The Manchus and their language (presidential address).

• Author: Norman, Jerry

Six hundred years ago, eastern Manchuria was inhabited by numerous small Tungusic tribes. Three centuries earlier these peoples had organized a powerful state, eventually conquering North China where they ruled for the better part of a century before being overcome by the Mongol armies of Cinggis Qavan in 1234; the Tungusic groups that created the confederation that we know as the Jin [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] dynasty (1115-1234) are known to history as the Jurchens (Nuzhen [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] in Chinese). After the fall of the Jin, a majority of the Jurchens remained in China and southern Manchuria; in the course of time these Jurchens became completely sinicized. However, in the river valleys, forests and mountains of northeastern Manchuria, other Tungusic peoples, also commonly referred to as Jurchens, were found. These tribal peoples still preserved their languages and cultures; some of them engaged in agriculture and herding; others engaged in hunting and fishing for their livelihood.

At the beginning of the Ming dynasty (1368-1644), these Jurchen tribes began to move southward, occupying regions only nominally under Ming control. By the sixteenth century, they were divided into three groups: the Jianzhou Jurchens, the Haixi Jurchens, and the Yeren Jurchens. The first two groups were rather more advanced culturally. The Yeren Jurchen lived along the tributaries of the great Amur River, eastward to the seacoast. It was from these tribal groupings that the Manchus, the founders of the Qing dynasty (1644-1911), were to come. The Qing empire, in addition to Manchuria, comprised all of China proper as well as Tibet, Xinjiang, and Mongolia. It seems remarkable that a number of small Tungusic tribes could have had the organizational skills and power to create one of the great empires in world history. By the beginning of the sixteenth century, the present province of Jilin, as well as parts of Liaoning and Heilongjiang were controlled by the Jianzhou and Haixi Jurchens. It was from the Jianzhou Jurchens, who had settled in the region of the Long White Mountains (sanggiyan golmin alin) just north of the Korean border, that the founder of the Manchu confederation, Nurgaci (1559-1626) arose. (1)

By means of a series of campaigns at the end of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth century, Nurgaci united the Jianzhou and Haixi Jurchen tribes and quickly began to menace the Ming dynasty in China. Before 1636, the Tungusic tribes that Nurgaci had united under his rule were collectively known as the Jusen which is the native Manchu form of the ethnonym Jurchen. In 1616 Nurgaci declared himself emperor of the Later Jin dynasty, thereby associating himself with the earlier Jurchen state. The Later Jin, first under Nurgaci and later under his successor, his eighth son Hung Taiji, adopted an increasingly hostile attitude toward China. By the 1630s, Hung Taiji came to think that the association of his emerging empire with the former Jurchen dynasty was politically unwise. The designation of themselves as Jurchens only served to remind the Ming of their nascent imperial ambitions. In 1636 he changed the dynastic name Hou Jin [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] to Daicing and simultaneously abandoned the ethnonym Jusen and replaced it with Manju. (2)

This name had occasionally been used previously during Nurgaci's time, but the origin of the name has always been a mystery. Some have tried to connect the name with the Boddhisattva Manjusri, but there is no precedent for using Buddhist deities' names as ethnonyms, either among the Mongols or the Jurchen. In 1949 the Russian tungusologist, Vera Cincius, suggested in her comparative grammar of the Tungusic languages that Manju might be related to a general Tungusic word meaning 'large river'. The common Tungusic form of this word can be reconstructed as *mangu. The related Udehe word ma[??]mu ~ mangu is defined as a 'large river'--the Amur, Sunggari, and Ussuri; it is also used in one Udehe dialect to refer to the Nanai, a Tungusic group living along the Amur and Sunggari rivers (Cincius et al. 1975-77: 1.525-26). The Nanai cognate, manbo, means 'large river'. Other relevant forms are Ulchi mangu 'large river', Orochi maangu, Kilen ma[??]u, Hejen mam[??]u, all meaning 'large river'. (3) Looking at all these forms, it seems likely that *mangu originally referred to any of several large rivers in Northeast Asia--the Amur, the Ussuri, or the Sunggari.

An earlier cluster *-ng- regularly becomes -nj- in Manchu as can be seen in the Manchu word for 'five' sunja

Another consideration is the symbolism of names of large bodies of water among the Altaic and Central Asian peoples to denote power and prestige. We have only to think of Cinggis Qavan whose name means 'sea' or 'large body of water' (cf. OT te[??]iz 'ocean'); and there is the Dalai Lama, where dalai is the Mongolian word for 'sea'. Omeljan Pritsak has suggested that the name of the Hunnic chieftain Attila was based on the old name of the Volga, itil or idil (cf. Mongolian ijil

Finally, it is not totally irrelevant to point out that the two Chinese characters used to write Manzhou [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], the Chinese transliteration of Manju, both have the water radical, as does the dynastic name Qing [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII].

In the Manchus' own historical account of their origins, they seem to be rooted in the region of the Long White Mountains, bordering on North Korea. (6) Numerous independent historical sources, however, attest to the fact that the ancestors of the Manchus came from farther north, along the banks of the Sunggari River, certainly one of the "large rivers" of northeast Asia. The Jianzhou Jurchens, from whom the Manchus directly arose, were originally from the area of Ilan Hala ("three clans"). Ilan Hala was located at the confluence of the Mudan and Sunggari rivers, near the modern city of Yilan (Manzu jianshi 1979: 14). In light of all these considerations, it seems highly possible that the ethnonym Manju derives from a Tungusic form meaning "large river."

The Jurchen language of the Jin dynasty was written in a complex script, partly logographic, partly syllabic, but by the time of Nurgaci's rise to power, it had fallen from use. During the early years of Nurgaci's hegemony, documents were written in Mongolian. In 1599 Nurgaci ordered two officials, Erdeni and Gagai, to develop a writing system based on the Mongolian alphabet (Hummel et al. 1943-44). This alphabet had been borrowed by the Mongols from the Uighurs who in turn derived their writing system from the Sogdians. This alphabet was not particularly well suited for writing Altaic languages like Old Uighur and Mongolian; it was unable to make several important phonological...