Talk:Shanghainese

[i, i̝]?

“/i, jɛ/ are also similar in pronunciation, differing slightly in vowel height ([i, i̝] respectively).” Is the ‘i̝’ symbol correct here? Or should it be with a similar diacritic, however with a ‘tail’ pointing down? Kshatriya Drum (talk) 06:00, 6 December 2020 (UTC)

Or, maybe, the other way round? /i/ would render as /i̝/, and /jɛ/ as /i/? Any ideas? Kshatriya Drum (talk) 02:27, 8 December 2020 (UTC)

I *think* i̝ corresponds to [iʑ] or a “strident vowel” as Zhu describes it in “A grammar of Shanghai Wu” - he romanises it as <ii> which is used in the examples section of this article. The diacritic is correct, it’s being analysed as a raised version of /i/ with more frication as a result. It should be the other way round like you say, as [i̝] is the realisation of /i/ and unraised [i] is the realisation of what is described here as /jɛ/ - corresponding to mandarin /iɛn/ 面钱etc. *However*, there are words like 廿念 etc where /jɛ/ is realised as [jɛ] not [i] so I think it would be much better if /i/ and /i̝/ were analysed as separate phonemes in their own right - this is how the Suzhounese article treats the Suzhou Wu equivalents, and how many resources of Shanghainese such as Zhu’s “A grammar of Shanghai Wu” describes them. Yinm (talk) 01:19, 16 July 2022 (UTC)

Suburban dialects

Shanghainese is well known for having a lot of variation between suburban varieties (本地闲话) and the “Standard” dialect from the historic city core. Many suburban dialects are now spoken in the area considered the “city” due to its expansion and retain some features no longer present in 中派/新派 urban shanghainese. This article doesn’t specify that it’s describing urban shanghainese and doesn’t at all acknowledge the existence of the variation in suburban dialects which are also commonly known as shanghainese. Youtube channel ILoveLanguages has two videos showing the difference between urban and suburban (pudong) shanghainese. I think these suburban dialects deserve at least a paragraph detailing their existence and some noteworthy differences between them and the urban standard. Thoughts? Yinm (talk) 01:32, 16 July 2022 (UTC)

Romanisation

The phonology section describes the vowel system with the e/ɛ rimes distinct so it seems logical to me to include that distinction in the romanisation.

I am aware they were somewhat merged but **this wasn’t ever complete anyway**! (and there is an active de-merger process happening although this de-merger places 海 and 闲 in the same set (ɛ)) - thus the issue is not with the phonology section, whose inclusion of both rimes is the right choice. This leaves us with some options for romanising, for example, the word 上海闲话- Zaon he ghae gho (most conservative) Zaon he ghe gho (merger of -e and -ae during 中派 period- current romanisation used on page) Zaon hae ghae gho (newest and possibly most common but I’m going off on personal observation here)

The most conservative form is still the didactically correct one for Huju etc and frankly given all three ways are in widespread usage the “proper” way seems the most logical. The current form is inadequate - there is no distinction. Writing in 新派 style -e.g 海闲 as hae ghae - could work too, at least it shows there is an -ae rime. However at the end of the day the important thing is that the -e and -ae rimes are distinct in the Phonology section - so consistency should also be retained elsewhere. Yinm (talk) 14:23, 20 September 2022 (UTC)

Citation for Lexical Similarity

While I've seen this figure (28.9%) quoted often online, the closest to it that I could find was in "Tang, Chaoju and Vincent J. van Heuven. “Mutual intelligibility and similarity of Chinese dialects: Predicting judgments from objective measures.” Linguistics in The Netherlands 24 (2007): 223-234."

The numbers are in Table A1, in the appendix. It doesn't list Shanghainese by name, but for Beijing-Suzhou lexical similarity it has .289 (.217 for Beijing-Wenzhou). Actually, under Suzhou-Beijing, it has a .298, which I assume is an error in their table.

I'm going to assume this is where the figure comes from, and edit the article accordingly. Owlblocks (talk) 17:47, 17 October 2022 (UTC)

Wiki Education assignment: ESL Workshop

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Problematic Lexical Similarity Source

The 28.9% figure used by Tang et al. (2007) is problematic because it is not a lexical similarity index in a general sense, which counts shared cognates using a Swadesh list. While it is appropriate within the article, it has been widely misrepresented online outside the article's context. It comes from Cheng (1997) "Measuring relationship among dialects: DOC and related resources", which in turn comes from Cheng (1982) "A quantification of Chinese dialect affinity". This figure is actually a correlation index for dialect comparison and is not applicable outside the context of Sinitic dialectology.

Other estimates of lexical similarities between Sinitic languages, such as those by Wang (1960) "中国五大方言の分裂年代の言語年代学的試探" and Xu (1991) "历史语言学", place the lexical similarity between Mandarin and Wu at 73%. I am going to cite Maxwell (2024) "Error bars for lexicostatistical estimates, with a case study comparing the diversity of Chinese and Romance." as it incorporates both Wang (1960) and Xu (1991). Simonsterata (talk) 13:38, 23 June 2024 (UTC)

Thank you very much for noticing this! Remsense诉 13:59, 23 June 2024 (UTC)

Number of native speakers

I've been trying to find a source to the number of native speakers, but I failed to find anything. All the articles that mention it just says "14 million" without giving any sources (I suspect they might be copying off each other/Wikipedia).

However I did find some stuff that might be useful for anyone else that wants to dig deeper: I found this Shanghai Bureau of Statistics report from 2013 that lists the percentage of people who "know or know a bit of Shanghainese" based on age groups. Using population statistics by age group from this paper from 2015, I estimated the population of people who "know or know a bit of Shanghainese" in Shanghai is around 15 million, so the 14 million statistic seems like it's at least close to the accurate amount. Potato2357 (talk) 00:04, 5 September 2024 (UTC)