It was, furthermore, a shaggy and outlandish kind of Chinese. In the extreme north-west of China they speak what I take to be a variant of the Shansi dialect. it is not as incomprehensible as the southern dialects, being based closely on mandarin; but it was disconcerting to find (for instance) that 'water' was fi instead of shui, that she-me (meaning 'what') had contracted to sa, and that normen, not wormen, meant 'we'. I found myself, mutatis mutandis, in roughly the position of a Chinese who, after cursorily studying the first chapters of a modern English primer, is turned loose in the remoter parts of eighteenth century Yorkshire.
P. Fleming, News from Tartary (1936), 167
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