Re: [lg policy] Manchu, Former Empire’s Language, Hangs On at China’s Edge

[Brookes, Tim]

Thanks so much for posting this article. If anyone in the group can read
and write Manchu in its traditional, Mongolian-based script, I'd love to
hear from them with a view to carving a short text in Manchu for the
Endangered Alphabets Project.
Thanks!
Tim Brookes
www.endangeredalphabets.com
brookes at champlain.edu

On Mon, Jan 11, 2016 at 11:32 AM, Fierman, William <wfierman at indiana.edu>
wrote:

> Manchu, Former Empire’s Language, Hangs On at China’s Edge
>
>
>
> By ANDREW JACOBSJAN. 11, 2016
>
> Photo
>
> Xibe farmworkers in a cotton field near Qapqal County, China, in October.
> Credit Adam Dean for The New York Times
>
> Continue reading the main story
>
>
>
> QAPQAL XIBE AUTONOMOUS COUNTY, China — Loyal to the core and prized for
> their horsemanship, several thousand Manchu soldiers heeded the emperor’s
> call and, with families and livestock in tow, embarked in 1764 on a trek
> that took them from northeastern China to the most distant fringes of the
> Qing dynasty empire, the Central Asian lands now known as Xinjiang.
>
>
>
> It was an arduous, 18-month journey, but there was one consolation: After
> completing their mission of pacifying the western frontier, the troops
> would be allowed to take their families home.
>
>
>
> “They were terribly homesick here and dreamed of one day going back east,”
> said Tong Hao, 56, a descendant of the settlers, from the Xibe branch of
> the Manchus, who arrived here emaciated and exhausted. “But sadly, it was
> not to be.”
>
> Continue reading the main story
>
> Related Coverage
>
>
>
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>
>     A nomad in the Xinjiang region. China wants nomads settled to preserve
> grasslands.
>
>     China Fences In Its Nomads, and an Ancient Life WithersJULY 11, 2015
>
>     Jin Youzhi, right, half-brother of China's last emperor, with the
> historian Jia Yinghua in an undated photo provided by Mr. Jia.
>
>     Jin Youzhi, Sibling of China’s Last Emperor, Dies at 96APRIL 13, 2015
>
>     In their village in northeastern China, Meng Shujing, 82, standing at
> left, and her friends and neighbors are among the last native speakers of
> Manchu, the dying language of the former Qing dynasty, Chinese linguists
> say.
>
>     Chinese Village Struggles to Save Dying LanguageMARCH 18, 2007
>
>
>
> But two and a half centuries later, the roughly 30,000 people in this
> rural county who consider themselves Xibe have proved to be an ethnographic
> curiosity and a linguistic bonanza. As the last handful of Manchu speakers
> in northeast China have died, the Xibe have become the sole inheritors of
> what was once the official tongue of one of the world’s most powerful
> empires, a domain that stretched from India to Russia and formed the
> geographic foundation for modern China.
>
> Photo
>
> Children attended a class at a primary school in Qapqal County in October.
> Han, Kazakh, Xibe and Uighur children attend the school, which requires
> students to study the Xibe language. Credit Adam Dean for The New York Times
>
>
>
> In the decades after the revolution in 1911 that drove the Qing from power
> after nearly 300 years, Mandarin Chinese vanquished the Manchu language,
> even in its former stronghold in the forested northeast. But the isolation
> of the Xibe in this parched, far-flung region near the Kazakh border helped
> keep the language alive, even if its existence was largely forgotten until
> the 1940s.
>
>
>
> For scholars of Manchu, especially those eager to translate the mounds of
> Qing dynasty documents that fill archives across China, the discovery of so
> many living Manchu speakers has been a godsend.
>
>
>
> “Imagine if you studied the classics and went to Rome, spoke Latin and
> found that people there understood you,” said Mark C. Elliott, a Manchu
> expert at Harvard University who said he remembered his first encounter, in
> 2009, with an older Xibe man on the streets of Qapqal County. “I asked the
> guy in Manchu where the old city wall was, and he didn’t blink. It was a
> wonderful encounter, one that I’ll never forget.”
>
>
>
> Despite the local government’s best efforts, which include language
> instruction in primary schools and the financing of a biweekly newspaper,
> what is known here as Xibe is facing the common fate of many of the world’s
> languages: declining numbers of speakers and the prospect of extinction.
>
>
>
> The publication Ethnologue identifies almost 300 living languages in
> China, half of them on the edge of the abyss as Mandarin, the nation’s
> official language, continues to subsume minority tongues. Among those under
