User:Ceige/Manchu Grammar Overview

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Intro

This guide is meant to give people with an interest in historical linguistics and conlanging an overview of the Manchu language. Manchu is the language that descended from earlier Jurchen; "Manchu" was sort of a rebranding for the Jurchen after they absorbed surrounding peoples.

Xibe is a daughter language of Early Modern Manchu, splitting off in 1764 thanks to a Qing military garrison.

Orthography

The Manchu script has a Proto-Sinaitic (and thus likely Egyptian, via grapheme borrowing + phonemic calquing) heritage along with the Roman, Greek, Hebrew, Arabian and Devanagari writing systems, amongst many others.

Specifically, the Manchu script's lineage is thus: Manchu < Mongolian < Old Uyghur < Sogdian < Syriac < Aramaic < Phoenician < Proto-Sinaitic < Egyptian Hieroglyphs.

The Old Uyghur script was used for Buddhist, Manichaean and Christian texts.

Phonology

Please refer to the Wikipedia Manchu Phonology section for the following notes.

Music

Here's some music to get a feel for the modern phonology as sung (note some contractions, e.g. tebufe na > /të:f nei/:

Consonants

  • Fortis-lenis distinction ala Mandarin, English
  • Apparently a historic ts ~ s alternation
  • coda /r/ can sometimes be followed by an epenthetic duplicate of the vowel before it.
  • Most f are seemingly derived from *p, with remaining p's from onomatopoeia, ideophones and loans. Cf. Japanese, Arabic.

Vowels

  • e = schwa-ish sound ala Mandarin but considered "front"
  • ū/v/ü = probably some sort of central u sound, but in Xibe this has supposedly merged with u.

Phonactics in general

  • Manchu phonology has more or less followed a cycle of contracting open syllables to produce CVC syllables, before simplifying the inevitable internal CC clusters, and then repeating that process.
  • -n is the one reoccurring coda consonant (ala Japanese).
  • Wikipedia mentions abtara-mbi as an example of this sort of simplification, resulting in atara-mbi; however, even -mbi appears to be a combination of -mV* and -bi *(frequent verb nominaliser in the Altaic language area, cf. Korean, Japanese; even the Uralic and IE families like -mV as a nominaliser).

Grammar

Noun cases

Manchu primarily marks noun case via a series of clitics/suffixes (that's a debate for another time).

Here the core Manchu noun cases will be covered, with comparison to other languages with similar noun cases, for mnemonic effect and to stimulate the inner lumper in all of us (the reader should not take this as defacto evidence of a genetic relationship). See Wikipedia for examples of cases in glossed sentences.

Case Form Xibe Equivalent Comparisons & Notes
Nominative Ø Ø
Accusative be, or Ø - be has ~definiteness -f/və Cf. Japanese -he, -wo; note -he could conceivably have Chinese origins too
Genetive i, or ni i I need to confirm what possible the difference in usage is
Dative-locative de də, -t cf. Turkic, Mongolic, Japanese; Xibe can get away with -t even after -n, e.g. ɢazn-t
Ablative ci dəri cf. Partitive in Uralic (can be used in comparison, see Wikipedia examples)
Lative - ći Note correlation between Manchurian Initiative and Xibe Ablative
Instrumental-Sociative - maq ~ with

In addition, there is a series of less used cases:

Case Form Notes
Initiative deri Starting point of an action
Terminative tala, tele, tolo End point of an action
Indefinite allative si "to somewhere around X" - allative, but when you don't know precisely where you'll end up relative to the goal of your movement.
Indefinite locative la, le, lo "at somewhere around X"
Indefinite ablative tin "from X or somewhere like that"
Distributive dari every one of something
Formal gese as, like, in the form of
Identical ali, eli, oli same as X, from adali "same"
Orientative ru facing/towards something, not actually moving
Revertive ca, ce, co backward/against something
Translative ri change in quality/form

Nominalisers

Derivational Suffixes

  • Adjective forming -ngga/-ngge/-nggo

Verbs

  • -mbi is used for the present. It is seemingly descended from a combination of a gerund ending with a copula/existential verb, e.g. -mV-bi

Vocabulary

For a more extensive list of words (446 apparently): Wikibooks: Manchu/Vocab

  • ama, eme = father, mother
  • akū = COP.NEG
  • boo = house
  • bu = give
  • dahame = about
  • dzengse = orange (Manchu loan)
  • ejen = master
  • encu = other
  • ere = this
  • erin = time
  • fe = old
  • fulu = better??
  • haha, hehe = man, woman
  • han = khan
  • jui = child
  • kooli = regulations
  • ningge = nominaliser
  • niyalma = man
  • oyonggo important
  • ši/si = PLU
  • tua (tuwa) = consider
  • tuci = go away
  • weile = build
  • yabu = act
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