|
Manchu (Manchu: ''manju gisun'') is a severely endangered Tungusic language spoken in Northeast China; it was the native language of the Manchus and one of the official languages of the Qing dynasty (1636-1911). Most Manchus now speak Mandarin Chinese and there are fewer than 70 native and semi-speakers of Manchu out of a total of nearly 10 million ethnic Manchus. Although the Xibe language, with 40,000 speakers, is in almost every respect identical to Manchu, Xibe speakers, who live in far western Xinjiang, are ethnically distinct from Manchus.〔Ma, Yin: ''Die nationalen Minderheiten in China'', p. 250. Verlag für fremdsprachige Literatur, Beijing, 1990, ISBN 7-119-00010-1.〕 Manchu language sources have two main uses for historians of China, especially for the Qing dynasty. They 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. 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 alphabet (which in turn derives from Aramaic via Uyghur and Sogdian). Although Manchu does not have the kind of grammatical gender that many Indo-European languages do, some gender-related words in Manchu are distinguished by different stem vowels; in such cases, "a"s are sometimes used to indicate masculine ones, as in ''ama'' "father", and "e"s are sometimes used to indicate feminine ones, as in ''eme'' "mother". ==Writing system== The Manchu language uses the Manchu script, which was derived from the traditional Mongol script, which in turn is based on the vertically written pre-Islamic Uyghur script. Manchu is usually romanized according to the system devised by Paul Georg von Möllendorff in his Manchu grammar. Its ancestor, Jurchen, used the Jurchen script, which is derived from the Khitan script, which in turn was derived from Han characters. There is no relation between the Jurchen script and the Manchu script Chinese Characters can also be used to transliterate Manchu. All the Manchu vowels, and the syllables commencing with a consonant, are represented by single Chinese characters, as are also the syllables terminating in ''i, n, ng'', and ''o''; but those ending in ''r, k, s, t, p, I, m'', are expressed by the union of the sounds of two characters, there being no Mandarin syllables terminating with these consonants. Thus the Manchu syllable ''am'' is expressed by the Chinese characters ''a-muh'' (8084, 7800) ( ''a mù''), and the word ''Manchu'' is, in the imperial Manchu dictionary, spelt in the following manner: ''Ma'' (7467) ''-a'' (8084) ''gan'' (2834) —Man; ''—choo'' (1303) ''a'' (11767) ''chu''; —Manchu. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Manchu language」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|