The Adaptation of Western and Chinese Categories to the Description of Manchu
MariarosariaGianninoto
Université Paul Valéry, Montpellier
Summary
Frequent contacts between European countries and China during the Qing period kindled interest in the languages
spoken in the Qing empire and led to the publication of numerous Western books on Chinese varieties but also on the Manchu
language. To describe the features of these distant languages, most of these works adapted Western linguistic categories and
terminologies. This was the case of the earliest Western grammar of Manchu, Verbiest’s Elementa linguae
tartaricae (1682). However, some Western works progressively integrated elements of the Chinese linguistic tradition.
For instance, the grammars of Kaulen (1856) and Harlez (1884) refer to the Chinese categories “full words” (content words) and “empty words” (function words). Other
Western works translated or drew on Chinese-Manchu bilingual primers, which in turn adapted the methodology and categories of
Chinese philology to the description of Manchu, such as in the textbooks by Shěn (1682)
and Wǔ-gé (1730). Their western translations (Domenge n.d.; Wylie 1855; Hoffman 1883) resulted in interesting examples of
circulation of linguistic knowledge and amalgamation of descriptive categories.
Now an endangered East Asian Tungusic language, Manchu was for almost three centuries
the official dynastic language of the Chinese empire (Norman & Wadley 2017: 666).
During the Qing dynasty (1644–1911), established by Manchu rulers, Manchu language “was the fundamental medium of communication within
the imperial family, and within the court it was used for worship, ideological expression, address to the bannermen and nobility”
(Crossley & Rawski 1993: 63). Written Manchu continued to be used as the official
language throughout the Qing Dynasty, but “Manchu never supplanted literary Chinese in the state or in society at large” (Söderblom Saarela 2020: 43) and spoken Manchu declined since the second half of 17th century
(Beffa & Even 2011). Manchu was learnt by Chinese individuals who worked as
interpreters and mediators, but also by Manchu who “had lost their mother tongue […] and spoke Chinese as their native language”
(Takekoshi 2019: 41). Numerous bilingual Manchu-Chinese primers were written,
responding to the need of learning Manchu and Chinese in the multilingual context of the Chinese empire (Takekoshi 2014, 2015, 2019).
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