Altaic influences on Beijing dialect: the Manchu case.

• Author: Wadley, Stephen A.

INTRODUCTION

Chinese(1) has been characterized as being resistant to outside influence. It has been assumed that if there is any borrowing between Chinese and neighboring languages, the direction is nearly always from Chinese to the other languages, rather than vice-versa. A statement on word order made by Li and Thompson (1974: 206) typifies what has been the majority opinion: "It is to be noted that the Chinese language is particularly suited to the investigation of the principles and directions of word order changes because of the overwhelming dominance of the Chinese civilization in pre-twentieth-century Asia. Such cultural dominance precludes the possibility of any external influence on Chinese in its word order development. Any change observed in Chinese word order must be originated internally."(2)

THE IDEA OF LANGUAGE DIFFUSION

More recently, however, a few scholars have challenged this idea of Chinese being a closed system. One has gone so far as to characterize Chinese as a language "mosaic."(3) Mantaro Hashimoto (1976a; 1976b; 1978; 1980; 1986) has done, perhaps, the most in advocating the study of areal features to gain information on the development of Chinese. He studied the Chinese dialects of northern China and noticed the further north one traveled in China, the more the Chinese dialects began to resemble the Altaic languages that bordered them. Conversely, as one traveled south in China, the Chinese languages began to resemble Austro-asiatic languages that bordered them in the south. He theorized that the Chinese languages had been heavily influenced by the non-Chinese languages on their periphery. Going even further with respect to the situation in northern China, he theorized that during the Qing (Manchu) dynasty (1644-1911), the language of the capital was not Chinese but rather a pidgin made up of Manchu and Chinese elements, as well as a few elements from Mongolian and other minor languages. Furthermore, he suggested that modern Beijing dialect was a descendant of that pidgin (Hashimoto 1986). Though this theory is impressionistically persuasive, the major obstacle in accepting it is the lack of solid empirical evidence. It might be expected that little or nothing would be written in this hypothesized "mixed" language. Pidgins rarely, if ever, produce a literature. Hashimoto (1986: 92-93) pointed to several texts of zidi shu (a type of "drum song" popular in northern China during the Qing dynasty(4)) that were written in a mixture of Manchu and Chinese as a proof that the mixed language he hypothesized actually existed. Charles Li (forthcoming) has argued convincingly that these texts were purposeful manipulations of the two languages, much in the same way that macaronic verse in the West was often simply a manipulation of Latin and a vernacular language to produce a comic idiom for the enjoyment of those who had to study Latin. Indeed, it would be unusual for a pidgin to assume the form of the language in zidi shu, since most pidgins rely on essentially a single language for their lexicon, rather than being a mixture of lexical elements (Whinnom 1971). The fact that there are so few texts in this form also argues against them being a representation of the spoken language of time - although more and more texts of this type are coming to light (see Tulli 1992).

BORROWING VS. LANGUAGE SHIFT

The evidence given us by the existence of zidi shu should not be abandoned entirely, however. The fact that the texts were produced tells us something about the language situation in northern China. First, there must have been some, even much, bilingualism among the inhabitants of Beijing then, otherwise there would be no audience for the pieces. Ji Yonghai (1993) has in fact presented evidence that the Manchus went through a period of bilingualism before abandoning their language for Chinese. Second, although the mixed-language zidi shu appear to be deliberate manipulations of language for comic effect, one may assume that part of the comedy is that the language parodies an actual language situation. As Whinnom (1971) has pointed out, target-language speakers often parody the language of non-native speakers of the language, not in the way they actually speak, but rather how they are perceived to speak. Thus they may produce evidence of a mixed language even though they do not produce the actual mixed language. In the zidi shu text Chaguan ("Inspecting the Pass") the Manchu language is put in the mouth of the chou (clown),(5) a method that exactly matches genres of tanci (chantefable) in the south, wherein the major characters speak in Mandarin (guanhua) but the chou speaks in the local dialect. From that single text it would appear that Manchu was considered the local language, in contrast to Mandarin, which was the lingua franca.

Let us return for a moment to the areal situation in Chinese. Despite the lack of specific evidence to support Hashimoto's theory of a Manchu-Chinese pidgin, it remains a fact that when one travels north or south in China, the Chinese dialects one encounters tend to resemble to some degree the non-Chinese languages that border them. In the Fujian dialects, Jerry Norman (1976) discovered that some features of the language did not go back to Middle Chinese cognates and postulated a substratum language from the Austroasiatic family. Charles Li (forthcoming) has recently done work on Chinese and Tibetan dialects in western China and has discovered mutual influences, sometimes to an advanced degree, between the two languages. But since Standard Chinese (a standard based on modern Beijing dialect) has...