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Wu Chinese grammar wheels
Grammar Wheels
"I gave my three books to her at the market." — Change any wheels to see how Wu Chinese encodes each shift.
Common questions about Wu Chinese
What can I toggle on the Wu Chinese wheel?
Subject (我 ngu, 侬 nong, 伊 yi, 阿拉 aqlaq), tense (past, present, future via adverbs), aspect (simple, 了 leq completed, 辣 laq ongoing, 过 gu experiential), mood (declarative, 伐 va question, command), polarity, voice (active, 拨 peq passive), and definiteness with 该 ge / 个 geq. Each spin rewrites the particles and word order with Shanghainese romanization.
Why doesn't the verb itself change when I switch tense?
Wu does not inflect verbs for tense. Time is shown by adverbs and the aspect particles 了, 过, 辣. Toggling tense on the wheel changes those surrounding words while the verb root stays the same.
How is a question marked?
Wu typically marks yes / no questions with the sentence-final particle 伐 va. Switching mood to question on the wheel appends 伐 and applies the question intonation in the gloss.
What is the 拨 peq passive?
拨 is the Wu equivalent of Mandarin 被. Switching to passive inserts 拨 between the patient and the verb, so 伊吃了苹果 'he ate the apple' becomes 苹果拨伊吃了 'the apple was eaten by him'.
Can I use the wheel without reading Chinese characters?
Each generated sentence shows Hanzi for the Wu form, a Shanghainese romanization, a word-by-word gloss, and an English translation. The same characters and syllables reappear under each spin.
Sources for Wu Chinese
The grammatical descriptions on this page are informed by the following published reference and descriptive grammars. Grammatical facts themselves are not subject to copyright; the scholars who documented them deserve attribution.
- Chappell, Hilary & Peyraube, Alain (2016). "A Typological Study of Negation in Sinitic Languages: Synchronic and Diachronic Views." In New Horizons in the Study of Chinese: Dialectology, Grammar, and Philology, pp. 483–534. Hong Kong: CUHK Press.
- Chappell, Hilary & Li, Lan (2016). "Mandarin and Other Sinitic Languages." In The Routledge Encyclopedia of the Chinese Language. London: Routledge.
- Myers, Ethan C. (2015). "Sentence Final Particles in Shanghainese: Navigating the Left Periphery." M.A. Thesis, Purdue University.