A Guide to the Tai-shan Dialect

I did some more snooping around ERIC, and I found a manuscript titled A Guide to the Tai-shan Dialect by the prolific academic Anne Yue-Hashimoto. Clearly my literature review wasn’t as thorough as I thought it was! Abstract below.

This document provides a description of the Tai-shan dialect of Chinese. Maps illustrate the area where the dialect is spoken, and introductory remarks concern previous study of the dialect, sources of current information, and relationship to other dialects. The phonological description provides information on syllable structure, initials, finals, tones, syllables in sequence, combinations of initials, finals, and tones, tone change, and colloquial versus literary forms. In the lexicon section, morphemes are arranged in the matrix of Ancient Chinese sound categories in order to afford easy comparison with similar items among other dialects. The tables are arranged according to rime group distinction, division distinction, and tonal distinction, in that order. A sample colloquial text is provided and the grammar notes that follow include remarks on pronouns, deictics, interrogatives, aspects, negatives, copula and locative, sentence particles, common classifiers, affixes for nouns, possessives, and modifying clauses. An annotated bibliography lists books and articles relevant to the Tai-shan dialect and a character index is provided.

This is one really big file—366 pages compressed into 39.87 MB. I haven’t read it yet, and considering my professional reading list, it will be a while before I get around to this tome. Yue-Hashimoto also recently published a monograph on the Dancun dialect (台山淡村方言研究), available from HKU.