On his t-shirt was Manchu script being used in the same way that you might find English or other western script (and maybe even more unintelligibly):

We woke up, went to the lobby, and were met by two women from the Fuyu County government. One was 吴旭英 (Wú Xùyɪ̄ng), the Fuyu County Secretary of Ethnic and Religious Affairs, and the other was 安晓丽 (An Xiǎolì). I didn’t catch her title; maybe she was one of Secretary Wu’s subordinates. We had breakfast in the hotel, and then set off.

There were now six of us, so we hired a minivan taxi to take us 30 minutes south to Sanjiazi. We got in. Secretary Wu was in the front, I was behind her and next to Mrs Guan, and everyone else was in the back. Suddenly it became apparent that someone got up on the wrong side of the bed that morning, and somehow picked me as a scapegoat, probably just because I happened to be sitting next to her.  She told me to refrain from joining in the conversation.  I didn’t take the directive seriously, and continued my participation in the chatter.  Then she blew up.  Knowing that escape is often the best ukemi, at the next traffic light I did just that, which would have ended the trip for me.

Mrs An stayed behind with me and pointed out that if I left, I would have come all that way for nothing and that would be regrettable. She suggested that she and I go to Sanjiazi in a separate minivan taxi. I gave in on the condition that I pay the fare.

We went straight to the elementary school. 

Here are the two sides of the front gate (click on them for bigger versions). On the brass plates it says Sanjiazi Manchu School — on the left in Manchu (ilan boo i tokso manju gisun tacikv), and on the right in Chinese (三家子满族学校, sānjiāzi mǎnzú xuéxiào).

What’s carved into the stone is even more surreal than what happened in the minivan. On the right side is Chairman Mao’s famous quotation 好好学习, 天天向上 (hǎohāo xuéxí, tiāntiān xiàngshàng, study hard and improve daily), famously mistranslated as “Good good study, day day up”. On the left it appears that this quotation from the Great Helmsman of Communist China has been translated into the royal language of the Qing Dynasty (who Mao, as a soldier in the 1911 Revolution, personally had a hand in overthrowing). To trump that I’d have to find a copy of Mao’s little red book in Manchu. Who knows?

Going inside the gate, we can see the school, which is very tidy.

In the hall outside the classrooms, we can see some students’ work, which is in sharp contrast to the Manchu writing (if you can call it that) we saw in Wulajie.  (Again click on each one for a bigger version.)

There are a few spelling errors here and there of course, which you would expect from elementary school students, but this is real Manchu!  And each student has their own distinct handwriting style!  

Here we can see indisputable evidence that an effort is being made to preserve this dying language by passing it on to the youth of this village.  The major players in this effort are the students themselves, their teacher, 石君广 (Shí Jūnguǎng), who we’ll meet in the next post, and the former Manchu teacher, 赵金纯 (Zhào Jīnchūn), who now is the vice mayor of Fuyu.

It turned out that Mrs Guan’s daughter also was keen on learning English, so much of the train ride was taken up with me giving her English lessons.  She was very nice and pleasant, so I even ended up offering that she could come to my school anytime and study for free.

When we got to Haerbin, we got in line for the next leg of the trip, which was through Qiqihaer to Fuyu.  But the sign said “Fuyu (Wenzhou)”, meaning that Wenzhou is the final destination of that train.  Being the only person in our group who had looked at a map, I thought it was awfully strange that the train should go northeast to Qiqihaer, then north to Fuyu, and then south all the way down to Wenzhou.  But our tickets said 扶余 (Fúyú), and that’s what it said on the sign.  I kept asking people about it (Chinese people in my experience are horrible at geography), and finally got someone that said that Fùyù is in Qiqihaer prefecture (Heilongjiang province), and that our tickets had us going to Fúyú, which is in Jilin province, not Heilongjiang province.  It’s a good thing we hadn’t gotten on that train.

