The Languages of China

92 THE CHINESE LANGUAGE

Shanghainese Consonants

Denti- Retro- Alveo- Post-

Labial labial Dental flex lar Palatal Velar velar Glottal

Voiceless stop
Aspirated stop
Voiced stop
Voiceless affricate
Aspirated affricate
Voiced affricate
Voteless fricative
Voiced fricative
Nasal

Voiceless nasal
Lateral

Voiceless lateral
Flap or trill
Voiceless flap
Semivowels

There are an especially large number of vowels in Shanghainese: i, e, e, a, z, a,
3, j, u, o, ii, 6, er. The vowel that is written here as z is pronounced with the blade
of the tongue so close to the alveolar ridge it has a fricative quality. It is similar to
the vowel of Mandarin si 'four,' and it only occurs after the consonants ts-, ts'-, s-,
and z-. The central vowel S is very unusual; it is pronounced with the tongue
bunched up in the center of the mouth, but how the articulation differs from that
of schwa (a) is uncertain. The acoustic impression is that it has rounding of some
kind. The retroflex vowel er, which is pronounced like its Mandarin equivalent, is
heard mostly in learned words; er 2 'ear,' for example, is the form a Shanghainese
doctor uses in the term for the ear-nose-throat department of a clinic. The usual,
colloquial word for 'ear' is ni l (or ni l tu).

This large inventory of vowels is in part the result of historical changes. Many
vowels, for example, come from original diphthongs. Others occur in syllables
where a final nasal has been lost. In such cases Mandarin has been more con-
servative. Compare the following words:

Shanghai

Peking

come
'good'

A Shanghainese syllable can only end in a vowel, a glottal stop (q), or the nasal
-ng. The final nasal is sometimes heard as a real velar consonant [ng], and some-
times just as nasalization on the preceding vowel — the word for 'square,' for

S. ROBERT RAMSEY

The Languages of
China

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY

PRESS
Copyright © 1987 by Princeton University Press