User Comments - changye
changye
Posted on: Haggling Like a Local
May 1, 2010 at 9:08 AMHi jiangcheng1985
Thanks a lot for your reply.
To put it another way, the question is "how important are tones in modern Shanghainese?" I heard before that today young Shanghainese people virtually use only two tones, i.e., high and low pitches, and this is just enough for communicating in Shanghainese. Is this true? How many tones do you usually use when speaking in Shanghainese?
Incidentally, I enjoyed reading the article “四声与用韵” shown in your comment. However, as far as I know, “入声” already began to disappear several hundred years before “满清入关” (1644). I think that invasions by northern ethnic groups, such as 契丹族，女真，and 蒙古, between the 10th and the 14th centuries perhaps triggered the disappearance of 入声. Just for the record.
Posted on: Haggling Like a Local
May 1, 2010 at 7:43 AMHi jiangcheng1985
Can I have your opinion on the following comment about tones in modern Shanghainese posted by ksarvestani in other thread? Many thanks!
> Okay, so this is probably going to be a very sticky and controversial question, but what exactly do the presenters mean when they say that Shanghainese has "7 or 8 tones, definitely more than Mandarin"?
> Everything that I have read before about Shanghainese suggests that it uses a much simpler tone system than Mandarin with no more than two phonemic tones. I have even read that some scholars analyze Shanghainese as not having lexical tone and instead classifying it as a pitch-accent language like Japanese.
> I'm not trying to cause a scholarly controversy here, I'm just wondering what exactly the presenters meant to say.
Posted on: Suffix Magic
May 1, 2010 at 7:27 AMSome Chinese suffixes （词尾）, such as “化”, “性”, “型”, “感”, and “主义”, came into use in China only about a hundred years ago, which was a result of Europeanization of the Chinese language.
These words, which are translations of European concepts, were created first by Japanese people, and later introduced to China mainly by Chinese intelligentsia who studied in Japan at that time.
The three major East Asian languages, Chinese, Korean and Japanese, were greatly influenced by European languages during modernization in the late 19th century and the first half of the 20th century.
Below are some examples I found on the net.
词尾“化”：多元化、大众化、公式化、电气 化、革命化……
词尾“式”：西洋式、方程式、简易式、问答式、流动式……
词尾“炎”：气管炎、关节炎、胃炎、肠炎……
词尾“力”：生产力、消费力、想象力、劳动力、记忆力……
词尾“性”：可能性、偶然性、放射性、原则性、创造性……
词尾“的”：大众的、自然的、必然的、偶然的、秘密的……
词尾“型”：新型、流线型、标准型……
词尾“论”：方法论、唯物论、认识论、结论、推论……
词尾“观”：主观、乐观、悲观、世界观、宇宙观……
词尾“法”：辩证法、分析法、归纳法……
词尾“感”：美感、好感、情感、敏感、读后感、优越感
Posted on: An Introduction!
May 1, 2010 at 6:05 AMHi mikemiller
저는 한자의 역사, 특히 한자독음의 역사에 매우 흥미가 있어, 중국어, 일본어, 그리고 한국어의 역사에 관한 책을 자주 읽습니다. 그 때문에 한국어에 대하는 지식이 필요하게 되어 조금씩 공부하게 되었습니다. 회화는 잘 못하지만 매일 한국어신문기사 몇개를 읽도록 하고 있습니다.
Posted on: What do Foreigners Like?
May 1, 2010 at 4:26 AMI always wonder why some people are so nervous about the word “老外” (= 外国人) in Chinese. Like it or not, we are 外国人 here in China, after all. Don't you use a similar word such as "foreign people, auslander, etranger, uitlander" in your countries?
Posted on: An Introduction!
May 1, 2010 at 4:03 AMHI ksarwestani
The most interesting thing about Dongba script is that the meaning of some characters change according to their colors, as you already know. For example, "blue" indicates "male" when it's used for animals, and "red" means "female". I guess that color laser printers sell well among Nasi people!
Posted on: An Invitation to the God of Wealth
April 30, 2010 at 7:50 AM总之，关公对商人来讲是一种“保镖”！
Posted on: An Invitation to the God of Wealth
April 30, 2010 at 3:06 AM转祸为福 (zhuan3huo4wei2fu2)
Posted on: An Introduction!
April 30, 2010 at 3:00 AMHi ksarvestani
I heard the same story before. I hope that native Shanghainese staff of Chinesepod would post a comment about this issue.
Incidentally, I think your avatar is very attractive. Is that Dongba script (东巴文)or something like that?
Posted on: Requesting a Fork
May 1, 2010 at 9:21 AMI always wonder why young Chinese people who come here love to use "wanna" instead of "want to" or "would like to". Does the phrase often appear in English textbooks used in the PRC?