Casacchia Giorgio. The lexicon of the suzhou dialect in the nineteenth century novel "Sing-song girls of Shanghai" Part I. In: Cahiers de linguistique - Asie orientale , vol. This lexicon contains dialect words used in the dialogues of the first thirteen chapters of the novel "Sing-song girls of Shanghai" Hai shang hua lie zhuan, HSHLZ ; the italian translation of these thirteen chapters will be published by the review "Catai", edited by Venice University.
The author, Han Bangqing Ziyun , born in Song- jiang, adopted the Suzhou dialect in the dialogues of his novel. Hu Shi praised this choice, as it appeared similar to Cao Xueqin's choice of the Peking dialect, and spoke of "the first masterpiece in the Suzhou vernacular literature". The language of the dialogues is the Suzhou dialect, regarded as the purest representative of the northern Wu dialect, and spoken at the end of the nineteenth century in the triangle delimited by the towns of Changzhou - Suzhou - Songjiang - Jiaxing - Hang- zhou - Huzhou.
Nevertheless it is to some extent influenced by the Shanghai dialect. The words collected in this lexicon are divided into two groups :. They are followed both by translations and by examples for every meaning of the word. They are marked by an asterisk. Asie Orientale Vol. He has also worked out the system of transcription of the tones and tone sandhi used here. We would like to express our gratitude to him for this laborious work and also for his valuable suggestions.
We would also like to seize this opportunity of thanking Sal lie Beaumont, a Chinese language student at Rome University, who edited the English text of this paper.
Of course, the author of this paper takes all the responsability upon himself. The bases of the translation are :.
