Manchu language

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Manchu ᠮᠠᠨᠵᡠ manju
in Manchurian script:
Spoken in:	China
Region:	Heilongjiang
Total speakers:	60 (1999 Zhao Aping)
Language family:	Altaic (controversial)  Tungusic   Southern Tungusic    Manchu
Language codes
ISO 639-1:	none
ISO 639-2:	mnc
ISO 639-3:	mnc
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. See IPA chart for English for an English-​based pronunciation key.

The Manchu language is a Tungusic language spoken by Manchus in Manchuria; it is the language of the Manchu, though now most Manchus speak Mandarin Chinese and there are fewer than 70 native speakers of Manchu out of a total of nearly 10 million ethnic Manchus. Although the Sibe (Xibo) language, with 40,000 speakers, is in almost every respect identical to classical Manchu, Sibe speakers, who live in Liaoning and far western Xinjiang, are ethnically distinct from Manchus and lay claim as well to the distinctiveness of their language.

It is an agglutinative language that demonstrates limited vowel harmony, and it has been demonstrated that it is derived in the main from the Jurchen language though there are many loan words from Mongolian and Chinese. Its script is vertically written and taken from the Mongolian alphabet (which in turn derives from Aramaic via Uyghur and Sogdian).

[edit] Writing system

The Manchu language uses the Manchu script, which was derived from the Mongol script. Manchu is usually romanized according to the system devised by Paul Georg von Möllendorff in his Manchu grammar.

[edit] History and significance

Historically, the Manchu language is important in that some Europeans were exposed to and familiar with Manchu before they encountered the Chinese language. Manchu began as the primary language of the Qing dynasty Imperial court, but by the 19th century even the imperial court had lost fluency in the language. Nevertheless, until the end of the Qing Dynasty in 1912, all Imperial documents were drafted in both Manchu and Chinese. Today written Manchu can still be seen in architectures inside the Forbidden City whose historical signs are written in both Chinese and Manchu, and Manchu records are important in the study of Qing-era China.

Plaque at the Forbidden City in Beijing, China, in both Chinese (left - pinyin: qian qing men) and Manchu (right - romanized: kiyan cing men)

Very few native Manchu speakers remain; in what used to be Manchuria virtually no one speaks the language with the entire area having been completely sinicized. In fact, the modern custodians of the language are actually the Sibe who live near the Ili valley in Xinjiang and were moved there by Qianlong Emperor in 1764. Modern Sibe is very close to Manchu, although there are a few slight differences in writing and pronunciation; however, the Sibe consider themselves to be separate from the Manchus.

Various governments around China have taken to teaching Manchu in more recent times.

[edit] Grammar

As mentioned above Manchu is an agglutinative language, and its basic sentence structure is Subject-Object-Verb (SOV).

[edit] Manchu Nouns

Nouns in Manchu have a number of cases which are determined by suffixes.

Basic cases:

• nominative - used for the subject of a sentence, it is marked by a zero suffix.
• accusative - used for the direct object of a sentence, it is marked by the suffix -be.
• genitive - used to indicate possession and means by which something is accomplished, it is marked by the suffix -i or the allomorph -ni if coming after a word ending in -ng. For instance, abka-i cira (the emperor's countenance, literally "the face of heaven") vs. wang-ni moo (the king's tree). Less intuitively, the genitive case marker is also used in Manchu to mark a noun that is the Object of a simile (i.e., the thing to which the Subject or the Subject's action is being likened), e.g. akjan-i adali durgi-mbi ("to roar like thunder").
• dative-locative - used to indicate location, time, place, or indirect object, it is marked by the suffix -de.
• allative - used to indicate an action reaching a location, time, place, or indirect object, it is marked by the suffix -de.
• ablative - used to indicate the origin of an action or the basis for a comparison, it is marked by the suffix -ci.
• instrumental - used to indicate how/with what to do something.

Less used cases:

• initiative - used to indicate the starting point of an action. suffix -deri
• terminative - used to indicate the ending point of an action. suffix -tala/-tele/-tolo
• indef. allative - used to indicate 'to a place, to a situation' when it is unknown whether the action reaches exactly to the place/situation or around/near it. suffix -si
• indef. locative - used to indicate 'at a place, in a situation' when it is unknown whether the action happens exactly at the place/situation or around/near it. suffix -la/-le/-lo
• indef. ablative - used to indicate 'from a place, from a situation' when it is unknown whether the action is really from the exact place/situation or around/near it. suffix -tin
• distributive - used to indicate every one of something. suffix -dari
• formal - used to indicate a simile ("as/like"). suffix -gese
• identical - used to indicate that something is the same as something else. suffix -ali/-eli/-oli (apparently derived from the word adali, meaning "same")
• orientative - used to indicate "facing/toward" (something/an action), showing only position and tendency, not movement in. suffix -ru
• revertive - used to indicate "backward" or "against (something)". From the root 'ca' (see cargi, coro, cashu-n, etc.) suffix -ca/-ce/-co
• translative - used to indicate change in the quality/form of sth. suffix -ri
• in. accusative - used to indicate that the touch of the verb on the object is not surely complete. suffix -a/-e/-o/-ya/-ye/-yo

In addition, there were some suffixes, such as the primarily adjective-forming suffix -ngga/-ngge/-nggo, that appear to have originally been case markers (in the case of -ngga, a genitive case marker), but which had already lost their productivity and become fossilized in certain lexemes by the time of the earliest written records of the Manchu language: e.g. agangga "pertaining to rain" as in agangga sara (an umbrella), derived from Manchu aga (rain).