As a foreigner (foreigners struggle a lot with the tones in the Chinese language) I thought this was hilarious (though I didn’t say anything to that effect).  Here a Chinese native speaker screwed up the tones and bought the wrong tickets!

After getting tickets to the right place, we had to wait several hours for that train, which didn’t get in until midnight.  On the train, I had the good fortune of sitting next to Mrs Wu, who was talking about history a lot.  At one point she mentioned that when she was little she learned a rhyme about how to tell the difference between Manchu and Mongol script:

一根棍儿，长满刺儿，加上圈和点儿，就是满族字儿。
yì gēn gùnr, zhǎngmǎn cìr, jiāshang quānr hé diǎnr, jiùshi mǎnzú zìr.
A stem, grown over with quills; add circles and dots, that’s Manchu script.

Of course, the wondrous internet can help us find more complete versions.  Here’s one:

“竖着一根棍儿，两边毛毛刺儿，加上圈和点儿，就是满文字儿。”
“竖着一根棍儿，两边毛毛刺儿，上下一拧圈儿，就是蒙古字儿。”
shùzhe yì gēn gùnr, liǎngbian̄ máomáo cìr, jiāshang quān hé diǎnr, jiùshi mǎnwén zìr.
shùzhe yì gēn gùnr, liǎngbian̄ máomáo cìr, shàngxià yìníng quānr, jiùshi měngwén zìr.
A vertical stem, hairy quills on both sides; add circles and dots, that’s Manchu script.
A vertical stem, hairy quills on both sides; up and down twist circles, that’s Mongol script.

Some others start with 中间一根棍儿 (zhōngjiān yì gēn gùnr, a stem in the middle).  There are many variations.

Anyway, we finally got into Fuyu at midnite and checked into a hotel.

The next installment in this series will cover the unfortunate thing that happened in the minivan taxi in the morning, and our arrival at Sanjiazi and a few of the things we saw there.

By my “first real case”, I mean two words that are attested in dictionaries, having the same written form but different pronunciation, i.e. they are homographs.

First of all, the theory behind it.  Initial “a” looks like .  Initial “e” looks like .  Medial “n” when followed by a consonant looks like , so when you have a word that starts with “en” followed by a consonant, the “en” looks like , the same as initial “a” .

Sima gave me a copy of Gertraude Roth Li’s Manchu: A Textbook for Reading Documents last week, and I’ve been sticking my nose in it whenever I have a minute.  I had just gone through romanizing the first reading selection, and noticed that one of the words could be romanized in two different ways: acu or encu (”c” sounds like English /ch/), which both look like:

Acu is the sound Manchu people make when they sneeze (or when they touch something hot).  Encu means “separate”, “foreign”, or “different”.

Another kind can occur with medial “k”, which looks like.  So “nka” would be the same as “kan”, either at the end of a word, or before a consonant.  Haven’t found one of those yet though.  But it does present the possibility that some words could have an undetermined pronunciation.  In most cases one should be able to verify a word by checking how the Xibe pronounce it, but there is a miniscule chance that there are some words with this pattern that are not in any dictionary because they’re in a document that’s rotting away in some underfunded archive somewhere.  It’s an extremely small chance, but a chance nevertheless.

Another thing reducing the size of the chance to the nano scale is vowel harmony.  A word with “a” in it normally wouldn’t have “e”.  I’ll be surprised if I find another one of these rare gems.

He filled up two tour busses and hired two tour guides, one for each bus.  The tour guides talked about the usual things — Manchu people don’t eat dog meat, their chimneys run under their beds to provide a heated surface to sleep on, they are great archers, etc.  Not much linguistic stuff outside of the fact that there is only a handful of mother-tongue speakers left.

Our first stop was the same government outpost that I mentioned in an earlier post, where I saw a strange word in Manchu script on an outside wall.  The word is strange because it spells “kisi”, which is not in any Manchu dictionary that’s available to me.  So what is this word?

