Wu Jiading Huating Words Rhyme

Usually dialect investigation focuses on the towns ofadministrational centres but not remote rural area. However, theremoter area tends to be more conservative on its dialect andconserves more ancient language features. These regions, forinstance,as Huating town in the north-east of Jiading district in Shanghaimunicipality, have much value. According to the open materials, theclosest dialect points to Huating are Shuangcaodun and Luodian inBaoshan and the county town of Jiading. There is still no census openabout the dialect in Huating town, Jiading district. So, the author hasdone a field investigation with Tool for Field Work to do the soundrecording and Tool for Dialect to reorganize and analyse.The result of the investigation shows that there are27initialconsonants,45simple or compound vowels and6tones in JiadingHuating dialect. In terms of its initial consonants, the plosives andaffricates divided into three kinds: unaspirated voiceless sound,aspirated voiceless sound and voiced sound. This is the typical featureof the Wu dialect, and the MC voiced initials are still voiced initials intoday’s Huating dialect. Its simple or compound vowels have four kinds:vowels, nasal sound, nasalization and vowel ended with glottalstop. Compared with the middle ancient Chinese, the nasal end inHuating has just the?, and its stop ends have merged into one, the?.With a view to its middle ancient source, the six tones are yinping,yangping, yinqu, yangqu, yinru, yangru. And its yinping, yangping, yinru,yangru are corresponding to those characters of pingsheng tone withvoiceless initials, pingsheng tone with voiced initials, rusheng tone withvoiceless initials, rusheng tone with voiced initials in middle ancientChinese. However, today’s yinqu tone including those characters ofshangsheng tone and qusheng tone with voiceless initials, and its yangqu tone including those characters of shangsheng tone withvoiced initials and qusheng tone with voiced initials.The outstanding characteristics of its coordination between initialsand vowels are: labial initials, alveolar initials and the initial? do notcoordinate with Hekouhu vowels except u. Palatal initials do notcoordinate with any Hekouhu vowel. y is the only cuokouhu vowel andit does not coordinate with labial initials, velar initials and the initial th, d,n, h. Besides, about160characters have the phenomenon of literalreading and colloquial reading, and the two kinds of reading aremainly showed on initials and vowels. Compared with the dialect of thecounty town of Jiading, the most dominant difference is that thosecharacters which belonged to the Han vowel, Duan system, have thetwo sounds of literal reading and colloquial reading in Huating but notin the county town.Compared with other two dialects, Jiading Huating dialect is moredifferent from Beijing dialect. In terms of initials, just the initial m and l areone to one in the two places. In Huating there is a whole system ofvoiced plosives, affricates and fricatives but in Beijing there are justvoiceless ones as correspondence. The group?,?h, s in Huating is incorresponding to the three groups:?,?h, s, t?, t?h,? and?,?h,? inBeijing. In terms of vowels, the pure vowels in Beijing are incorresponding to both the pure vowels and the vowels ended withglottal stop. Huating has syllabicational nasal but Beijing has not whileBeijing has the retroflex vowel? but Huating has not. Otherwise, thevowels of cuokouhu in Beijing are more plentiful than that in Huating. Interms of tones, Huating is two more than that of Beijing. Thecorresponding law between the two places is complex for the law ofdifferentiation and combination from the middle ancient Chinese isdifferent in the two places. Comparatively, the dialects in Huating andthe county town are much more closer. The initials’ number and kinds are the same in two places and so are the tones, only the tone pitchesof yinqu are different. The mainly differences are on the vowels.