11.05.08
Posted in Excursions, Script at 2:43 pm by Randy Alexander
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. Read the rest of this entry »
Permalink
11.01.08
Posted in Excursions, Introductory at 12:10 am by Randy Alexander
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. Read the rest of this entry »
Permalink
09.26.08
Posted in Script at 12:08 am by Randy Alexander
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” . Read the rest of this entry »
Permalink
09.24.08
Posted in Uncategorized at 10:07 am by syz
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. Read the rest of this entry »
Permalink
09.21.08
Posted in Announcements at 11:58 pm by Randy Alexander
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…. Read the rest of this entry »
Permalink
09.19.08
Posted in Excursions, Script at 2:57 am by Randy Alexander
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? Read the rest of this entry »
Permalink
06.10.08
Posted in Unexplained at 8:36 pm by Randy Alexander
Sometimes you just can’t explain things.
I have a friend who likes to send me YouTube links of bands, and sometimes I send some back. I had been trying to think of songs that I liked when I was growing up. Somehow, David Essex’s 1973 hit Rock On came into my mind, so on April 9th of this year, I sent it to him, wondering if he liked it too. It’s really a one-of-a-kind thing. The drums are sparse with no snare or cymbals — only hi-hat, toms and bass drum, and the hi-hat and some of the drums have a single echo (not a repeating echo), as strong as the original signal, slapping back one sixteenth note later. The bass is very unusual as well, being stronger than the drums and having a very muddy sound. It too has the same echo on it. There is no guitar at all, which may be the strangest thing about the whole song; pop songs of that time were dominated by guitars. The song’s production is extremely complex, with a wide variety of vocal and percussive effects, and a striking string ensemble “solo” featuring glissandi. It left a big impression on me as a child. I guess I was seven or eight years old when I first heard it.
Yes, this does in fact have something to do with Manchu. Keep reading.
Read the rest of this entry »
Permalink
05.22.08
Posted in Introductory, Script at 11:48 pm by Randy Alexander
You’ve all seen those movies where someone finds some ancient parchment or carving with strange runes written on it. And then some professor-type runs off with it for an hour or so and then comes back holding it above his head shouting, “I’ve got it! It means….”
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).
Read the rest of this entry »
Permalink
05.05.08
Posted in Excursions at 9:32 pm by Randy Alexander
Seeing as I live up here in Manchuria, all the hubbub about Manchu stirred up my wanderlust instinct and I was chomping at the bit to go poke around in 三家子 (sānjiāzi) or someplace. On the map, I noticed that there were some Manchu villages nearby, so I heeded the call.
I met with my friend Alice and caught the 08:15 bus to 乌拉街 (Wūlājiē ). It took about an hour and twenty minutes to get there. During the ride, we asked some other passengers and the 车长 (chēzhǎng , conductor) if anybody could speak Manchu there. Everybody said that they didn’t know anyone who could speak, but they thought there still might be some old people who could. The 车长 said that she thought they taught Manchu in the area primary school, so that’s where we headed when we got off the bus.
Read the rest of this entry »
Permalink
Posted in Introductory at 9:01 pm by sima
Over the last year or so, Beijing Sounds has been a source of inspiration for those of us grappling with the finer points of life in China. Mandarin language obsessives have been treated to recordings and analyses of real Běijīnghuà, spoken by Beijingers young and old, as well as some of the other sounds one might hear out and about on the streets of the capital, and even the outlying lands.
All of this has led to detailed discussions, most of which have remained vaguely connected to the original subject matter. But in recent months, questions have been arising more quickly than anyone has been able to put them to bed. Indeed three of us have become quite obsessed with the current state of Manchu and whether it had an influence on modern Standard Mandarin.
It may have been Ken Grey, a sometime Beijing Sounds commenter, who planted the seed. He mentioned a time, not so very long ago, when the Manchu language could be heard on the streets of Beijing. If this was the case, who were the Manchu and where did they all go?
Read the rest of this entry »
Permalink