> pressure, 20 have fewer than 1,000 speakers, according to the website The
> World of Chinese.
>
>
>
> Although many young people here still speak Xibe at home, few of them can
> read its graphically bold script, made up of 121 letters and written
> vertically, from left to right. One recent day in the offices of The Qapqal
> News, a four-page gazette composed mostly of articles translated from the
> state-run news media, He Wenjun, 72, a teacher and translator, said he
> worried that his children and grandchildren could not read or write Xibe.
>
>
>
> “Language is not only a tool for communication, but it ties us to who we
> are and makes us feel close to one another,” said Mr. He, who has spent
> decades translating imperial Qing documents into Chinese. “I wonder how
> much longer our mother tongue can survive.”
>
>
>
> Even as intermarriage and migration to other parts of the country dilute
> their identity, the Xibe remain proud of their history and especially their
> role helping to secure the lands that greatly expanded China’s borders. It
> was a Manchu emperor who tapped the Xibe to settle the Ili Valley here
> after Qing soldiers massacred or exiled the nomads who had long menaced the
> empire’s western borderlands.
>
> Photo
>
> Workers monitored the printing presses at The Qapqal News, a biweekly Xibe
> language newspaper in Qapqal County, in October. Credit Adam Dean for The
> New York Times
>
>
>
> In the decades that followed, a succession of rebellions, many of them led
> by the region’s ethnic Uighurs, kept the Xibe garrisons busy and sometimes
> thinned their ranks. One battle in 1867 nearly halved the Xibe population,
> to 13,000.
>
>
>
> Until the 1970s, the Xibe remained isolated from the ethnic Kazakhs and
> Uighurs who settled Ghulja, a city that sits on the far side of the Ili
> River. The Xibe also ate pork and practiced a blend of shamanism and
> Buddhism, making intermarriage with the Muslim Kazakhs and Uighurs
> relatively rare.
>
>
>
> “We happily lived in our own world and rarely took boats to the other side
> of the river,” said Tong Zhixian, 61, a retired forestry official who sings
> and performs traditional Xibe dances at the county’s new history museum.
>
>
>
> The Xibe language has gradually evolved from Manchu as it absorbed
> vocabulary from the Uighurs, Kazakhs, Mongolians and even the Russians who
> passed through Xinjiang. Unlike Mandarin, which has few borrowed words,
> Xibe is flecked with adopted nouns like pomodoro (tomato), mashina (sewing
> machine) and alma (the Uighur word for apple). Scholars say that the
> phonetic diversity of Xibe, a language thought to be related to Turkish,
> Mongolian and Korean, allows speakers to easily produce the sounds of other
> tongues.
>
>
>
> “We fought with the other groups, but there were so few of us here and no
> one else spoke our language, so we had to learn theirs to survive,” said
> Mr. Tong, an engineer at the county power company who is vice president of
> the Xibe Westward March Culture Study Association, a local group that
> promotes Xibe language and history. “That’s why we are so good at learning
> foreign languages.”
>
>
>
> Those linguistic talents have long been an asset to China’s leaders. In
> the 1940s, young Xibe were sent north to study Russian, and they later
> served as interpreters for the newly victorious Communists. In recent
> years, the government has brought Xibe speakers to Beijing to help decipher
> the sprawling Qing archives, many of them of imperial correspondence that
> few scholars could read.
>
>
>
> “If you know Xibe, it takes no time for you to crack the Qing documents,”
> said Zhao Zhiqiang, 58, one of six students from Qapqal County sent to the
> capital in 1975, and who now heads the Manchu study department at the
> Beijing Academy of Social Sciences. “It’s like a golden key that opens the
> door to the Qing dynasty.”
>
>
>
> But generous government funding might not be enough to save the language
> of the Manchus. At the county museum here, a sprawling collection of
> dioramas depicting the westward exodus, Mr. Tong spends most days
> performing to an empty room. After one recent performance, an ensemble
> piece that featured Xibe matrons twirling with very large knives, he
> wondered aloud whether he might be the last of his generation to keep such
> traditions alive.
>
>
>
> “Young people just aren’t interested in this kind of thing,” he said,
> wiping the sweat from his brow. “Sure, they might study some Xibe in
> school, but once they leave the classroom, they plunge right back into
> Mandarin.”
>
>
>
> Yufan Huang contributed research from Beijing.
>
>
>
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>
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