Talk:Wu Chinese

message: The bit where it says Wu is SOV or has a high occurance of SOV. Well i am Wu blood and speaker, and i can tell you right now, its not high occurance. Regulary the syntax of words get changed round heaps, but not in the manner from SVO to SOV. its not such a drastic change. However i could be wrong, there might be weird cases. So it would be good to state some examples. --Fifty lightning (talk) 12:49, 31 March 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: SOV

message: I have since removed the claim that there are over 100 million Wu Chinese speakers. Cantonese has about twice or three times that amount, and is thus the second most spoken dialect after Mandarin. ★Dasani★ 00:02, 16 January 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Cantonese has about twice or three times the amount of speakers than Wu? Stop inventing lies! It has actually less speakers. It just seems much because Cantonese gets all the attention abroad and ignorant foreigners think there are only two major dialects of Chinese. --2.245.120.17 (talk) 04:25, 18 August 2016 (UTC)

text: Wu is not a single language, and it is divided into many different mutually unintelligible dialects like the Min Chinese dialects. Sonic99 (talk) 02:46, 8 August 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Regardless, any claims like this should be sourced. Colipon+(Talk) 06:45, 8 August 2009 (UTC)
replies: text:  Um, Cantonese has variants too... The variations aren't as great but to say that all Wu dialects are mutually unintelligible is pretty retarded. I can understand pretty much anyone from Zhejiang and parts of Jiangxi just fine and I grew up with the Suzhou dialect. Someone source how many Cantonese speakers and Wu speakers in China and I'm fairly certain that Wu beats out Cantonese, but if you take in overseas Chinese then we have a whole different minefield I'm not getting into. 173.60.170.28 (talk) 06:40, 9 August 2009 (UTC)
replies: text:  Ethnologue classifies Wu as 77 million which is more than Yue (Cantonese) so I'm changing it back. If anyone has a better source then source it, but the current source indicates that Wu has more speakers than Yue, even if it's not 100 million. Can't you guys read the sources? Karajanis (talk) 06:50, 9 August 2009 (UTC)

text:  Yes. Ethnologue is generally quite reliable. Also, in response to IP 173.60..., I have travelled Zhejiang extensively, and my experiences tell me that some parts of Zhejiang are so linguistically diverse that people from one valley speak a different dialect from people to the next, which may or may not be mutually intelligible. I know Wenzhou dialect is largely not mutually intelligible with other Wu dialects. Taizhou dialect is harder for Shanghai speakers to understand than Hangzhou dialect. Wuxi dialect takes at least a few weeks to fully pick up from a Shanghainese speaker etc. etc. Colipon+(Talk) 08:18, 9 August 2009 (UTC)
replies: text:  Karajanis, Wu Chinese is like the Min Chinese which is broken down into many different mutally unintelligible dialects. Don't you know that? Northern Wu speakers and Southern Wu speakers can't understand each other. But the Cantonese dialects are not like the Wu Chinese and Min Chinese. The Guangxi Cantonese is very similar to the Guangdong Standard Cantonese with the only difference in accents. I don't know about the Hainanese Cantonese, but it could be partially intelligible with Guangdong Cantonese. Sonic99 (talk) 03:01, 12 August 2009 (UTC)
replies: text:  I speak the Suzhou dialect natively and the only kind of Wu I can't understand at all is the Wenzhou variety, but that's besides the point since virtually every source I've read considers it a part of the Wu dialect family anyway. You can make an argument that the Wenzhou dialect doesn't count as Wu, but then you might have to make up a whole new category for that and take 5 million speakers off the Wu count. You're still left with 72 million to 52 million. Oh yeah, and the lack of acceptance of Hainanese immigrants to Singapore amongst the Cantonese or Fujianese secret societies in the mid to late 1800s probably indicate that their dialects aren't exactly completely mutually intelligible as well. Karajanis (talk) 13:36, 16 November 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Taihu Northern Wu dialects are mostly intelligible. Partially mutually intelligible doesn't means mutually intelligible, therefore Taizhou dialect is not intelligible with Shanghainese.  Hainanese speak a Min Nan dialect which cannot be understood by other Min Nan speakers and Cantonese speakers. Surprisingly, some local Hainanese can speak Cantonese. With a large Cantonese population in and outside of China, Cantonese or Yue speakers still outnumber the Wu speakers. Sonic99 (talk) 02:54, 2 December 2009 (UTC)
replies: text:  Wait, first of all, mere spoken intelligibility doesn't make up the entire criteria for determining whether a dialect belongs to a language (or we'd have way more isolates than just Basque, Ainu, and the Finno-Uralic), you also have to factor in grammar, idioms, a host of things. Second, how intelligible would you count it as "intelligible"? There are Shanghainese words I don't understand, as its foreign influence is much larger than the other Wu dialects. I've read a report about the difference between Guangzhou and Hong Kong varieties of Yue and a case could be made that the vocabulary consists enough loan words to separate the two, not to mention the intelligibility of Guangxi/Hainan varieties. If you want to go by intelligibility, what benchmark would you use? Also, is there a source for the number of overseas Yue speakers? Personally I'd let the Ethnologue numbers until better sources can be found. Karajanis (talk) 12:04, 27 January 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: 100 million+?

