七 as shǎng?
I was asked about this yesterday, and frankly I just don’t know the answer. But someone here might. Wiktionary has a reference in a couple different places of 七 transcribed as shǎng. I asked a couple other people about this but with no luck.
Is there such an alternate pronunciation? Is it a regional thing like 两 as the standard 2 in Wu or 幺 not showing up in Taiwan outside of the military?
Steve pointed out the likelihood that Wiktionary is just wrong. I can accept that. But since it’s in a few different places we thought it might be worth asking about here.
Looks like it was added in this revision: http://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=%E4%B8%83&direction=prev&oldid=23357 The description reads “(manual update; Cangjie: http://www.chinesecj.com; Others: Unihan database))” but Unihan doesn’t support the addition at all. I suppose you could inquire about it from the editor who made the change, except that the editor doesn’t come around much anymore.
7 does have a military reading of 拐 (akin to 洞 and 勾 for 0 and 9).
Bingo! The smoking gun is in version 3.2.0 of Unihan (http://www.unicode.org/Public/3.2-Update/), which was published March 2002. This would have been been the latest available version used by the Wiktionary editor when the entry was changed in November 2003.
U+4E03 kMandarin QI1 SHANG3
In the next version of Unihan, 4.0.1 (http://www.unicode.org/Public/4.0-Update1/), dated January 2004, the alternate pronunciation is gone:
U+4E03 kMandarin QI1
U+4E03 kHanyuPinlu qi1(950)
Unfortunately, the references used for the pinyin in Unihan 3.2.0 were not listed. However, the notes for 4.0.1 suggest it may have been a programmatic error:
You guys are my freaking heroes. Seriously.
I found two similar errors from the same edit batch:
鯉
3.2.0 U+9BC9 kMandarin LI3 ZHENG1
4.0.1 U+9BC9 kMandarin LI3
鵝
3.2.0 U+9D5D kMandarin E2 GU3 HE4
4.0.1 U+9D5D kMandarin E2
You’ve got to wonder how far this spread from that one version. How many databases around the world must now have this misinformation?
The Wikipedia Effect™