A Dream of Tartary

Some correspondence from the bulging Echoes of Manchu mailbag:

Michael Rank, a journalist and translator and Chinese graduate based in London, writes:

A few weeks ago I came across an interesting book entitled A Dream of Tartary by Henry McAleavy (1963), in almost new condition, in an Oxfam shop in Leamington Spa, Warwickshire.

It’s subtitled The Origins and Misfortunes of Henry P’u Yi, and is a lively if not terribly scholarly account of the fall of the Qing dynasty and the sad fate of its last emperor. It’s mainly based on Chinese and Japanese sources, I don’t think the author knew Manchu though he does devote a few paragraphs to the language. He says: Continue reading A Dream of Tartary

Sanjiazi 04: The school museum

Previous entries: 1, 2, 3.

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. Continue reading Sanjiazi 04: The school museum

Sanjiazi 03: A bump in the road, and arrival

Previous installments are here and here.

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.

Continue reading Sanjiazi 03: A bump in the road, and arrival

Book: Materials of Spoken Manchu

Following Zev Handel’s comment on an earlier post, we have now obtained Materials of Spoken Manchu from Seoul National University Press.

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. Continue reading Book: Materials of Spoken Manchu

Sanjiazi 02: Journey to the … South?

On Monday morning, October 12th, we met at the train station for a 7:40 train.  On Saturday, I had called Mr Guan (the Jilin City Manchu Association’s resident Manchu language expert), and he said he couldn’t go.  This was very unfortunate because that left me as the only one going who was interested in the language.  So only Mrs Guan, Mrs Wu, and Mrs Guan’s 26-year-old daughter, who is a graduate of a Changchun college of Chinese Medicine, were to be my traveling companions.  We boarded the train and set off on our way. Continue reading Sanjiazi 02: Journey to the … South?

Sanjiazi 01: An Unexpected Party

On Thursday, October 9th, I took my computer to a shop to get it fixed (my fan wasn’t on right, causing the CPU to heat up, in turn causing the C drive to crash, apparently).  I had brought my copy of Gertraude Roth Li’s wonderful book Manchu: a Textbook for Reading Documents along so I could study while I was waiting, and since it looked like it would take a while, I took a cab over to the local Manchu Association to ask the Manchu language teacher there about his opinion on the meanings of some of the phrases and sentences in the first reading lesson of the book.  Little did I know that this would lead into a trip to Sanjiazi, a place that still has living Manchu native language speakers. Continue reading Sanjiazi 01: An Unexpected Party

Minim confusion

I found my first real case of minim confusion, which I previously said was theoretically possible in Manchu because medial “a”, pre-consonantal “n”, and one form of “k” are all made up of identical strokes.

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” . Continue reading Minim confusion

Sunzi visualizes… (Manchu acquisition?)

Randy’s recent creation of the Tiny Little Corpus (TLC™) of Manchu from the Art of War provides a fine excuse to dump the data into the mind-blowing visualization tools at Many Eyes (h/t to Ideophone) and get a new perspective on what Sunzi says.

The screenshot below doesn’t really do it justice. Continue reading Sunzi visualizes… (Manchu acquisition?)

The Art of War — in Manchu!

It is with great fanfare that I announce Victor Mair‘s new addition to Sino-Platonic Papers: an expanded set of notes (1.03 MB download, PDF) on his 2007 translation of the Art of War.

The notes themselves are fantastic, but what made me practically fall out of my chair was what he has in the appendix: a complete Manchu version of the Art of War in romanized text.  And if that’s not enough, English glosses are given for each word/phrase!  The romanization and glosses are provided by Hoong Teik Toh at Academia Sinica in Taiwan.  Of all of the Manchu study materials that I’ve seen, this one has got to be the coolest!

And as Mark Swofford says in his announcement on Pinyin.info, this is most probably the longest piece of romanized Manchu text on the web.  That makes it like a tiny little corpus (TLC™).  So I started playing around with it, doing things that one might do with a corpus…. Continue reading The Art of War — in Manchu!

Wall Mystery Solved!

I went to Wulajie again earlier this week.  A fellow school headmaster had arranged a trip there for his school so the students could learn about Manchu culture and spend part of the afternoon drawing.  His school is an art school, and he said he chose Wulajie partly because he was inspired by my interest in Manchu language and culture, and also that it makes sense for kids to know more about Manchu culture since this area (Northeast China) used to be their country.

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? Continue reading Wall Mystery Solved!