message: There is a great but not complete degree of mutual intelligibility between written Wu and Mandarin within the People's Republic of China as both are written in the current Vernacular Chinese, which uses Simplified Chinese characters as well as grammar and vocabulary centred on Standard Mandarin with a few allowances for "regional variation".
^That sentence doesn't really make sense. Written Wu is as different from Vernacular Chinese as Wu is from Mandarin. If Written Wu were written in Vernacular Chinese, then it wouldn't quite be Written Wu, would it now?
I think it ought to be removed.Micro01 (talk) 15:38, 10 April 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Sentence about mutual intelligibility of written Wu 

message: Here is the confusion. In all Chinese books available in PRC and online blog and interview with Chinese linguists, almost everything/everyone says Wu Chinese was the first established Chinese Dialect/Language. One book 《汉语方言学基础教程》 puts the latest limit to be Three Kingdoms due to Eastern Wu, which is hundreds of years before Middle Chinese. 
However, all books and people also agree that Wu Chinese has been heavily influenced by Mandarin/Northern Chinese of different period. And this is the only reason why Wu Chinese shows features more like Middle Chinese.
So if the article here states that Wu Chinese is derived from Middle Chinese, there better be strong evidences or references. Otherwise, I am gonna change it to what I read and hear.--Tricia Takanawa (talk) 00:16, 3 August 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  History 

message: Throughout this article, the term "Standard Wu" appears. I would like to know where this came from and who decided that Shanghainese is the standard? Based on what authority? The Hangzhou dialect is clearly the most intellegible to all Wu speakers because of its high levels of Mandarinization and many people also consider Hangzhounese the 普通话 of the Wu lectosphere should there be one. People from Hangzhou can speak their dialect and be mostly understand by most Wu speakers. Shanghainese is one of the most atypically Wu varieties of Wu. It has no tone system, its vocabulary is a hodge podge of different dialects and pidgin English. You could very well consider it a creole different Chinese dialects and not the kind of natural language which is the object of inquiry in linguistics. Dialectologists never look to Shanghainese for insight into the traditional or ancestral forms of Wu, it is anathema in the field. Why else would it have been excluded from Beijing University's seminal dialectology surveys?
If there is such a thing as "Standard Wu" then there should be a regulatory organization or committee of some sort of Wu experts which issue publications clearly defining what this standard is, what standardized characters are used for Wu vocabulary, they should have meetings, vote on the standard, publish it and should produce representative works in the standardized language to get it started, yet despite my continuous searches for works on Wu in Chinese bookstores and online book shops and the fifty odd books I have about Wu, I have never encountered such a thing, since it would likely incite an adverse reaction from the central government (since even a search for "standard Wu" in Chinese appears to be blocked by the firewall) or may not even be permitted to be published in the first place. Although this "Wu Association" plays with the notion of a standard Wu, it has been only making standard Romanizations (standard meaning consistently dealing with phonetic distinctions) for individual dialects (not a broad standardized language, and Romanization is no arduous task) and putting them online. The associations is by no means an association. It's not much more than a wiki. There are no members, no meetings, no office. It's just a website. Their website clearly states the association is just a website. The work these guys do is mostly ineffectual without widespread implementation in schools (where dialects are in principal banned) and publications of the standard (which would likely again be banned). Anyone can put some stuff on a website and say it's a standard, but that's utterly meaningless without implementation, and implementation would be ineffectual because of the large populations of people who don't speak the dialects that reside in Wu areas, which then makes them second class citizens and linguistically isolated. 
You can't have a standard nobody knows about... This idea of a unified Wu is preposterous. The whole concept of Wu is brand new and founded in the common phonetic features the dialects share and some mutual history. It was a couple guys drawing a line on a map after some surveys and that's it. It has little to do with commonalities in grammar or vocabulary or native Wu speakers sense of a unified Wu cultural sphere. We're not talking about French dialects here, there is no Wu country and no official Wu Chinese ethnicity. Simply choosing Shanghainese as the standard would destroy the natural diversity of the dialects when even Mandarin has combined some dialectal features as well. Unless someone has some justification for this vocabulary, I plan on purging it from the article.D.s.ronis (talk) 13:19, 5 June 2011 (UTC)
thread_title: Standard Wu

message: Most of the claims such as "the pronoun system in Wu" gives the reader the impression that Wu is mostly internally homogeneous. There are some twenty plus pronoun system typologies found in Wu varieties, how can you deceive people into thinking they are all the same?
I plan on editing out this vocabulary with more appropriate vocab of "in some Wu varieties..." or "in representative Wu varieties..." as you cannot talk about Wu as a unified entity. That's like saying "Russians are alcoholics" and while a disproportionate number are, it's incorrect to place all Russians in this category. D.s.ronis (talk) 13:19, 5 June 2011 (UTC)
thread_title: in Wu...

