A couple of students came to the office to demonstrate their Manchu skills.  Mrs Guan was given the third book I mentioned in the last post (which you can open up and look at to follow along, if you like), so she could say some words in Chinese and have the students say their Manchu equivalents. 

She picked a word from the first page of the book, ten thousand (#13 in the lower right hand corner: 一万, yīwàn), and the students quickly reply:

emu tumen (note that I’m not using the book’s crazy romanization)

No problem there.  Next she asks the word for one hundred million (#14: 一亿, yīyì).  The students stumble for a second, and get it wrong saying emu minggan.  One of the students quickly realizes their mistake, and says that’s the word for one thousand, and then they quickly correct it.

emu bunai

We can see clearly here that the student’s native language is Mandarin, because as soon as the student realizes the mistake, he shouts out a very short “buh!”, which is a typical way any Chinese child would pronounce 不 (bù) in that kind of a situation.

The next exchange between Shi Junguang (SJG), Mrs Guan (MG), and the students (SS), is interesting from a sociolinguistic point of view:

Quick translation:

SJG: (pointing to a page in the book) You can also ask them any of these.  They might have forgotten some of them; it’s been a long time,  Some of….

MG: (completely ignoring SJG, addressing someone else) Then take a picture of us!

SJG: (not sure how to deal with this)…after a while…one year…

MG: (getting louder) Of ME!  WITH THESE TWO KIDS!

SJG: …after one year…

Other person: We could video it.

SJG: These two have a lot of…

MG: HEY! HOW DO YOU SAY “ANSWER THE QUESTION”? “ANSWER THE QUESTION”?

SJG: …afterwards…

MG: HOW DO YOU SAY “HEAD”?  “Head”?

Student 1: “Head”?

MG: “Head”.

Student 1: hoto.

Student 2: hoto.

MG: “Head”?

Student 1: (softly, as if in disbelief) hoto.

SJG: They said it; hoto.  Say it louder.

SS: HOTO!

MG: How do you say “head”?

Student 1: hoto.

Student 2: hoto.

Aside from the asker’s center-of-attention-grabbing interruptions (who is supposed to be shown off here, anyway?), and the pure surreality of the “conversation” in general, note their pronunciation of hoto, which is very obviously influenced by Chinese.  It sounds exactly like pinyin huōtuo.  The Manchu sound should be more of a pure [o] or [ɔ], and not the Chinese [uo].

The next couple of words trip the students up:

Mrs Guan asks the words for nose (鼻子, bízi) and tongue (舌头, shétou), and after the students look around and scratch their heads, Shi Junguang says they forgot, and then gives the words.  Nose is oforo, which he pronounces as owulo (using normal Manchu romanization), and tongue is ilenggu, which according to Materials of Spoken Manchu, is usually spoken in Sanjiazi as yulong (using normal Manchu romanization), but he pronounces it the same as Chinese pinyin yulun, just like it is written in the book Mrs Guan is reading from.

Next she interrupts to ask “teacher” (老师, lǎoshī), and “study” (学习, xuéxí); and then “hello teacher” (老师好, lǎoshīhǎo) and “hello guest” (客人好, kèrénhǎo).

Teacher is sefu, which is taken from Chinese 师傅 (shīfu, master).  In the book Mrs Guan is reading from, it is given as sewo, but the student seems to say something like owo.  Study is tacimbi, (the students forgot it at first, but Shi Junguang corrects them) but in the book it is tacime.  This is very odd.  Verbs in the book are given in their -me form, which while similar to the English infinitive, is not the way that verbs are normally listed in Manchu dictionaries.  They are normally listed with a -mbi ending, which corresponds basically with simple present.  The -me form is used for verbs that are not the main verb in the sentence, so they cannot be used alone.

“Hello teacher” is sefu sain (sewo sain), and “hello guest” is antaha sain.  This construction, X sain, seems to be a translation of Chinese X 好, as in 你好, which was popularized in China in the 1980s.  The staff here at Echoes of Manchu has not yet been able to find any verifiable Qing dynasty examples of Manchu X sain as a greeting, but there may be some Chinese examples of X 好.  Sima is currently preparing a post on that topic.

Next, Mrs Guan asks the word for everybody (大家, dàjiā), and following a long pause, I ask the word for student.

For “everybody”, the students say saza, which is what is written in the book, but I can’t find anything resembling that in any dictionaries.  The closest thing I can find is in Materials of Spoken Manchu, which gives “crowd” in a phonetic spelling as sasəxəčjə (I’d have to take a wild guess at how to romanize that).  Also, Enenggi gives an adverb sasa, which means “together”.

“Student” is given as xaiwe (it’s given in Materials of Spoken Manchu that way also).  In traditional Manchu it’s xabi.  Perhaps it was changed on account of its sounding very much like a common Chinese putdown, shǎbī (silly twat), which I’m sure all of the students are familiar with.  In fact, I wonder if there might really be a relationship between those two words, because according to Gertraude Roth Li (p351, #5), self-deprecation was used in Manchu to show humility.