When I saw the word the first time, the caretaker (who doubles as an antiques seller), said he didn’t know what it said, and that it was there for a long time.  This time (it’s amazing how people change their stories for no apparent reason) I guess the excitement of having two tour busses full of people come to see his lonely little place (and interupting his Mahjong game!) was overwhelming enough that it gave him one of those “oh, yeah, now that you mention it” moments, and he said that the mayor of the village wrote it there a few years ago; it says “fortune” (in Chinese: 福, fú).  No way, I told him.  I looked it up and it wasn’t in any dictionary I looked in.  He said that was what the mayor said it meant.

Let’s refresh our memory a little.  The word on the side of the building is this:

Which I mentioned looks pretty much like it reads “kisi”, which in Manchu script looks like:

One commenter said it might be a transcription of a Chinese word, like “qishi”, but the middle part is definitely “s”.

In Manchu, “s” looks like , and the “sh” sound  would be .  Sometimes in initial position, the stroke to the left is connected, making a letter that looks like the first one on the building, but that would put two consonant sounds in a row, and Manchu words never start with two consonants.

Looking up the word 福 in the Anaku Manchu-Chinese (and sometimes Japanese) dictionary, we do in fact find a similar word in the output: “kesi”, which is given as 福分 (fúfen), which means the same thing as 福.

So there you have it.  He spelled it wrong.

For comparison, here is the right way to spell it (kesi), followed by the wrong way (kisi):

This is certainly one of the (if not the) largest pieces of Manchu script in existence.  It’s only one word.  Four letters.  And he spelled it wrong.

Instead of going into a big tirade about how this isn’t the only language I’ve seen prominently spelled wrong in China, I’ll leave you with some disappointing pictures.  The place is in terrible disrepair.  I’ll have to mention one bright note though.  I heard a rumor that the government is going to put some money into Wulajie and clean the historical places up for tourism.  They should; it’s a 600 year old town and was an important Qing outpost.  Click on the pictures for larger images.

Yeah, right.

Deciphering an unknown script can be a nearly impossible task. Some scripts, like the Indus Script, remain undeciphered, despite many researchers collectively spending decades attempting to do so, even with thousands of (albeit short) texts available.

But the Manchu script is not some mysterious script; it was the language of the Chinese government during the final dynasty. There is even a kind of colony in Xinjiang province that was started in 1764 called the Xibe (or Sibo) that may still even produce their own newspaper.

Let’s take a look at exactly how hard it is to learn Manchu script. Remember now, this isn’t some mysterious script that no one has ever deciphered. It was commonly used just less than 100 years ago. There are even textbooks and online study materials available (which I’ll give links to as we go).

How difficult is it to learn a new script? Well, some scripts are easier than others. And don’t even get me started about Chinese….

It’s been about a month and a half or so since Syz had the idea to look into what happened to the Manchu language, and how it interacted with Mandarin, so I’ve been studying it for no longer than that. At this point, if you found a piece of Manchu script and showed it to me, I would able to make out most of the letters, but I wouldn’t necessarily have any idea what it means. I started out my study of the script by reading the Wikipedia article, of course. And that led me to the listing on Omniglot (mainland link). I printed out the page and tried to see how it applies to a book called “现代满语八百句” (xiàndài mǎnyǔ bābǎi jù, 800 Sentences in Modern Manchu) published by 中央民族学院出版社 (zhōngyāng mínzú xuéyuàn chūbǎnshē, Central University for Nationalities Press) that Sima found. I compared the Manchu script with the romanization given in the book. Some things were clear, but I still had many questions. Later, Sima mailed me a Manchu phrasebook, which helped more, and then we found a textbook which explains things pretty clearly (all these books are in Chinese). Note that there are slightly different romanization systems, which I’ll get into in another post.

The good news is that the Manchu script is alphabetical, and phonemic, just like Korean or Spanish. It has letters! The bad news is that each letter has up to four different forms, and there are quite a lot of rules about how a letter will change its form when preceded or followed by another certain letter. English has two forms (lowercase and uppercase), Japanese has two (hiragana and katakana — or three, if you count romaji). Manchu letters have four forms: a stand-alone form, a word initial form, a word medial form, and a word final form. The script is written from top to bottom along a spine. Students in my English school said that it looks like 虫子 (chóng.zi, bugs or worms).

