User Comments - ksarvestani

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ksarvestani

Posted on: An Introduction!
April 30, 2010, 04:47 PM

Changye,

I'm glad to know that I'm not the only one who has heard this before.

I'm also glad that you enjoy my avatar. You are absolutely correct, and I am surprised that anybody recognizes that it is indeed Naxi Dongba script. I took it during my visit to the Dongba Culture Museum in Lijiang.

Posted on: An Introduction!
April 30, 2010, 01:10 AM

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.