Manchu

**Manchu** (Manchu: *ᠮᠠᠨᠵᡠ ᡤᡳᠰᡠᠨ*, Romanization: *manju gisun*) is an East Asian Tungusic language native to Manchuriana. As the traditional native language of the Manchus, it was one of the official languages of the Qing dynasty (1636–1912), although today the vast majority of Manchus speak Mandarin Chinese and Mongolian as well. One million people speak Machu as a native language, and several hundreds of thousands can speak Manchu as a second language (along with the either aforementioned Mandarin and Mongolian) through governmental primary education or free classes for adults in classrooms or online.

The Manchu language also enjoys high historical value for historians of both China and Manchuria, especially for the Qing dynasty, majorly under the pinnacle behalf of the Manchu government. Manchu-language texts supply information that is unavailable in Chinese, and when both Manchu and Chinese versions of a given text exist, they provide controls for understanding the Chinese.

Like most Siberian languages, Manchu is an agglutinative language that demonstrates limited vowel harmony. It has been demonstrated that it is derived mainly from the Jurchen language though there are many loan words from Mongolian and Chinese. Its script is vertically written and taken from the Mongolian script (which in turn derives from Aramaic via Uyghur and Sogdian). Although Manchu does not have the kind of grammatical gender found in most European languages, some gendered words in Manchu are distinguished by different stem vowels (vowel inflection), as in *ama*, 'father', and *eme*, 'mother'.

## Names

The Qing dynasty referred to the Manchu language in various Chinese titles such as 'Qingwen' *清文*, or "Qingyu" *清語* ("Qing language") and Guoyu *國語* ("national language"), which was used by previous non-Han dynasties to refer to their languages. The term "national" was also applied to the Manchu writing as in Guowen *國文* in addition to Guoyu *國語*. In the Manchu-language version of the Treaty of Nerchinsk, the term "Chinese language" (*Dulimbai gurun i bithe*) referred to all three Chinese, Manchu, and Mongol languages, not just one language. Guoyu now refers to Standard Chinese.

## Phonology

Written Manchu was close to being called an "open syllable" language because the only consonant that came regularly at the end of native words was /n/, similar to Beijing Mandarin, North-Eastern Mandarin, Jilu Mandarin and Japanese. This resulted in almost all native words ending in a vowel. In some words, there were vowels that were separated by consonant clusters, as in the words ilha ('flower') and abka ('heaven'); however, in most words, the vowels were separated from one another by only single consonants.

This open syllable structure might not have been found in all varieties of spoken Manchu, but it was certainly found in the southern dialect that became the basis for the written language. It is also apparent that the open-syllable tendency of the Manchu language had been growing ever stronger for the several hundred years since written records of Manchu were first produced: consonant clusters that had appeared in older forms, such as abka and abtara-mbi ('to yell'), were gradually simplified, and the words began to be written as[citation needed] aga or aha (in this form meaning 'rain')[dubious – discuss] and atara-mbi ('to cause a commotion').

### Consonants

Manchu has twenty consonants, shown in the table using each phoneme's representation in the IPA, followed by its romanization in italics. /pʰ/ was rare and found mostly in loanwords and onomatopoeiae, such as pak pik ('pow pow'). Historically, /p/ appears to have been common, but changed over time to /f/. /ŋ/ was also found mostly in loanwords and onomatopoeiae and there was no single letter in the Manchu alphabet to represent it, but rather a digraph of the letters for /n/ and /k/. [ɲ] is usually transcribed with a digraph ni, and has thus often been considered a sequence of phonemes /nj/ rather than a phoneme of its own, though work in Tungusic historical linguistics suggests that the Manchu palatal nasal has a very long history as a single segment, and so it is shown here as phonemic.

Early Western descriptions of Manchu phonology labeled Manchu b as "soft p", Manchu d as "soft t", and Manchu g as "soft k", whereas Manchu p was "hard p", t was "hard t", and k was "hard k". This suggests that the phonological contrast between the so-called voiced series (*b*, *d*, *j*, *g*) and the voiceless series (*p*, *t*, *c*, *k*) in Manchu as it was spoken during the early modern era was actually one of aspiration (as shown here) or tenseness, as in Mandarin.

/s/ was affricated to [ts] in some or all contexts. /tʃʰ/, /tʃ/, and /ʃ/ together with /s/ were palatalized before /i/ or /y/ to [tɕʰ], [tɕ], and [ɕ], respectively. /kʰ/ and /k/ were backed before /a/, /ɔ/, or /ʊ/ to [qʰ] and [q], respectively. Some scholars analyse these uvular realizations as belonging to phonemes separate from /kʰ/ and /k/, and they were distinguished in the Manchu alphabet, but are not distinguished in the romanization.

### VowelsEdit

 mid-high
 mid
 low

In this vowel system, the "neutral" vowels (i and u) were free to occur in a word with any other vowel or vowels. The lone front vowel (e, but generally pronounced like Mandarin [ɤ] ) never occurred in a word with either of the regular back vowels (o and a), but because the rules of vowel harmony are not perceptible with diphthongs, the diphthong eo occurs in some words, i.e. deo, "younger brother", *geo*, "a mare", *jeo*, "department", *leole*, "to discuss", *leose*, "building", and *šeole*, "to embroider", "to collect".

e is pronounced as /e/ after *y*, as in niyengniyeri /ɲeŋɲeri/.

Between *n* and *y*, *i* is absorbed into both consonants as /ɲ/.

The relatively rare vowel transcribed *ū* (pronounced [ʊ]) was usually found as a back vowel; however, in some cases, it was found occurring along with the front vowel *e*. Much disputation exists over the exact pronunciation of *ū*. Erich Hauer, a German sinologist and Manchurist, proposes that it was pronounced as a front rounded vowel initially, but a back unrounded vowel medially. William Austin suggests that it was a mid-central rounded vowel. The modern Xibe pronounce it identically to *u*.