Now sometimes each of the four letterforms is the same, which makes it a little easier:

The letter that represents “ch” has the same form in all positions.

But sometimes one of a letter’s forms looks like one of another letter’s forms. For example, this is what medial “a” looks like . It also happens to be what “e” looks like when it follows “t” or “d”, and what “n” looks like when it precedes a consonant. Of course that’s not the only example of letters looking like each other, but I won’t bore you with more examples. Eventually maybe I’ll put up a page that explains how Manchu script works in a nutshell. It’s actually readable (of course) once you understand it.

There are also other things that make it difficult, though, such as what can seem like minim confusion. The medial form for the letter “k” looks like (unless it is followed by a consonant and preceded by “a”, “e”, “o”, or “u”), so when you have an alternation of “a” and “k”, it results in a bunch of identical strokes, like in the word “ukakabi”:

Looks like something I could comb my hair with.

I’m not exactly sure what the word means, but it seems to be a verb meaning something like “to escape like a convict would”.

So what about finding real examples of Manchu script in the wild and seeing if we can figure them out?

On a recent trip to Wulajie (that I’ll post on soon), I bought some Qing Dynasty coins that have Manchu script on them.

I recognize the first word as “boo”, (which means “house”, “building”, or “family”, and probably sounds more or less like English “bow” (as in bow-tie) — I’ll get into the pronunciation in another post, ’cause that’s a whole ‘nother barrel o’ worms). [The man in the antique store where I bought these said that the reason the one on the left is bright and shiny and the others are not is because it was handed down from generation to generation, whereas the other two were robbed from graves!]

Using the Anaku Manchu Script Generator, which can be downloaded here, we can type “boo” and it comes out as:

The second word looks strange though, especially the line on the right. In Manchu script there are no vertical lines on the right. There are dots, circles and horizontal lines that turn up or down, but no vertical lines. Maybe it’s like the top part of the first word but somehow the lines that connect the right part (the vertical line) with the main body somehow disappeared for some reason, stylistic or otherwise. Maybe it’s just “bo”. But I can’t find a word “bo” in this or this online Manchu dictionary. So what is it? Maybe it’s an abbreviation like we would find in a Latin tomb inscription: LE VI V P F FEC. Without looking into what the Qing Dynasty put on their coins, I couldn’t guess further, let alone come to any kind of conclusion.

The second word on the second coin (after I consulted a Manchu textbook to make sure about the letters) looks like it spells “yuwan”, which comes out:

Looking this up in the dictionary, I see it can mean “yuan” (元, yuán, a unit of Chinese money). I’m deliberately not looking into this further yet, because I just want to show you how I’m using the resources I have available.

The third coin has what looks like “su”:

, which can mean “whirlwind” or “scent”; not likely candidates for inclusion on a coin.

The last example I want to look at is written on the side of a building in what was a Qing Dynasty government outpost in Wulajie.

The first letter is a little strange. I’m guessing it’s the initial “k” form, making this “kisi”:

But there’s no word like that in the dictionaries, so it remains a mystery.

I expect that these mysteries will be solved eventually, if not by my own nosing around, then by readers writing in to tell me. I’m deliberately not looking too hard yet, just to give readers a sense of just how difficult reading a new script is, and to give a sense of what we are faced with when finding real examples of the writing. It’s usually not something you can just “crack”.

We are involved in an exploration, and there are many directions that we are going in simultaneously. We’re new at learning the language (although some of you, our readers, aren’t), and that is a world in itself. And then there is the history, and how the language influenced and was influenced by other languages that it came in contact with. And we’re faced with the stranger question of why the Manchu people basically gave up their culture and let their language practically die out. But we still have the echoes. Here in northeast China, there are echoes of Manchu all over the place if you pay attention.