As a native Shanghainese speaker I am extremely confused (and curious!).
Cantonese at least has a written form, but Shanghainese AFAIK has no written form, so what does "Shanghainese dialectal spelling" even mean? :\
Cantonese at least has a written form, but Shanghainese AFAIK has no written form, so what does "Shanghainese dialectal spelling" even mean? :\
The confusing part for me as a Shanghainese speaker though is that we don't have a way to write Shanghainese, this "spelling" concept AFAIK simply doesn't exist. So I'm very curious to see who actually designed this functionality and what does it actually do.
No they're not. Time to go studying linguistic before writing false statements on the internet. Even if most characters and words are shared in-between Sinitic languages, there are difference in lexicon, grammar, syntax and other subtle grammatical phenomena. Phonology is also distinct. It would be incredibly painful for someone the write its native language using an input method made for another language.
They are not. Written Cantonese, in fact, uses the Mandarin grammar and the Mandarin lexicon and is, essentially, Mandarin, not Cantonese. There are substantial differences in the grammar and in the basic lexicon between the two to make them distinct languages. Written Cantonese that uses the Cantonese lexicon is incomprehensible to a Mandarin speaker, either, just as the spoken Cantonese is.
The fact you don't know about it doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Same goes for Taiwanese Southern Min: a lot of natives think "it's not a written language" where in fact there are both romanizations and a way to write it with Chinese characters.
The central government is actively fighting standardization effort (both romanization and writing in Chinese characters) and push the fiction of Wu and other Sinitic languages (Cantonese, Hakka, Min, etc.) as merely dialects, as a way to destroy them. The method is not new, is has been policy in France, Taiwan and probably other countries. It's a real shame that Apple is validation China's propaganda on that front.
> The fact you don't know about it doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
I take your point.
Interestingly, growing up in the late 80s, we were briefly taught Zhuyin (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo), but not this. I don't believe my parents (both native Shanghainese) even know how to "spell" Shanghainese.
Ah, the lost art...