Shanghai, part 1

Yes, this post is very late, but, honestly, upon my return, I did not feel like writing a lick about Shanghai. It was a crazy, busy, and really fun week, and I needed another week to recover before I could even contemplate trying to recall the highlights and put them to page.

First off, I'd better state my business in Shanghai. After missing out on the Inner Mongolia trip, I still wanted to go some place where some tongue other than Mandarin was spoken, and Shanghai fit the bill. Moreover, with the Expo and all that excitement this year in particular, I was surprised spots for the Shanghai trip were still available, and took one while I still could.

Before setting out, I already knew I was going to study Shanghai hua, a dialect of the Wu Chinese language, and totally unintelligible to a Mandarin speaker. Moreover, I also had a mystery on my hands. I had read that, in Shanghai, the word for "I" is "ngo" (or "ngu") (cognate with Mandarin "wo3" and Tibetan "nga"). However, one teachers, a Zhejianger (Zhejiang is the province just south of Shanghai), told me that they say "ala'" (according to my written sources, "ala'" meant "we"). My other teachers, anecdotally, agreed with this opinion. Therefore, "ala'" vs. "ngo/ngu" became the main point of my linguistic investigation in Shanghai.

So, business stated. Now time for some general observations:

1. Shanghai's weather, at least this time of year, seems preferable to Beijing's (it has more cool days and, moreover, it rains all the time).

2. Shanghai, right on the mouth of the Long River, aka the Yangtze, and is a coastal town (hence, you know, its name: "on the sea"). This is also preferable to Beijing's (relatively) drab inland location (admittedly, Shanxi province is just a little ways west of Beijing, and thinking about the Buddha caves and all the jinyu being spoken gets me pretty pumped--however, no matter how near it is, Beijing isn't Shanxi).

3. Shanghai's culture (once again, compared to Beijing's) is a lot more like what one imagines modern Chinese culture to be--bustling, competitive, innovative, and very consumeristic. It's the economic capital of China, and it's what we imagine when we imagine Chinese prosperity. On our first day, we went to a huge shopping mall (5 stories plus a "basement"), and I thought that it was crazily big and busy. Then, on one of our last days, we went to a shopping mall that was 10 stories tall!

4. Shanghai hua is great! Its grammar is much more conservative than that of Mandarin Chinese (so is its phonology), and it struck me as being much more apparently similar to Tibetan than its northerly cousin. I have only have a word-list of probably 150 words, many of which are synonyms (because speech communities are so small (Shanghai hua isn't used for business or mass communications--it's only spoken at home, with friends, and with neighbors) there are lots of small variants--one speaker says the word for "daddy" is "ya", another says "yaya", a third says "aya", a fourth says "ba", and a fifth says "aba").

Some interesting comparisons (note, my notes, while doubtless flawed, are much more phonetically and phonologically precise than the Shanghai hua transcription used below):

English: fire, Mandarin: huo3, Shanghai hua: fu

English: mother, Mandarin: ma1ma, mu3qin1, Shanghai hua: (a)niang (=Mandarin niang2 'girl')

English: uncle (father's older brother), Mandarin: bo2bo (da4bo2 using Shanghai topolect), Shanghai hua: laobaba, dubaba (= Mandarin da4 'big' + ba4ba 'daddy')

And so on...

5. I realized, while using Mandarin to interview our driver, who had a thick "Southern accent" (in Chinese terms), about an entirely different language, that my Chinese skills have increased quite a bit since I was last at Yale. Which was a weird realization--after all, I'd only been here a nudge over 4 weeks at the time.

Well, that's enough for now. Until part 2, which may be around as early as a few hours from now.