9 thoughts on “software for Shanghainese”

1. Interesting new tool for Shanghainese. I loved learning its sassy expressions when I lived there – saseidi for shisandian (13 o’clock) as a phrase for the creative craziness necessary to live happily in the city, and all the rest.

   There’s some great – and really funny — commentary on dialect issues at: http://chinesepod.com/lessons/regional-accents-part-ii/discussion

2. LOVE IT. Best news I’ve heard all day. Whenever I hear Shanghainese here in HK, my day gets much brighter.

3. Hmm… it will take me some time to get used to the Pinyin used here… but still I am very happy to have any type of Shanghainese support. By the way, what is the site’s opinion on dealing with Romanization systems of forms of Chinese with 3-way distinctions in plosives (Wu, Minnan)? Hanyu Pinyin-style Romanization works well for forms of Chinese with 2-way distinction (Mandarin, Cantonese) where the pairs such as b/p, d/t, and g/k can be used instead of p/p’, t/t’, k,k’. However, Shanghainese and other dialects of Wu Chinese contrast voiced, tenuis, and aspirated stops, which means a different system must be used.

   Usually, I see Romanization systems which try to follow the IPA as much as possible, thus using b/p/ph, d/t/th, and g/k/kh. This is generally what I’ve seen for Shanghainese both on the internet in random forums as well as the occasional Shanghainese language book I find here and there, with the exception of some coming out of the mainland, which assume knowledge of Hanyu Pinyin and thus use the cumbersome bh/b/p, dh/d/t, gh/g/k instead.

   For someone like me who is studying languages of South Asia such as Hindi, b/p/ph, d/t/th, and g/k/kh is definitely most comfortable and natural, as it corresponds to the standard usage of Roman alphabet for languages of India. In contrast, bh/b/p, dh/d/t, and gh/g/k totally screw up my feeble brain, as now I have to remember that bh isn’t IPA bh- it’s b, b isn’t IPA b, it’s p, and p is actually ph. It’s easier to get away with this in Mandarin’s Hanyu Pinyin because you’re only contrasting two consonants, and all you have to do is remember one thing- aspirated or unaspirated.

   I would imagine this system would also mess with people who use both English and Mandarin, seeing as “sh” now maps to English “z.” Overall, I understand that the creator of this romanization system is trying to help people who are already familiar with Hanyu Pinyin for Mandarin, but I think that the streamlined feel of Mandarin’s Hanyu Pinyin can be used for Shanghainese without such cumbersome consonant systems such as using an “h” to indicate voicing instead of aspiration. In fact, there are Romanization systems for Shanghainese which I find more user friendly on the web.

   Having said all that, I am definitely exicited at the possibilities for Shanghainese in the future now that it has made a move towards modernity with a typing input system, since due to the nature of Chinese characters, a monolingual Shanghainese speaker could only type with a difficult structure-based system such as Cangjie. I hope that in the future, standard pronunciation can be agreed on for Shanghainese.

4. what is the site’s opinion on dealing with Romanization systems of forms of Chinese with 3-way distinctions in plosives (Wu, Minnan)?

   As frustrated as I get sometimes with Wade-Giles (or, rather, how badly Wade-Giles is usually written) I recognize that its use of apostrophes had its virtues, esp. when dealing with older forms of Sinitic languages and modern languages other than Mandarin. But, unfortunately, I don’t know nearly as much about Sinitic languages other than Mandarin as I would like, so I’m hesitant to venture an opinion.

   I had a lot of admiration for the late, great zanhe.com, which had lots of good information on Shanghainese. Its approach to romanization of Shanghainese is probably worth looking at.

   (BTW, if anyone knows those who made Zanhe.com please let me know. I’d like to get in touch with them.)

5. Hello dear Pinyin: I am Penkyamp, one of the members active on the zanhei Shanghainese lingustics forum.
   I am also one of the Cantonese romanization researchers that designed software and teaching materials for the Cantonese Pinyin. I’d like to inform you that there is a wealth of discussions and articles produced on the Penkyamp system recently, many of them on the Cantonese Linguistics forum. Also, a software designed to input special characters for Penkyamp has been published. All these can be found on several user pages as links listed at the very bottom of each page.
   The Penkyamp system is the very first Cantonese romanization system that utilizes both concepts from the Hanyu Pinyin: 1. marking tones by diacritics only 2. following Pinyin rules on linking syllables into words.
   I hope you’ll find the new info on Penkyamp to be valuable supplement to your website on Pinyin.

   Following are the Penkyamp intro pages maintained by my team:

   http://cantonese.wikia.com/wiki/User:Penkyamp

   http://penkyamp.pbwiki.com/
   ????????

   http://penkyamp.pbwiki.com/Seuyap+Gonkgoy+Foxs
   Please click to download Penkyamp special characters input software. Password: share

   http://blog.sina.com.cn/penkyamp
   penkyamp???

   http://www.cnic.org/wiki/Penkyamp
   ??????

   http://www.cnic.org/wiki/User:Penkyamp
   ??????

   http://wiki.keyin.cn/index.php/User:Penkyamp
   ??? ????

   ?????????????

   * ???????, ??????????????????????????.
   * ??: PENKYAMP ? JYUTPING ????????: 1. ???”??????”? ? 2. ???”????”? http://bbs.cantonese.asia/viewthread.php?tid=11459&pid=98523&page=1&extra=#pid98523
   * ???? http://www.gophor.com/cjkv/read.php?tid=9270&page=1&toread=1
   * ?????????:
   o http://penkyamp.pbwiki.com/Seuyap+Gonkgoy+Foxs
   o http://bbs.cantonese.asia/viewthread.php?tid=11180&extra=page%3D1&page=1
   o http://www.gophor.com/cjkv/read.php?tid=9330&page=1
   o http://www.somdom.com/viewthread.php?tid=3194&page=2&extra=page%3D1#pid12089
   o http://www.emus.cn/bbs/viewthread.php?tid=8856&page=1&extra=#pid34824
   o http://www.salars.cn/bbs/viewthread.php?tid=1777
   o http://fujian.qq.topzj.com/thread-403764-1-1.html
   o http://www.gzee.net/viewthread.php?tid=2728&extra=page%3D1&page=2
   o https://free.twforum.com/forums/showthread.php?t=92527
   o http://www.tuerqi.info/bbs/viewthread.php?tid=1030&page=2#pid38423

6. Zanhei.com was created by William Yin Zok-In of University of Chicago. He is my friend.

7. I found a Wikipedia user page possibly know William Yin. Naus is also a Chinese medical science student at U of Chicago. But his political views are very different from William’s, who goes by the internet nickname of Nishishei. Please message Naus on his talk page. I haven’t been in touch with William for two years. However, I am sure he is in one of these Wu dialect forums participating in the romanization program.

   Wikipedia user page:
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Naus

   Wu-Chinese forum
   http://wu-chinese.com/bbs/index.php

8. I can’t seem to download the zip file

9. I just tried, and the link above still worked for me. If you’re still having troubles, write me and I’ll e-mail you the file.