Manchu is not dead

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Listen for yourself:

Posted by Wikitongues, who also provided this explanation:

Manchu is a Tungusic language from Manchuria in Northeast China. Spoken in the Qing Dynasty, it is critically endangered, and its linguistic traditions continue with the Sibe people in the Northwest.

More from Wikipedia: "Manchu (Manchu:ᠮᠠᠨᠵᡠ ᡤᡳᠰᡠᠨ, manju gisun) is a critically endangered East Asian Tungusic language native to the historical region of Manchuria in Northeast China. As the traditional native language of the Manchus, it was one of the official languages of the Qing dynasty (1636–1912) of China, although today the vast majority of Manchus now speak only Mandarin Chinese. The Xibe (or Sibe) are often considered to be the modern custodians of the written Manchu language. The Xibe live in Qapqal Xibe Autonomous County near the Ili valley in Xinjiang, having been moved there by the Qianlong Emperor in 1764. Modern written Xibe is very close to Manchu, although there are slight differences in the writing system which reflect distinctive Xibe pronunciation. More significant differences exist in morphological and syntactic structure of the spoken Xibe language." Ronglu and Shiyu (at the center and left) are both Sibe and from Qapqal. Shihuan (at the right) is Manchu and lives in a village near the Heilong (“Black Dragon”) River, referred to in Manchu as Sahaliyan Ula.

The Manchu Qing dynasty ruled over the whole of China from 1644 to 1912, a total of 268 years, making it one of the longest dynasties in East Asian history.  Two of its emperors ruled for roughly 60 years each.  It expanded Chinese territory to its greatest extent (in 1790, it was the fourth-largest empire in world history), matched only by the Mongol Yuan dynasty (1279-1368) which preceded it, separated by the ethnic Han Ming dynasty (1368-1644), which was three times smaller and three times less populous than the Manchu Qing.  And yet, in 1912, the Manchu empire collapsed colossally, taking its language with it.

 

Selected readings

[Thanks to Jichang Lulu]



6 Comments »

  1. Pamela said,

    December 2, 2024 @ 10:16 am

    Good to know. Efforts by the PRC government to "save" documentary Manchu date to the 1970s, and projects to record the last surviving Manchu speakers of the settlements around Sanjiazi village date to at least the 1990s, about the same time that Manchu identity organizations in Taiwan promoted learning to read (more than speak). Native fluency–one mode of language survival, but only one–necessarily decreases as the elderly population of these traditional villages declines (now to well under a hundred). Elementary schools in Sanjiazi taught Manchu from 2017, part of a pilot program to conduct second-language instruction in many of the "autonomous" regions of China (a program that has been strangled by increasing intolerance of the Xi regime for any kind of cultural particularisms). But documentary Manchu has been undead for decades, and spoken Manchu has been the object of preservation and revivalism for decades as well. But always nice to know that Manchu is still undead. It is still officially critically endangered, which may have contributed to it being an early AI project to recognize Manchu (as well as Tibetan, Mongolian and Uyghur) speech and attempt to reproduce it, which at the the time (2022) was a meaningful augmentation of the already extensive database in English and Chinese. The logic behind these projects seems to be based upon their increasing scarcity of native fluency speakers, literally substituting AI speakers for human ones.

    https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3199551/job-urgent-chinese-team-hopes-ai-can-save-manchu-language-extinction

  2. David Marjanović said,

    December 2, 2024 @ 3:08 pm

    and spoken Manchu has been the object of preservation and revivalism for decades as well.

    This is complicated by the fact that Manchu was never a single language – but the more divergent varieties were only recorded to any extent while they were going extinct in the mid-late 20th century.

  3. Y said,

    December 2, 2024 @ 3:23 pm

    Impressionistically, it sounds to me like the teacher and the students speak with some kind of Sinitic accent/phonology. Or am I just imagining it? I have no idea what non-Sinicized Manchu sounds like.

  4. Pamela said,

    December 2, 2024 @ 7:44 pm

    "Manchu was never a single language." Puzzled by that one. The article doesn't say that, in fact it makes Manchu very distinct as a development from Tungusic (in contrast to "Alchuka," which I take to be a reference to Jurchen Alchun, the name of the "Golden" river). It is a very interesting exploration of non-Manchu Jurchenic language development. Many historians say rather blandly that Manchu was a descendant of Jurchen, but the Jurchen known as standard by the Ming court was quite different from what later came to be known as Manchu. For its part, Manchu was a single language–it was the standardized language of the Jianzhou Jurchens of southern Jilin, and it displaced the formerly dominant Jurchen language of the Hulun federation, on the border between Manchuria and Mongolia. In fact Manchu was one of the most disciplined, standardized and well-documented languages–as disciplined as French or Modern Standard Arabic, thanks to the interventions of the eighteenth-century Qing court. But there remained many Jurchenic languages and dialect sdistinct from Manchu, and this is a very interesting study of one.

    As for the question of Mandarin accented Manchu, yes–I notice in many videos that individuals claiming to speak or teach Manchu are actually pronouncing Chinese phoneme representations of Manchu–for example very commonly one hears the Manchu word abka pronounced as abuka, which is just three Chinese words strung together to sound like a Manchu word. I assume that some of these conventional manglings of Manchu words may be very old–perhaps even dating to the utterances of Chinese officials in Qing times–and so they are intelligible to modern ears.

  5. David Marjanović said,

    December 2, 2024 @ 8:37 pm

    But there remained many Jurchenic languages and dialect sdistinct from Manchu

    …but they were all equated as "spoken Manchu" until very recently.

  6. Pamela said,

    December 2, 2024 @ 9:49 pm

    Maybe by some people, yes.

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