05.22.08

The writing on the wall

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).

How difficult is it to learn a new script? Well, some scripts are easier than others. And don’t even get me started about Chinese….

It’s been about a month and a half or so since Syz had the idea to look into what happened to the Manchu language, and how it interacted with Mandarin, so I’ve been studying it for no longer than that. At this point, if you found a piece of Manchu script and showed it to me, I would able to make out most of the letters, but I wouldn’t necessarily have any idea what it means. I started out my study of the script by reading the Wikipedia article, of course. And that led me to the listing on Omniglot (mainland link). I printed out the page and tried to see how it applies to a book called “现代满语八百句” (xiàndài mǎnyǔ bābǎi jù, 800 Sentences in Modern Manchu) published by 中央民族学院出版社 (zhōngyāng mínzú xuéyuàn chūbǎnshē, Central University for Nationalities Press) that Sima found. I compared the Manchu script with the romanization given in the book. Some things were clear, but I still had many questions. Later, Sima mailed me a Manchu phrasebook, which helped more, and then we found a textbook which explains things pretty clearly (all these books are in Chinese). Note that there are slightly different romanization systems, which I’ll get into in another post.

The good news is that the Manchu script is alphabetical, and phonemic, just like Korean or Spanish. It has letters! The bad news is that each letter has up to four different forms, and there are quite a lot of rules about how a letter will change its form when preceded or followed by another certain letter. English has two forms (lowercase and uppercase), Japanese has two (hiragana and katakana — or three, if you count romaji). Manchu letters have four forms: a stand-alone form, a word initial form, a word medial form, and a word final form. The script is written from top to bottom along a spine. Students in my English school said that it looks like 虫子 (chóng.zi, bugs or worms).

Now sometimes each of the four letterforms is the same, which makes it a little easier:

The letter that represents “ch” has the same form in all positions.

But sometimes one of a letter’s forms looks like one of another letter’s forms. For example, this is what medial “a” looks like . It also happens to be what “e” looks like when it follows “t” or “d”, and what “n” looks like when it precedes a consonant. Of course that’s not the only example of letters looking like each other, but I won’t bore you with more examples. Eventually maybe I’ll put up a page that explains how Manchu script works in a nutshell. It’s actually readable (of course) once you understand it.

There are also other things that make it difficult, though, such as what can seem like minim confusion. The medial form for the letter “k” looks like (unless it is followed by a consonant and preceded by “a”, “e”, “o”, or “u”), so when you have an alternation of “a” and “k”, it results in a bunch of identical strokes, like in the word “ukakabi”:

Looks like something I could comb my hair with.

I’m not exactly sure what the word means, but it seems to be a verb meaning something like “to escape like a convict would”.

So what about finding real examples of Manchu script in the wild and seeing if we can figure them out?

On a recent trip to Wulajie (that I’ll post on soon), I bought some Qing Dynasty coins that have Manchu script on them.

I recognize the first word as “boo”, (which means “house”, “building”, or “family”, and probably sounds more or less like English “bow” (as in bow-tie) — I’ll get into the pronunciation in another post, ’cause that’s a whole ‘nother barrel o’ worms). [The man in the antique store where I bought these said that the reason the one on the left is bright and shiny and the others are not is because it was handed down from generation to generation, whereas the other two were robbed from graves!]

Using the Anaku Manchu Script Generator, which can be downloaded here, we can type “boo” and it comes out as:

The second word looks strange though, especially the line on the right. In Manchu script there are no vertical lines on the right. There are dots, circles and horizontal lines that turn up or down, but no vertical lines. Maybe it’s like the top part of the first word but somehow the lines that connect the right part (the vertical line) with the main body somehow disappeared for some reason, stylistic or otherwise. Maybe it’s just “bo”. But I can’t find a word “bo” in this or this online Manchu dictionary. So what is it? Maybe it’s an abbreviation like we would find in a Latin tomb inscription: LE VI V P F FEC. Without looking into what the Qing Dynasty put on their coins, I couldn’t guess further, let alone come to any kind of conclusion.

The second word on the second coin (after I consulted a Manchu textbook to make sure about the letters) looks like it spells “yuwan”, which comes out:

Looking this up in the dictionary, I see it can mean “yuan” (元, yuán, a unit of Chinese money). I’m deliberately not looking into this further yet, because I just want to show you how I’m using the resources I have available.

The third coin has what looks like “su”:

, which can mean “whirlwind” or “scent”; not likely candidates for inclusion on a coin.

The last example I want to look at is written on the side of a building in what was a Qing Dynasty government outpost in Wulajie.

The first letter is a little strange. I’m guessing it’s the initial “k” form, making this “kisi”:

But there’s no word like that in the dictionaries, so it remains a mystery.

I expect that these mysteries will be solved eventually, if not by my own nosing around, then by readers writing in to tell me. I’m deliberately not looking too hard yet, just to give readers a sense of just how difficult reading a new script is, and to give a sense of what we are faced with when finding real examples of the writing. It’s usually not something you can just “crack”.

We are involved in an exploration, and there are many directions that we are going in simultaneously. We’re new at learning the language (although some of you, our readers, aren’t), and that is a world in itself. And then there is the history, and how the language influenced and was influenced by other languages that it came in contact with. And we’re faced with the stranger question of why the Manchu people basically gave up their culture and let their language practically die out. But we still have the echoes. Here in northeast China, there are echoes of Manchu all over the place if you pay attention.

Permalink