Da Baizi, Malaria-Derived Lexicon, and Local Speech Identity in Jiangnan: A Jiepai Speech Record from Jiangsu

This record is a primary source archival item about “Da Baizi,” a Jiepai vernacular expression, disease-derived local lexicon, pragmatic usage, semantic shift, lexical survival, native-speaker judgment, and local speech identity in Jiepai, Jiangsu, curated for research use in language documentation, local Sinitic varieties, Jiangnan vernacular speech studies, Chinese dialectology, local lexicon, vernacular pragmatics, emic semantic documentation, semantic shift, intergenerational dialect shift, and low-resource language documentation. It is released as the OA_V1 item-level record for “Da Baizi, Malaria-Derived Lexicon, and Local Speech Identity in Jiangnan: A Jiepai Speech Record from Jiangsu,” a Chinese language and lexicon text within the Jiepai Jianghu section of the Chuanyue Archive. The text documents the expression “Da Baizi” in Jiepai speech. In present-day local usage, the phrase commonly means “talking nonsense,” “speaking absurdly,” or, in some contexts, “chatting idly.” The record preserves several ordinary usage examples, including expressions equivalent to “You are talking nonsense again,” “nonsense talk,” and a scene in which people stop their vehicle in the middle of the road and continue chatting. The record’s value lies in local lexicon, vernacular pragmatics, emic semantic documentation, semantic shift, lexical survival, and local speech identity. The expression is widely understood and smoothly used by Jiepai speakers, while many younger speakers may no longer know its earlier bodily or disease-related sense. This makes the item useful for documenting how older lexical meanings survive in everyday pragmatic forms after their original experiential context has faded. A key feature of the record is the semantic shift from bodily trembling associated with malaria-like illness to a pragmatic expression for nonsense speech or idle talk. In the author’s explanation, “Da Baizi” originally referred to chills, shivering, bodily trembling, and teeth-chattering speech associated with malaria or similar symptoms. In contemporary Jiepai speech, the phrase has become a conventionalized expression used to evaluate talk, joking, nonsense, or excessive chatting. The item also records “Hanre Bing,” a local term formerly used by Jiepai speakers for malaria or similar fever-and-chill conditions. The public text does not attempt to provide a medical history of malaria in China. Instead, it documents the author’s native-speaker understanding that the physical scene associated with “Da Baizi” has largely disappeared from everyday local experience, while the expression itself has remained active in speech. Methodologically, this item is based on the Archive Author’s native-speaker knowledge, direct speech experience, childhood and adult usage memory, local semantic judgment, and author annotations. The annotations also preserve a personal memory from around 2003, when the author heard Jiepai speech on a bus in Hangzhou and felt an immediate sense of local recognition. This memory helps document the expression’s role in local speech identity and native-language belonging. This item-level record has DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20975169. It belongs to the Jiepai Jianghu Language, Lexicon, Grammar, and Pragmatics Series, whose series-level record has DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20970326. The item is also part of the broader Chuanyue Archive, a native-insider emic vernacular multimodal archive. This public OA_V1 release includes the public text, author annotations, and contextual metadata. It does not include raw audio, private videos, precise speaker-identifying materials, private notes, raw provenance materials, unreleased supporting materials, or materials retained in the Author Private Master Archive. Authorship and upload roles are separate. The Archive Author, The Jiepai Archivist, is the creator, archive owner, rights holder, and public contact person. Any uploader, depositor, or curatorial assistant provides deposit and formatting assistance only and is not the author, creator, archive owner, rights holder, or public contact for this archive.