Examples of Dialect Differences Between
Peking, Shanghai and, Canton

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In the table superscript numbers are the tones, and brackets contain Pinyin writings (with superscript tones where HTML does not contain the appropriate diacritic).

	Shanghai	Peking
p-	pu1 "wave"	po1 [bo1]
p'-	p'u1 "slope"	p'o1 [po1]
b-	bu2 "old woman"	p'o2 [pó]
t-	tong1 "east"	tong1 [dong1]
t'-	t'ong1 "be open"	t'ong1 [tong1]
d-	dong2 "be alike"	t'ong2 [tóng]
k-	kuong1 "light"	kuang1 [guang1]
k'-	k'uong1 "frame"	k'uang1 [kuang1]
g-	guong2 "mad, wild"	k'uang2 [kuáng]
	Cantonese	Peking
-t/0	kat7a "cough"	k'e2 (sou4) [ké(sòu)]
-t/0	pat7a "brush"	pi3 [bi3]
-t/0	yüt7b/8 "moon"	yüeh4 [yuè]
-t/0	yat7a/8 "sun, day"	jih4 [rì]
-k/0	paak7b "hundred"	pai3 [bai3]
-k/0	sik7a "color"	(yen2)se4 [(yán)sè]
-k/0	kwok7byü4 "national language"	kou2yü3 [guóyu3]
-p/0	t'aap7b "pagoda"	t'a3 [ta3]
-p/0	yap8 "enter"	ju4 [rù]
-p/0	sap8 "ten"	shih2 [shí]

The Wu dialect of Shanghai is noteworthy because it retains the distinction between voiced and unvoiced, aspirated and unaspirated stops that existed in T'ang Chinese. In Mandarin the voiced stops have disappeared. In these examples, the voiced stops have seen assimilated to the aspirated ones.

Cantonese is noteworthy because it retains from T'ang Chinese a greater variety of finals. In Mandarin, a syllable must end in a vowel or in n or ng. In Cantonese, syllables can also end in p, t, k, or m as well. Words borrowed from Chinese into Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese often also preserve evidence of the older final consonants. Thus "China" (Mandarin Zhongguó, "Middle Country") in Korean is Chung-guk and in Japanese Chû-koku. Both of them have an extra consonant in "country" where Mandarin doesn't -- but Cantonese (Jòong-gwok) does.

I had a lingustics professor once who said that you could get a kind of "instant Proto-Indo-European" by combining Greek vowels and Sanskrit consonants. Well, we can get a kind of "instant T'ang Chinese" by combining Shanghai initials and Cantonese finals. The evidence is poor for older versions of Chinese. Cantonese also preserves the larger number of tones that T'ang Chinese had. Mandarin only has four now, but Cantonese has six, or even nine if the tones of finals that end in stops are counted separately, which they sometimes are.

The most daring theory is that the Chinese of Confucius's day didn't even have tones. Evidence for this is that other members of the Sino-Tibetan language family do not have tones, while the nearby family of the Daic languages (like Thai) all have tones. In another adjacent language family, the Austroasiatic (Mon-Khmer) group, some languages have tones (like Vietnamese) and others do not. It is tempting to see the phenomenon as a South-East Asian Sprach Bund where the Daic tones have influenced some languages in the Sino-Tibetan and Austroasiatic families.

At left are examples of the Cantonese tones, using the notation in Teach Yourself Cantonese by R. Bruce [Teach Yourself Books, Hodder and Stoughton, 1970, 1976, pp.12-13]. Different tone symbols are not needed for the 7th, 8th, and 9th tones (in other treatments, as in the table above, the 7th and 8th tones are styled 7a and 7b, while the 9th tone becomes the 8th). These words will look different in A Concise Cantonese-English Dictionary by Yang Mingxin [Guangdong Higher Education Publishing House, 1999]. First of all, the latter uses an adapted Pinyin alphabet, where "x" is used for "s" and "g" for final "k." Second, although Pinyin introduced the use of Greek-like accents to show tones, the Dictionary reverts to the old Wade-Giles way of simply numbering the tones with superscripts. Also, the Dictionary uses simplified forms of some of the characters. I have used the unsimplified characters in Bruce where these are available. The Yale system of Romanization, with discussion of some alternatives (though not the Pinyin) is used in the English-Cantonese Dictionary, by Kwan Choi Wah, et al. [The Chinese University Press, Hong Kong, 1991].

Dictionaries or grammars of Shanghai Chinese in English seem to all be out of print.

A nice example of a difference between Mandarin and Cantonese is a surname. This is Wú in the former, Ng in the latter. The Cantonese name is one of many words that are simply a syllabic ng. There is also a syllabic m in Cantonese, which is , "not," in Mandarin. That is the only word with that pronunciation in A Concise Cantonese-English Dictionary [pp.260-262]. Although it seems like there ought to be, there is no syllabic n in Cantonese. There is more than one character used for the Cantonese surname. At right, we see the traditional character first, then a recent simplified one to the right of the pronunciation. This was also the name of the Kingdom of Wu, one of the states of the Three Kingdoms Period in Chinese history, and of the modern language of Shanghai. At far right is an alternative character used, at least in Cantonese, for the surname. My only question is that the first character (with its simplification) and the second are pronounced differently. In Mandarin, the first has a 2nd tone, the second a 3rd. In Cantonese, the first has a 4th tone, the second a 5th (with the symbols used in Teach Yourself Cantonese). I originally learned of the two possible characters from a young woman whose name actually was Ng, but I didn't know then to ask about the different tones. Perhaps someone can help me out.

Note that the Cantonese spellings in the table above are from Teach Yourself Cantonese, while, as noted, A Concise Cantonese-English Dictionary uses a form of Pinyin adapted from Mandarin. Thus, words traditionally ending in t/k/p are written d/g/b in the latter.