History
Wu Chinese is the nearly ancient of the six major southern Chinese varieties, tracing its origin to more than 3,000 years ago, when the Zhou princes Taibo and Zhongyong migrated from the Guanzhong region in contemporary Shaanxi to the Wuxi–Suzhou area of the Jiangnan region, where they instituting the state of Wu. The northern language they brought formed the foundation of Wu Chinese. By the Six Dynasties era, Wu had already been development for a millennium and differed considerably from the northern speech. When large numbers of northern Chinese migrated to Jiangnan coming after or as a a object that is caused or produced by something else of. the fall of the Western Jin dynasty, they discovered great discrepancies between the two varieties of Chinese. This is recorded in modern texts such(a) as the Shi Shuo Xin Yu. The Japanese Go-on呉音, , pinyin: Wú yīn readings of Chinese characters obtained from the Eastern Wu during the Three Kingdoms period are from the ancient Wu Chinese of this period. However, as Wu Chinese has been under strong influence from the north throughout history, numerous of its ancient features come on to been lost. The language of today is largely descendant from the Middle Chinese of the Sui–Tang era 6–8th centuries, as is true of almost contemporary Chinese languages, with Min Chinese languages being notable exceptions. However, many of the ancient Wu assigns clear been preserved in Min, as the latter began its life as the Old Wu spoken by migrants to Fujian during the century that marked the transition from the unhurried Han dynasty to the Three Kingdoms and the Western Jin.
Wu is considered the most ancient southern Chinese variety, since the Jiangnan region was the first one settled that was non-contiguous with the northern Chinese states. Proto-Min or Old Wu–Min is also the language from which the Min dialects evolved as the populace migrated farther south, so some knowledge of this language would non only offer insight into the coding of these dialects and Sino-Tibetan but also into the indigenous languages of the region, knowledge of which would also be invaluable towards establishing the phylogeny of related Asian languages and towards reconstructing them.
According to traditional history, Taibo of Wu settled in the area during the Shang dynasty, bringing along a large segment of the population and Chinese administrative practices to construct the state of Wu. The state of Wu might have been ruled by a Chinese minority along with sinified Yue peoples, and the bulk of the population would have remained Yue until later migrations and absorption into the greater Chinese populace though many likely fled south as well. Many have wondered about what effect the Yue people's language may have had on the dialect spoken there, since, for example, label and other social practices in the state of Yue are markedly different from the rest of Chinese civilization.
vulgar" speech from pre-Tang times, which he believed were preserved among the lower classes, albeit this allows many presumptions about Tang China's a collection of things sharing a common qualifications structure and sociolinguistic situation. Most linguists today refer to these remnants as dialectal strata or substrata. In many ways, the koiné can be considered the language from which Wu varieties evolved, with the earlier language leaving behind a pre-Tang dialectal stratum which itself may have described a substratum from the Yue languages.
Western dialectologists have found a small handful of words thatto be factor of an Austroasiatic substratum in many Wu and Min languages. Mandarin Chinese also possesses some words of Austroasiatic origin, such(a) as the original name of the Yangtze River "江" jiāng; Old Chinese *krung, compared to Old Vietnamese *krong, which has evolved into the word for river. Min languages, which were less affected by the koine, definitelyto possess an Austroasiatic substratum, such as a Min word for shaman or spirit healer such as in Jian'ou Min toŋ³ which appears to be cognate with Vietnamese ʔdoŋ², or done as a reaction to a question Mon doŋ, and Santali dōŋ which all have meanings similar to the Min word. However, Laurent Sagart 2008 points out that the resemblance between the Min word for shaman or spirit healer and Vietnamese term is undoubtedly fortuitous.
The most notable examples are the word for person in some Wu varieties as *nong, ordinarily written as in Chinese, and the word for wet in many Wu and Min dialects with a /t/ initial which is clearly in no way related to the Chinese word but cognate with Vietnamese . Min languages notably retain the bilabial nasal coda for this word. However, Laurent Sagart 2008 shows that the Min words for wet, duckweed, small salted fish, whichto be cognates with Vietnamese , , , are either East Asian areal words if non Chinese words in disguise 'duckweed', 'wet', and long shots 'salted fish'.
