Previous entries: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.
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. Continue reading Sanjiazi 07: Showing off students
Previous entries: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.
After dressing up and taking pictures, Shi Junguang, the Manchu teacher, brought out the books he uses to teach the children in their Manchu language classes.
They are not professionally published, but rather printed out using a color printer. I’m not sure who wrote these books, but I suspect they were written by Zhao Jinchun, who was the former Manchu teacher at the elementary school, and who now is the vice commissioner of Fuyu county. Continue reading Sanjiazi 06: Textbooks
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!