message: This article overall has a multitude of quality issues and lots of inappropriate and deceptive content which I hope to improve or remove.
I feel the need to remove "Common words and phrases in Wu" and the examples (which are mostly not representative) in vocabulary or place them in the Shanghainese article or an article about Shanghainese examples (which are horribly idiosyncratic and atypical for Wu) but don't want to act so imperiously. Does anyone have a justification for their presence? The article needs to focus on Wu universals and feature typologies and not get caught up in the idiographic minutiae of individual dialects (that's what the dialects' pages are for).
D.s.ronis (talk) 13:19, 5 June 2011 (UTC)
thread_title: Vocabulary

message: There is /ɺ/ (Alveolar lateral flap) in Wu Chinese? Shouldn't it be /l/ instead? Correct me if I'm wrong because I don't speak any Wu dialect.
--N6EpBa7Q (talk) 04:51, 25 March 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: I say it's the opposite. Modern Wu pronounces "er" just like in Mandarin since the syllable only exists in literary reading: Literary and colloquial readings of Chinese characters.--2001:16B8:2E64:E100:315A:DCEB:3374:FEEE (talk) 01:56, 19 April 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  Flap Consonant in Wu Chinese? 

message: The beginning part of the section is misleading and factually incorrect. Most Chinese dialects (Wu and non-Wu ones) were used in school well into the 1980's. When I went to primary school in Suzhou in the mid-1990s many teachers continued to use Wu in class. "the strong promotion of Mandarin" didn't start in most part of China until late 1980's. Even in the early 2000s when I was in senior high school there were still some elderly teachers who taught exclusively in Wu. 
If someone could edit this section it would be great. I would do it but I'm really bad at English so I hope someone could do it. Thanks a lot! — Preceding unsigned comment added by Sekyinb (talk • contribs) 04:34, 24 September 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Inaccurate information in the Post-1949 section 

message: The following line appears in the introduction to this article:
> the phonetic history of the Chinese language
This presupposes a unitary "Chinese language", and this is of course controversial. I'm not familiar with Wikipedia's official position on the status of the Chinese language(s), and I'm not Chinese myself, so I don't feel I'm in any position to say whether the article should say "the Chinese language" or "the Chinese languages". But as a linguistics student particularly familiar with the Chinese languages vis a vis my girlfriend, I'd tend to see "the Chinese language" as a less accurate term than "the Chinese languages". But again, this is my American perspective, and Wikipedia is an international site. And I don't think this substantially affects the overall quality of the article, but I think that fellow Wikipedians will understand my pet peeve. If anyone can inform me of Wikipedia's official stance on this topic, or tell me whether I should add a damn 's' where it ought to be, please let me know. 128.151.134.233 (talk) 08:48, 3 May 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Pedantic concern 

message: Seems an odd thing to call the actual languages of Wu and Yue. Is there any better term or a language code? — LlywelynII 16:13, 23 July 2014 (UTC)
thread_title: Proto-Wu

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: You've made major edits with no reliable sources or any discussion and have been repeatedly reverted by . In order not to start an edit war, please share your point in this page, discuss with others and reach consensus before making your edit. Prcuvu (talk) 15:35, 23 January 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Don't do arbitrary edits 

message: I have seen some books and media refer to it as Wunese instead of Shanghainese or Wu, should make mention of that, or is it Chinglish?  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 60.242.81.170 (talk) 21:48, 3 March 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: I've never seen that (and it sounds terrible).  The only uses I can find on Google books are a century or more old.  Kanguole 22:14, 3 March 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: Are you dumb? That person was referring to the name "Wunese" sounding terrible. --178.7.47.110 (talk) 01:35, 12 August 2017 (UTC)

text: You need to cite a reliable source to verify current usage. El_C 03:29, 5 March 2017 (UTC)
thread_title: Wunese

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: The fourth paragraph of the introduction states: "There is an idiom in Mandarin that specifically describes these qualities of Wu speech: Ngu nung nioe ngiu (吴侬软语)..." This seems to imply that 吴侬软语 is read as "Ngu nung nioe ngiu" in Mandarin, when that is in fact the *Wu* pronunciation of the idiom. The Mandarin pronunciation (written in pinyin) is "wú nóng ruǎn yǔ". I suggest that the Mandarin pronunciation be substituted for the Wu pronunciation.
— Preceding unsigned comment added by Stopdropandrock (talk • contribs) 16:35, 13 September 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Mandarin idiom in the introduction 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: This page claims:
    The Japanese Go-on (呉音, goon, 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, the Go-on page claims:
    there is no historical documentation to demonstrate that go-on readings are actually based on Southern Chinese.
This appears to be a contradiction and I suspect that one of the two pages should be edited, but I'm not sure which. The citation on this page one sentence later makes no mention of Japanese, and there is no citation on the Go-on page. Ununoctium117 (talk) 05:27, 23 March 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: There are a few readings about Chinese characters in Japanese and Go-on is one of them. Go-on is said that Japanese had already used before readings called Kan-on based on readings in Chang'an (Xi'an now) were introduced in 7th or 8th century. However there is not any clear proof that it is based on readings in Eastern Wu or other Wu's. Connection to Wu is very doubtful because the term "Go-on" has been used since middle of Heian Period between 784 and end of 12th century.--とんずらする豚 (talk) 07:00, 23 March 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Japanese Go-on Readings