Author: dsfsd
Date: 10-28-03 20:06
>>i am not saying that shanghainese sound like japanese
am saying anon's translation is like japanese
know some shanghainese and it sound nothing like what anon has translated<<
That's because I used Hepburn Romanization. Which is a romanization used for Japanese phonetics. Well, to tell you the truth... Modern Shanghainese spoken by people under age of 25 do indeed sound very similar to Japanese. The tones in Shanghainese have pretty much disappeared (replaced with long and short registers); syllables have all become much softer; and the final stops are now less abrupt.
Besides, I intentionally didn't use Hanyu Pinyin to transliterate because pinyin being made for Mandarin is VERY poor to transcribe Shanghainese.
the vowel for the ba in Mandarin sounds nothing close to the ba in Shanghainese, which is far softer and less pronounced. The Shanghainese word for magazine, (i transcribed as zattsu), would be impossible to transcribe using pinyin. First pinyin (Mandarin) 'z' is /dz/ and does not have the Shanghainese/English/Japanese 'z'. Second, the syllable 'za' in Shanghainese is short. Mandarin does not have short/long syllable distinction; Japanese does. The double consonant tt allows for a more accurate romanization of the sound, by indicating the za syllable in zattsu is short. Third, pinyin 'zi' is not very logical because 'zi' does not have the same vowel as 'ji' or 'ni' or 'di', because the 'i' in 'zi' is a voiced initial, different from the 'i' in 'ji'. Voiced initials in Wade-Giles and Hepburn are romanized by '-u'. Hence Sun-zi's Art of War is Sun-Tzu's Art of War.
It makes sense to use Hepburn to romanize Shanghainese, because it does the job (once you understand the system). But Hanyu Pinyin cannot even begin the task.
Examples:
magazine = zattsu in Shanghainese (in Japanese it is zasshi, by the way).
in Mandarin it is zhazhi. The vowel 'a' is not equivalent between Mandarin and Shanghainese; but are very close between Japanese and Shanghainese. The 'z's are not equivalent; and pinyin does not even have a letter for that sound. There is no short/long vowel distinction in pinyin either. And 'zh' is redundant in pinyin, since Shanghainese has no such sound. Also tones are not important in Shanghainese (most Shanghainese only use two pitch variations to speak as opposed to 4-5 in Mandarin).
race/ethnicity = minzoch in Shanghainese (Japanese: minzoku; with ku pronounced like a short 'k' in say English 'hawk'). "ch" there to indicate zo is short syllable with aspiration. minzoch would be impossible to romanize with pinyin (Mandarin's minzu is NOT equivalent, since pinyin z is /ds/ not English /z/).
I agree, there are some errors in my original list. It was a really haphazard creation. The only problem with using Hepburn romanization is because the Japanese also use it, and you don't like that.
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