believe Wu was the first dialect to depart from the lingua franca of the Central Plains in a significant way (mutually unintelligible). Wu dialects are the only family of Chinese dialects to still have kept the voiced initial contrasts in Early Middle Chinese; Sino-Japanese (Go-on) does to an extent also.
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>>>(2) it has only 2 live tones (I don't know what "live" means in this context) <<<<
2 contrasts of High and Low pitches for syllables with voiceless/murmurless initials; while voiced/murmured initials syllables are all low pitched. Shanghainese also has a type of extensive tone sandhi that is absolutely unique in the Sinitic family. All syllables following the first syllable lose their citation tones *completely* and obey a relative pitch accent pattern in accordance to the characteristics of the first syllable (high or low; short rhyme or not) in the word. There are 3 possible patterns for a 4-syllable word: 1. H-L-L-L (if first syllable high pitched); 2. L-H-H-H (if first syllable low pitched AND short); 3. L-H-L-L (if first syllable low pitched).
Pretty neat stuff for a Chinese dialect. It is possible that there is an Austronesian substratum in Wu dialects that explains why Wu speakers do not quite adopt the Chinese tones into speech (citation tones are pronounced only in complete isolation and with emphasis).
>> If not, why are Cantonese and Shanghainese considered dialects? What language are they dialects of? <<
Great questions. They aren't dialects of Mandarin or Standard Chinese. Instead the Chinese dialects should be translated as "topolects" in English. The Chinese term "fangyan" is mistakenly translated as dialect; when it just means the "regional language" in the Chinese. Before 1900, the Chinese called even Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese as "fangyan."
Wu sounds cool...like Japanese spoken with a very French or German accent.
Yeah, I didn't know very much about Wu...thanks for that description. That's funny that it came up here because today I just talked with a whole group of people living here that are directly from Shanghai.
Wow, those clips were neat! They don't sound anything like Mandarin and sound a lot like Japanese to me, although I did hear "yinwei" = "because" a lot. And most of the different dialects are mutually unintelligible. My Mandarin speaking friends can't understand Cantonese, Taiwanese, etc. I can't understand Mandarin just yet, but I can identify it as such, and when I hear Cantonese I can tell it's not Mandarin.
i am from China and speak Mandarin. I cant understand Shanghaiese. In fact, chinese people have a lot of dialects, which is sound so differrent. I am from the northeast of China and I cant understand the dialects in the south and west area of China. It should be noted that the except for some minorities such as Tibetan,Uigur and etc，the dialects use the same Chinese charactors.
I read an article somewhere on the net saying the Wu language is closer to Korean than any other dialect in China. Korean pronunciation is interestingly similar to Japanese but has a different writing system. I heard they used Chinese characters before their king assigned scholars to creat their own symbols for their language. Nuff for off topic.
I'm originally from Guangdong province and natively speak a dialect of Min [different to Taiwanese], mandarin and Cantonese. Shanghainese is unintelligible to me, period.
yifei, all the Chinese languages, which include Wu, are Sino-Tibetan, whereas Korean is probably most closely related to the Tungus branch of the Altaic languages, and the Sino-Tibetan and Altaic languages are in no way at all related; I haven't even heard the slightest suggestions of such. The primary thing that makes Korean (and especially Japanese) related to the Chinese language is that both have borrowed significant quantities of vocabulary from the Chinese languages and their historical predecessors such as Middle Chinese. There may be incidental superficial similarities overall sound-wise between Wu and Korean, but genetically the two are not related at all.
According to nishishei's information, most Chinese linguists believe Wu was the first dialect to depart from the lingua franca of the Central Plains in a significant way (mutually unintelligible). If Korean borrowed a great number of Chinese vocabulary historically, and the language being borrowed happened to be Wu as the oldest Chinese dialect alive, then it makes sense why the Wu speakers find Korean [even of some vocabularies] sound similar to their mother tongue. Right?
I meant even only of some but a significant number of Korean vocabulary sound like Wu in my last post. Btw, I also find out more Chinese loan words in Japanese sound like Min and Cantonese than mandarin.
Well, yes, such would make sense, as while such wouldn't make Korean genetically similar to Wu, it would provide significant quantities of loan vocabulary from Wu in Korean, and thus make Korean more recognizable to Wu speakers than to speakers of other Chinese languages. If I recall correctly, Japanese borrowed significant quantities of vocabulary from Chinese languages other than Mandarin as well, and much borrowed vocabulary from Chinese languages in Japanese actually preserves historical forms from Middle Chinese, which have changed significantly, in many caes, in most Chinese languages.
Korean, like Mandarin and Cantonese, has lost voiced consonants, while Japanese (especially Go-on, or Wu Pronunciation) and Wu still have consistent voicing.
>>> It should be noted that the except for some minorities such as Tibetan,Uigur and etc，the dialects use the same Chinese charactors. <<<
This is myth. Actually, most dialects don't have writing. Vernacular Shanghainese written in characters would not be identical to Putonghua. In fact, there is an acclaimed vernacular Wu novel written in 1892 titled <<Flowers of Shanghai>> (a movie based on the novel has also been made a couple of years ago), Mandarin speakers cannot understand very much of it at all. The book was later translated into Mandarin by Shanghainese writer Eileen Chang (Zhang Ailing).