Next, Shi Junguang takes the bull by the horns and shows us the grand finale: letting the students translate some sentences!

SJG: 上节课我们学到哪了? (How far did we get in the last class?)

SS: fujinmu kicen musei ya de … … tacime inaha.

(Traditional Manchu: ???? kicen musei yabade tacime isinaha.)

???? [previous]
kicen [lesson]
musei [we]
yabade [to what place]
tacime [study]
isinaha. [arrived]

SJG: 学到第三课了. ((We) got to the third lesson.)

SS: ilan kicen gisureme inaha.

(Traditional Manchu: ilan kicen gisureme isinaha.)

ilan [three]
kicen [lesson]
gisureme [discuss]
isinaha. [arrived]

SJG: 我读一句儿. (I’ll read a sentence).

SS: bi emu gisun hvlame.

(Traditional Manchu: bi emu gisun hulambi.)

bi [I]
emu [one]
gisun [sentence]
hvlambi. [read aloud]

SJG: 大家跟我读一句儿. (Everybody read a sentence with me.)

SS: saza mimbe dageme emu gisun hvla.

(Traditional Manchu: ???? mimbe dahame emu gisun hvla.)

???? [everybody]
mimbe [with me]
dahame [follow]
emu [one]
gisun [sentence]
hvla [read aloud]

They obviously spend some time developing fluency, huh?

We put our bags down in the office and then headed over to a little building near the school gate.  It’s the school museum — if you go in the school gate, it’s just to the right.  On the way over, I asked Shi Junguang, one of the school’s two Manchu teachers, how he started learning Manchu when he was little.

Me: 你怎么开始学习满语的？你小的时候。
SJG: 小的时候， 就是， 爷爷奶奶他们，就是老人们说满语了我也听不懂。但是，当时吧，他们就是教我们一些简单的词汇。唉。咋说呀？ 见到什么东西啦，介绍我们怎么叫。这是简单东西。或者诶，上学之候呢，到五六年级我们教的是赵金纯教育事变语。到中学阶段就是主要学习了。所以就断了这个阶段，完了倒是，高中毕业了之后，完了下来学的。当时，具有这个理想就是长大以后这个三家语言，就是赵老师当时介绍给我们说，全国来说保留非常好了。就是希望这些学生能传承一下。我就是有这种志向，所以始终这方面做这个。

Me: How did you start studying Manchu, when you were little?
SJG: When I was little, when my grandparents spoke Manchu, I couldn’t understand them. But at that time they taught us a simple vocabulary. When we saw an object, they would tell us what to call it. Or after I started going to school, in 5th or 6th grade we studied Zhao Jinchun’s educational methods. When we went to middle school it was the most important time for study, so at that time we stopped. After graduating from high school we started again. At that time, the goal was that after we grow up, the language of Sanjiazi, well, our teacher, Mr Zhao, told us then that here it was preserved best in the whole country. He hopes that we can hand it down. This is my aspiration, too, so this is what I’ve been engaged in all along.

It’s important to note that he’s not a native speaker.  The only native speakers left are above 80 years old, and there are only less than ten, I believe.  We’ll meet some of them in later posts.

In his answer he says that he stopped studying Manchu while he was attending middle school and high school (grades 7-12) because “it was the most important time for study”.  This shows a peculiar element of the average Chinese citizen’s perspective on education: math and Chinese language are considered “real” things to study, and Manchu (or anything else) is not.  (Click for bigger pictures.  Mouse-over for titles.)

He asks me in Manchu if I can speak Manchu:

My “huh?” before he repeats the question sums up my range of potential answers.

However, after listening to it at home many times and consulting no fewer than four books, I think what he said was: si manju gisun gisurehe mutembinio?

si = you
manju gisun = Manchu language
gisureme = speak (converb)
mutembinio = can (with question ending)

Notice the SOV (subject, object, verb) sentence structure, similar to Japanese and Korean.  A converb is a verb that is not the main verb in a sentence.  These are used much the same way secondary English verbs are used in subordinate clauses, or with coordinators, like “and”.  The word mutembi is the simple present form, and the -nio is a question suffix that can be put on the end of a verb as one way to make a question.

I’m a little puzzled why there is no be beween gisun and gisureme.  Usually, direct objects in Manchu are marked by be.  I don’t know if it just got swallowed up, or if there is a grammatical reason for its omission.

A quick peek in the next room shows that there is a nice computer room, with decent computers.  I asked Mr Shi if he had internet access, and he said no, and that the nearest internet bar was always filled up with people playing games, so he could never get a seat.  What an ironic tragedy.  He’s the one person who is charged with passing on the Manchu language, and he can’t even communicate with the Manchu enthusiasts scattered across the globe who are rooting for him.