[edit] Phonology

Written Manchu was close to being called an “open syllable” language since the only consonant that came regularly at the end of native words was “n", which is similar to the situation in the Japanese language. This resulted in almost all native words ending in a vowel. In some words, there were vowels that were separated by consonant clusters, as in the words ilha “flower” and abka “heaven”; however, in most words, the vowels were separated from one another by only single consonants. This open syllable structure might not have been found in all varieties of spoken Manchu, but it was certainly found in the southern dialect that was the standard dialect and became the basis for the written language. It is also apparent that the open-syllable tendency of the Manchu language had been growing ever stronger for the several hundred years since written records of Manchu were first produced: consonant clusters that had appeared in older forms, such as abka (rain; heaven) and abtara-mbi (to yell, to scream; to cause a commotion, to make a commotion, to cause a row), were gradually simplified, and the words began to be written as aga or aha (in this form meaning only "rain") and atara-mbi (now meaning only "to cause a commotion").

[edit] Manchu consonants

Orthographic differences from the IPA are indicated in brackets.

Manchu has twenty consonants, shown in the table using the usual transcription conventions (and the IPA values of the consonants where they differ). The consonant [p] was rare and found mostly in loanwords and in onomatopoeia, such as pak pik "pow pow". Historically, many p's appear to have occurred in ancient forms of the language; however, they had been changed over time to f. The phoneme [ŋ] was also found mostly in Chinese loanwords and onomatopoeia and there was no Manchu letter to represent it; it was written as a digraph nk using the Manchu letters for n and k. The palatal nasal consonant, [ɲ], is usually transcribed with a digraph, "ni," and has thus often been considered as a phonemic sequence of [n] followed by [j], but, in reality, it was pronounced as a single segment, like Spanish "ñ" ([ɲ]). Work in Altaic historical linguistics suggests that the Manchu palatal nasal consonant has a very long history and should not be considered as a mere combination of [n] and [i] or [n] and [j], despite the Manchus' own writing system.

Also, it should be noted that early Western descriptions of Manchu phonology, particularly those made by speakers of languages, such as French, in which the primary contrast between "b" and "p", "d" and "t", or "g" and "k" is truly one of presence vs. lack of voicing rather than lack of aspiration vs. presence of aspiration (or perhaps lenis vs. fortis), labelled Manchu b as "soft p," Manchu d as "soft t," and Manchu g as "soft k," while Manchu p was "hard p," t was "hard t," and k was "hard k," which suggests that the phonological contrast between the so-called voiced series (b, d, g, j) and the voiceless series (p, t, k, c) in Manchu as it was spoken during the early modern era was actually one of aspiration and/or tenseness, as in the Mandarin language.

The [s] of the Manchu language is peculiar in that many speakers habitually affricated it, pronouncing it like [ʦ] in some or all contexts.

There is scholarly controversy over whether the velar consonants actually existed in two allophonic forms, a forward palatal set and a rearward uvular set, or whether this was merely a carryover in spelling from earlier alphabets.

[edit] Manchu vowels

In this vowel system, the "neutral" vowels ([i] and [u]) were free to occur in a word with any other vowel or vowels. The lone front vowel ([e], but generally pronounced like Mandarin e or Korean eo/ŏ) never occurred in a word with either of the regular back vowels ([o] and [a]). The vowel [ū] (pronounced as [ʊ] or somewhat like the Korean vowel eu/ŭ) was usually found as a back vowel; however, in some cases, it was found occurring along with the front vowel [e]. Much disputation exists over the exact pronunciation of [ū]. One scholar proposes that it was pronounced as a front rounded vowel initially, but a back unrounded vowel medially. The modern Sibe pronounce it identically to [u].

In addition, there were special symbols used to represent the vowels of Chinese loanwords. These sounds are believed to have been pronounced as such, as they never occurred in native words.

[edit] Vowel harmony

The vowel harmony that was found in the Manchu language was traditionally described in terms of the philosophy of the I Ching. Syllables with front vowels were described as being as "yin" syllables whereas syllables with back vowels were called "yang" syllables. The reasoning behind this was that the language had a kind of sound symbolism where front vowels represented feminine objects or ideas while the back vowels represented masculine objects or ideas. As a result, there were a number of word pairs in the language in which changing the vowels also changed the gender of the word. For example, the difference between the words hehe (woman) and haha (man) or eme (mother) and ama (father) was essentially a contrast between the front vowel, [e], of the feminine and the back vowel, [a], of the masculine counterpart.

[edit] References

• Gorelova, Liliya M. 2002. Manchu Grammar. Brill Academic Publishers ISBN 9-0041-2307-5
• Haenisch, Erich. 1961. Mandschu-Grammatik. Leipzig: Veb Verlag Enzyklopadie
• Li, Gertraude Roth. 2000. Manchu: A Textbook for Reading Documents. University of Hawai'i Press, Honolulu, ISBN 0-8248-2206-4
• Möllendorff, Paul Georg von. 1892. A Manchu Grammar: With Analysed Texts. Shanghai.
• Norman, Jerry. 1974. "Structure of Sibe Morphology", Central Asian Journal.
• Norman, Jerry. 1978. A Concise Manchu-English Lexicon, University of Washington Press, Seattle.
• Ramsey, S. Robert. 1987. The Languages of China. Princeton University Press, Princeton New Jersey ISBN 0-691-06694-9

[edit] External links

• Manchu A language of China at Ethnologue
• Manchu language Gospel of Mark
• Manchu alphabet and language at Omniglot
• Manchu Test Page
• A Manchu language website in English is a dead link; use the Internet Archive link instead
• Manchu-Chinese-English Lexicon
• Manchu Script Creator (Chinese)
• Baktan Manchu Language Blog (Chinese)
• The last native speakers of Manchu