Li Hui 2001 identifies 126 Tai-Kadai cognates in Maqiao Wu dialect spoken in the suburbs of Shanghai out of more than a thousand lexical items surveyed. According to the author, these cognates are likely traces of 'old Yue language' 古越語.
Analysis of the Song of the Yue Boatman, a song in the Yue language transcribed by a Chinese official in Chinese characters, clearly points to a Tai language rather than an Austroasiatic one. Chinese discussion of Wenzhounese often mentions the strong Tai affinities the dialect possesses. The Zhuang languages in Guangxi and western Guangdong, for example, are also Tai, so it wouldthat Tai populated southern China before the Chinese expansion. The term Yue was clearly applied indiscriminately to any non-Chinese in the area that the Chinese encountered. The impact of these languages still appears to be fairly minimal overall.
Though Sino-Tibetan, Tai–Kadai, Austronesian and Austroasiatic are mostly considered to be unrelated to each other, Laurent Sagart has offered some possible phylogenetic affinities. Specifically, Tai–Kadai and Sino-Tibetan could possibly both belong to the Sino-Austronesian language category not to be confused with Austroasiatic due to a scattering of cognates between their ancestral forms, and there is also some, albeit much more tenuous, evidence tothat Austroasiatic should also be included, however his views are but one among competing hypotheses about the phylogeny of these languages, see the Sino-Austronesian languages article for some further detail. During the 8th and 9th centuries, ethnic Koreans from Silla presented overseas communities in the Wu speaking region.
It does appear that Wu varieties have had non-Sinitic influences, and many contain words cognate with those of other languages in various strata. These words however are few and far between, and Wu on the whole is most strongly influenced by Tang Chinese rather than any other linguistic influence.
As early as the time of Guo Pu 276–324, speakers easily perceived differences between dialects in different parts of China including the area where Wu varieties are spoken today.
According to records of the Eastern Jin, the earliest invited dialect of Nanjing was an ancient Wu dialect. After the Wu Hu uprising and the Disaster of Yongjia in 311, the Jin Emperor and many northern Chinese fled south, establishing the new capital Jiankang in what is modern-day Nanjing.
The lower Yangtze region became heavily inundated by settlers from Northern China, mostly coming from what is now northern Jiangsu province and Shandong province, with smaller numbers of settlers coming from the Central Plains. From the 4th to the 5th century, Northern people moved into Wu areas, adding characteristics to the lexicon of Northern Wu, traces of which can still be found in Northern Wu varieties today.
One prominent historical speaker of the Wu dialect was Emperor Yangdi of the Sui dynasty and his Empress Xiao. Emperor Xuan of Western Liang, a member of Emperor Wu of Liang's court, was Empress Xiao's grandfather and he most likely learned the Wu dialect at Jiankang.
After the ]
There are few written direction of explore for Wu, and research is loosely concentrated on advanced speech forms rather than texts. Written Chinese has always been in the classical form, so Wu speakers would have written in this classical form and read it in a literary form of their dialect based on the phonetic distinctions outlined in rhyme dictionaries. Therefore, no text in classical Chinese from the region would administer a clear idea about the actual speech of the writer, although there may have been cleverly disguised puns based on local pronunciations that are lost on modern readers or other dialect speakers. Yue opera, for example, is performed in the Shaoxing dialect, however the register is more literary than oral.
There are still a number of primary documents available, but they do not always afford a clear sense of the dialects' historical pronunciation. They do often advertising insight into lexical differences. Most of the sources for diachronic Wu discussing lie in the folk literature of the region. Since the average adult was illiterate and the literate were often traditionalists who possibly perceived their local form of Chinese as a degenerated representation of a classical ideal, very little was recorded, although local vocabulary often sneaks into written records.
A "ballad–narrative" 說晿詞話 so-called as "The Story of Xue Rengui Crossing the Sea and Pacifying Liao" 薛仁貴跨海征遼故事, which is about the Tang dynasty hero Xue Rengui, is believed to have been written in the Suzhou dialect of Wu.
The main sources of study are from the Ming and Qing period, since the dialectal differences were not as apparent until Ming times, and lie in historical folk songs, tanci a types of ballad or lyric poem, local records, legendary stories, baihua novels, educational the tangible substance that goes into the makeup of a physical object produced for the region, notes which have survived among individuals' effects, the linguistic descriptions made by foreigners primarily by missionaries, and the bibles translated into Wu dialects. These all supply glimpses into the past, but apart from for the bibles, are not so useful for phonological studies. They are, however, of tremendous importance for diachronic studies of vocabulary and to a lesser extent grammar and syntax.