Looking around the two or three museum rooms, we see some antiques:

“Galaha” (3rd picture) is a game played using sheep’s knuckles.  Players roll the sheep’s knuckles, then they throw a small ball (or another sheep’s knuckle) into the air and, while the ball is in the air, try to arrange all of the sheep’s knuckles to be in the same position, and then catch the ball.  Then they throw the ball again and see if they can pick them up and then catch the ball with the same hand.  Of course there are many variations of this game.  According to this, it is mentioned, along with the “nine interlinks” (4th picture) in 红楼梦 (hónglóumèng, Dream of the Red Chamber).  Galaha is regarded as a Manchu thing, and the name for the game in Chinese (嘎拉哈, gālāhà) is simply a transliteration of the Manchu.  I don’t know if the nine interlinks puzzle is of Manchu origin specifically or not, but from looking around the net a bit, it appears to be of Chinese origin at least.  If anyone knows more about these, please let us know in the comments.

In the main room there are also three montages on the wall depicting Sanjiazi’s development.

A translation of the Chinese captions follows (notice how random they are):

Montage 1

• Former Manchu residences
• The old schoolhouse
• 1996 school song and dance competition
• Young Pioneers initiation ceremony
• Recess
• 1997 performance celebrating Hong Kong’s return
• Dance performance
• Participating in village-level sports day
• 1998 Children’s Day performance

Montage 2

• The new school’s appearance
• Expert passing on Manchu language knowledge
• Manchu class
• Attentively studying Manchu
• Recess
• Recess
• A glance at the Manchu village
• Smooth, flat village road
• New Manchu residences

Montage 3

• Party and government leaders’ enthusiastic support
• City and county leaders watch a Manchu class
• Foreign experts come to do research
• Cash cows: “black & white flowers”
• A corner of the park
• Happy ethnic dance
• Modernized dairy production facility
• Zhongyin irrigation canal supplies an abundant source of water for Sanjiazi rice paddy production

There are also two enlarged Manchu documents posted on the wall.

As intriguing as they are, I’m not going to translate them just now.  I’ll save that for a rainy day, if another intrepid soul doesn’t beat me to it.  The titles are jakvn gvsa (Eight Banners), and ilan boo tacikv i suduri (History of Sanjiazi School).  It’s amazing how deep one can go into things.  Look at the how in the two documents, the words are split between lines — they sometimes get cut off at the bottom and then continue at the top of the next line!  I’ve never seen that happen before in Manchu script.  And in the second document, there is a horizontal space dividing two “horizontal columns” (since the writing is vertical).

Though the book is written in English, it appears not to be available from SNU’s English website and is only listed on the Korean site. I had it sent over by a Korean friend, but I imagine that it could be obtained by contacting Seoul National University Press by email.

The book:

Abstract

This book offers spoken Manchu data and a brief linguistic description of spoken Manchu used in Sanjiazi village, Fuyu county in China. This book is a report of our fieldwork research that we carried out as part of the research project — REAL (Researches on Endangered Altaic Languages) — of the Altaic Society of Korea.

 
Manchu language is spoken by less than 10 speakers, who are over 70 years old. This language is classified as a ‘nearly extinct language.’ In May, 2005 and in February, 2006, we interviewed our consultant Mr. Meng Xianxiao. He learnt Manchu from old people at the village. Based on our questionnaire, we have recorded about 1,800 items, 340 conversational sentences and 370 sentences for grammatical analysis. As Manchu is a nearly extinct language, we could find many common phenomena which dying languages share. 

 
Recently Manchu is educated at an elementary school in Sanjiazi village. A combination of local education authorities’ effort and students passion for reading their texts in their native tongue would lead us to have a hope for the survival of Manchu.

It is presented very nicely as a hardcover with considerable detail on how Manchu is being spoken now in Sānjiāzi. Four chapters (Introduction, The phonological system of Manchu, Word-formation and vocabulary, and Grammar) cover 47 pages. The remainder of the book’s 218 pages are occupied with the appendices, which include a list of 344 conversational expressions, 379 sentences for grammatical analysis (all with Chinese and English translations) and Manchu-English (with IPA and Chinese) and English-Manchu glossaries. 

Perhaps most telling about the situation of Manchu is the researchers’ choice of ‘consultant’ for their second trip – the trip on which it appears the above mentioned sentences and expressions were recorded (Introduction, page 5):

Mr Meng Xianxiao had a very good memory and linguistic sense. When he was a child, he used Manchu only for very basic conversation. He began to learn Manchu with relative intensity from the age of 12. Although his native language is Chinese, he was the best available Manchu speaker. So we selected him as our consultant.

So the best Manchu speaker, available to the researchers, was not a native speaker. It’s also clear from the book that the language recorded by these researchers has, not surprisingly, already deviated considerably from the written language of the Qing dynasty.  

Anyway, Randy has had the good fortune to meet Mr Meng and some of the other Manchu speakers in Sānjiāzi and I’m looking forward to his report.

I’m sure anyone with an interest in the Manchu language will find plenty to satisfy their curiosity in Materials of Spoken Manchu. It’s listed as the first publication in a Seoul National University Press series on Altaic Languages and sets a standard for further publications to follow.