Long-short (romanization)

Long-short (romanization)

The long-short romanization system is a romanization system for Wu Chinese. It was designed to accommodate the two most widely spoken Northern Wu dialects, the Shanghai dialect and the Suzhou dialect. The system is called "Long-short" (长短音 in Chinese) because the system distinguishes between long vowels, which are written with two vowels, and short vowels, which are written with one. In some dialects, the short vowels are pronounced with a following glottal stop, making the distinction between short and long vowels more important.

Because the phonological complexity of Wu Chinese is comparable with that of Middle Chinese, the romanization system has needed to incorporate a wider range of sounds compared to Mandarin Chinese or Cantonese. One notable example involves the use of the "muddy voice", which means that Wu Chinese is one of the few Chinese dialects with a three-way distinction between voiced, voiceless and aspirated consonants. Because most dialects only distinguish between unaspirated and aspirated, the romanization systems used for those dialects use the same convention (writing, for example, the unaspirated as "b" and the aspirated as p), but this format is insufficient for Wu Chinese, so the long-short romanization uses an "h" to show aspiration (so that is written "ph").