'Manchu' is a
Tungusic language spoken in
Northeast China; it used to be the language of the
Manchu, though now most Manchus speak
Chinese and there are fewer than 70 native speakers of Manchu out of a total of nearly 10 million ethnic Manchus. Although the
Xibe language, with 40,000 speakers, is in almost every respect identical to classical Manchu, Xibe speakers, who live in
Liaoning and far western
Xinjiang, are ethnically distinct from Manchus and lay claim 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).
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.
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.
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.
Grammar
Syntax
Manchu phrases are all head-last. This means that the head-word of a phrase (e.g. the
noun of a
noun phrase, or the
verb of a
verb phrase) always falls at the end of the phrase. Thus, adjectives and adjectival phrases always precede the noun they modify, and the arguments to the verb always precede the verb. As a result, Manchu sentence structure is Subject-Object-Verb (
SOV).
Manchu uses a small number case-marking particles that are similar to those found in Japanese, but also has a separate class of true postpositions. Case-markers and post-positions can be used together, as in the following sentence:
:
: I that person+GEN with go+PAST
: I went with that person
In this example, the postposition , "with", requires its nominal argument to have the genitive case, and so we have the genitive case-marker between the noun and the postposition.
Manchu also makes extensive use of structures, and has a rich inventory of converbial suffixes that indicate the relationship between the subordinate verb and the finite verb that follows it. For example, given the following two sentences (which have finite verbs):
:
: that woman house ABL go.out+PAST.FINITE
: That woman came out of the house
:
: that woman town DAT go+PAST.FINITE
: That woman went to town
These two sentences can be combined into a single sentence using converbs, which will relate the first action to the second. For example,
:
: that woman house ABL go.out+PAST.CONVERB, town DAT go+PAST.FINITE
: That woman, having come out of the house, went to town
:
: that woman house ABL go.out+IMPERFECT.CONVERB, town DAT go+PAST.FINITE
: That woman, coming out of the house, went to town
:
: that woman house ABL go.out+CONCESSIVE.CONVERB, town DAT go+PAST.FINITE
: That woman, though she came out of the house, went to town
Manchu Cases
Manchu has six cases, though one of them occurs only occasionally in Classical Manchu. The cases are marked by particles, which can either be written together with the noun the apply to, or else separately. The particles do not obey the rule of vowel harmony, yet they are also not truly postpositions.
★
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 sometimes marked by the particle ''be'', but it may also be unmarked. It is commonly felt that the marked accusative has a definite sense, like using a definite article in English. There are, however, sentences in Classical Manchu that use both the marked and unmarked accusative, indicating that the marked accusative might have a slightly different thematic meaning than the unmarked accusative. For example:
:
: that place+GEN people skin+ACC boot+ZERO.ACC make+IMPERFECT.FINITE
: The people of that place make boots out of skin
In this example, "boots" and "skin" are separately marked with the two forms accusative, and they have different thematic relationships to the verb. In other cases, however, it seems the two forms of the accusative can be used interchangeably.
★
genitive-
instrumental - used to indicate possession or means by which something is accomplished, it is marked by the particle ''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 particle ''de''. In the modern spoken Manchu dialect of the Sibe, this particle is normally used to mark the locative, but not the dative.
★
ablative - used to indicate the origin of an action or the basis for a comparison, it is marked by the particle ''ci''. In the modern spoken Manchu dialect of the Sibe, this particle is used to mark the dative.
★
prolative - used to indicate the origin of an action, it is marked by the particle ''deri''. This case is used infrequently in Classical Manchu. In the modern spoken Manchu dialect of the Sibe, this particle is used to mark the ablative.
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").
Manchu consonants
Orthographic differences from the IPA are indicated in angled 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 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 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, , 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" (). 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 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.
Manchu vowels
| neutral | front | back |
|---|
| i | | o |
| u | | (ū) |
| e | a |
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 [] 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].
Loanwords
Remarkably Manchu was able to absorb a large amount of non native sounds into the language from Chinese. 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. Among these, was the symbol for the a high unrounded vowel (customarily romanized with a ''y'') found in words such as ''sy'' (Buddhist temple) and ''Sycuwan'' (Sichuan). Chinese affricates were also represented with consonant symbols that were only used with loanwords such as in the case of ''dzengse'' (orange) (Chinese: ''chénzi'') and ''tsun'' (inch) (Chinese: ''cùn''). In addition to the vocabulary that was borrowed from Chinese, the Manchu language also had a large amount of loanwords from other languages such as
Mongolian, for example the words ''morin'' (horse) and ''temen'' (camel).
Vowel harmony
The
vowel harmony 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.
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
External links
★
Manchu A language of China at
Ethnologue
★
Manchu language Gospel of Mark
★
Manchu alphabet and language at
Omniglot
★
Manchu Test Page
★
★
Manchu-Chinese-English Lexicon
★
online Manchu-Chinese, Manchu-Japanese lexicon
★
Manchu Script Creator
★
Baktan Manchu Language Blog
★
The last native speakers of Manchu
★
A Dying Language
★
Contrast In Manchu Vowel Systems
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