The end of the queue?
The book of the Nisan Shaman, or nixan saman i bithe, is one of Shamanism’s most important documents. It is the story of a shaman who brings a person back from the dead.
The following guest post is the first installment of a translation by Paweł Manowski, from Poland (”p” from comments on earlier posts). I have only edited it slightly for consistency.
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. Read the rest of this entry »
Often children’s stories feature language that native speakers know and take for granted, but is not often found in texts that are intended for the day to day business of adults. They often include animal names, as well as words denoting things and actions one might encounter in daily life, but would not normally write about. This series of posts will explore stories that are found in one of the books I purchased in Taipei: Manju gisun aji gurun gisun i jube, 满语童话故事, by 庄吉發, who is a researcher in residence at Taipei Gugong.
By “Möllendorff”, I mean A Manchu Grammar with Analysed Texts, by P.G. von Möllendorff, Shanghai, 1892. It is the first English language Manchu grammar textbook. Since then, there has only been one other one published, in 2002 by Liliya Gorelova, but it’s very expensive, and according to the one review of it on Amazon, contains many typos and other errors. It’s too expensive for me to buy it myself to make my own judgement. Möllendorff is reasonably well written, even considering that it’s more than 100 years old. And it’s free!
Gertraude Roth Li’s (GRL) book, Manchu: a textbook for reading documents (MTRD), is excellent, but it does not purport to be a grammar textbook. It is designed primarily to help historians to be able to read Manchu documents, so although it is permeated with wonderful grammatical notes, it (deliberately) doesn’t explore syntax in a very complete way.
So exploring the texts in Möllendorff may be a good foothold and introduction to Manchu grammar. In this series of posts, I will go through the texts in Möllendorff and explain the grammar in light of all the resources I have at my disposal, and provide a fresh translation. I warmly welcome comments and corrections from readers. Read the rest of this entry »
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. Read the rest of this entry »
I’m in Taiwan attending a conference on English language teaching and testing. My friend the eminent linguist Geoff Pullum gave a mind-blowingly sharp plenary lecture on grammar in the afternoon, and later there was a panel discussion about the design and use of small corpora (or Tiny Little Corpora, as I have called them here).
A couple days ago I went to the National Palace Museum library and met a Manchu scholar, 莊吉發, who has been quite prolific in producing published Manchu materials. He gave me the address of a publishing company that he uses, and the next day I went to go find it. Read the rest of this entry »
There’s an old stereotype about Asians and cameras. When I was a boy growing up in the Midwest, I remember hearing my father say “I’ve never seen a Chinaman without a camera.” Of course by “Chinaman” he meant anyone with “yellow” skin. This kind of talk sounds almost racist these days, but that’s just how people talked back then, regardless of their views on race. Looking back on my father’s life at that time, I couldn’t say he was racist in any way. During that time I rarely knew or even saw any Asians, but my father worked with people from all over the world every day.
Stereotypes don’t come out of nowhere though. After I got married (to a Chinese girl), my wife and I were living in Manhattan’s Chinatown, and once decided to take a Chinese bus tour to Washington DC. As soon as we got there, the bus stopped in front of the Capitol building and everyone (all Chinese except me) proceded one by one to have their pictures taken in front of it. Then we got back on the bus, drove to the next attraction, and then the same thing again! And again! My wife and I finally decided we would escape and catch up with them later.
Back to Sanjiazi: when the Manchu teacher Shi Junguang (see previous posts, listed above) and I got back to the school office, some of the others were looking at the school’s collection of traditional Manchu costumes. Then someone pointed at me and I was doomed. Read the rest of this entry »
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: Read the rest of this entry »
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. Read the rest of this entry »
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.