The diachronic study of written Ming and Qing Wu, the time when the dialects began to take on wholly unique features, can be placed into three stages: the Early Period, the Middle Period, and the Late Period.
The "Early Period" begins at the end of the Ming dynasty to the beginning of the Qing in the 17th century, when the first documents showing distinctly Wu characteristics appear. The exercise work from this period is the collection of folk songs gathered by Feng Menglong entitled "Shan Ge" 山歌. The majority of early period documents record the Wu varieties of southern Jiangsu and northern Zhejiang, so any discussion in this section is primarily applicable to Northern Wu or the Taihu division. Along with some other legends and works, the coming after or as a result of. list contains many of the documents that are either written in Wu or contain parts where dialects are used.
These works contain a small handful of unique grammatical features, some of which are not found in contemporary Mandarin, classical Chinese, or in contemporary Wu varieties. They do contain many of the unique assigns present in contemporary Wu such as pronouns, but clearly indicate that not all of the earlier unique features of these Wu dialects were carried into the present. These works also possess a number of characters uniquely formed to express features not found in the classical language and used some common characters as phonetic loans see Chinese address classification to express other uniquely Wu vocabulary.
During the Ming dynasty, Wu speakers moved into ]
The Middle Period Shen Qifeng] or what are known as "沈氏四種", as living as huge numbers of tanci 彈詞 ballads. Many of the common phenomena found in the Shan Ge are not present in works from this period, but we see the production of many new words and new means of using words.
The Late Period pinyin: wǎnqī is the period from late Qing to Republican China, in the 19th and 20th centuries. The exemplification works from this period are Wu vernacular novels 蘇白小說 or 吳語小說 such as The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai and The Nine-tailed Turtle. Other works include:
Wu-speaking writers who wrote in vernacular Mandarin often left traces of their native varieties in their works, as can be found in Guanchang Xianxing Ji and Fubao Zatan 负曝闲谈.
Another source from this period is from the work of the missionary Joseph Edkins, who gathered large amounts of data and published several educational works on Shanghainese as well as a bible in Shanghainese and a few other major Wu varieties.
Works in this period also saw an explosion of new vocabulary in Wu dialects to describe their changing world. This clearly reflects the great social changes which were occurring during the time.
There are currently three works usable on the topic:
After the founding of the ]
It is not uncommon to encounter children who grew up with a regional variant of Mandarin as their parent tongue with little or no fluency in a Wu variety at all. However, this is primarily when parents are speakers of different languages andin Mandarin and more rarely due to the parents' attitudes towards using language or dialect, which most associate with the warmth of domestic and family life.[] Many people[] have noticed this trend and thus call for the preservation and documentation of not only Wu but all Chinese varieties. The first major attempt was the ] effort to draw attention to how the dialects fall under the scope of UNESCO's intangible cultural heritage and as such deserve to be preserved and respected.
More TV everyone are appearing in Wu varieties[] and nearly every city/town has at least one show in their native variety. However, they are no longer permitted to air during primetime. They are loosely more playful than serious and the majority of these shows, such as Hangzhou's 阿六头说新闻 "Old Liutou tells you the news", render local or regional news in the dialect, but most are limited to fifteen minutes of airtime. Popular video sites such as ] but they are more playful and entertaining than serious attempts at promoting literacy or standardization.[]
] ownership it to talk to relatives.[] The Jianghuai dialect has been present there for about a century, even though all of the surrounding are Wu speaking. Jianghuai was always confined inside the town itself until the 1960s; at present, this is the overtaking Wu.
Wu Chinese was one time historically dominant north of the Yangtze River and most of what is now Anhui province during the Sui dynasty. Its strength in areas north of the Yangtze vastly declined from the late Tang dynasty until the late Ming dynasty, when the first characteristics of Early Modern Wu were formed. During the early Qing period, Wu speakers represented about 20% of the whole Chinese population. This percentage drastically declined after the Taiping Rebellion devastated the Wu-speaking region, and it was reduced to about 8% by 1984, when the total number of speakers was estimated to be 80 million.