Handbook on the Vocabulary Survey of Chinese Dialects

Author: Shi Haoquan / Gu Qian / Shi Rujie (editors)
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-06-01
Features: This book is the first standalone survey manual on vocabulary of Chinese dialects published in China. It is one of the outcomes of the joint research project between the U.S. and China titled "The Boundary between Jianghuai Mandarin and Wu in Jiangsu Province." Previous published dialect surveys and glossaries mostly focused on nouns, neglecting verbs, adjectives, and function words; they emphasized phonetics over vocabulary itself; lacked tone sandhi tables; and the vocabulary lists had to be photocopied, with no space left for recording survey data, making them inconvenient to use. This book addresses these shortcomings. Entries are arranged in phonetic order, with three glossaries and a tone sandhi survey table. The detailed table contains over 1,900 entries for in-depth investigation; the concise table has more than 440 core entries for preliminary surveys before in-depth investigation; the short table has 60 core entries that can be used to create dialect maps. At the end of the book, there is a directory of survey locations for this project and demonstrations of short table surveys for three dialect points. This book is the first standalone survey manual on vocabulary of Chinese dialects published in China. It is one of the outcomes of the joint research project between the U.S. and China titled "The Boundary between Jianghuai Mandarin and Wu in Jiangsu Province." Previous published dialect surveys and glossaries mostly focused on nouns, neglecting verbs, adjectives, and function words; they emphasized phonetics over vocabulary itself; lacked tone sandhi tables; and the vocabulary lists had to be photocopied, with no space left for recording survey data, making them inconvenient to use. This book addresses these shortcomings. Entries are arranged in phonetic order, with three glossaries and a tone sandhi survey table. The detailed table contains over 1,900 entries for in-depth investigation; the concise table has more than 440 core entries for preliminary surveys before in-depth investigation; the short table has 60 core entries that can be used to create dialect maps. At the end of the book, there is a directory of survey locations for this project and demonstrations of short table surveys for three dialect points.