Manchu alphabet - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

The Manchu alphabet was used for recording the now near-extinct Manchu language

Manchu language

Manchu is a Tungusic endangered language spoken in Northeast China; it used to be the language of the Manchu, though now most Manchus speak Mandarin Chinese and there are fewer than 70 native speakers of Manchu out of a total of nearly 10 million ethnic Manchus...

; a similar script is used today by the Xibe

Xibe

The Xibe or Sibo are a Tungusic ethnic group living mostly in northeast China and Xinjiang. They form one of the 56 ethnic groups officially recognized by the People's Republic of China.- History :...

people, who speak a language descended from Manchu. It is written vertically from top to bottom, with columns proceeding from left to right.

History

According to the Veritable Records , in 1599 the Manchu

Manchu

The Manchu people or Man are an ethnic minority of China who originated in Manchuria . During their rise in the 17th century, with the help of the Ming dynasty rebels , they came to power in China and founded the Qing Dynasty, which ruled China until the Xinhai Revolution of 1911, which...

leader Nurhaci

Nurhaci

Nurhaci was an important Jurchen chieftain who rose to prominence in the late sixteenth century in what is today Northeastern China...

decided to convert the Mongolian alphabet

Mongolian script

The classical Mongolian script , also known as Uyghurjin, was the first writing system created specifically for the Mongolian language, and was the most successful until the introduction of Cyrillic in 1946...

to make it suitable for the Manchu people. He decried the fact that while illiterate Han Chinese and Mongolians could understand their respective languages when read aloud, that was not the case for the Manchus, whose documents were recorded by Mongolian scribes. Overriding the objections of two advisors named Erdeni and G'ag'ai, he is credited with adapting the Mongolian script to Manchu. The resulting script was known as ("script without dots and circles").

In 1632, Dahai added diacritical marks to clear up a lot of the ambiguity present in the original Mongolian script; for instance, a leading k
K
K is the eleventh letter of the English and basic modern Latin alphabet.-History and usage:In English, the letter K usually represents the voiceless velar plosive; this sound is also transcribed by in the International Phonetic Alphabet and X-SAMPA....

, g
G
G is the seventh letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet.-History:The letter 'G' was introduced in the Old Latin period as a variant of ⟨c⟩ to distinguish voiced, from voiceless, . The recorded originator of ⟨g⟩ is freedman Spurius Carvilius Ruga, the first Roman to open a fee-paying school,...

, and h
H
H .) is the eighth letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet.-History:The Semitic letter ⟨ח⟩ most likely represented the voiceless pharyngeal fricative . The form of the letter probably stood for a fence or posts....

are distinguished by the placement of no diacritical mark, a dot, and a circle respectively. This revision created the Standard script, known as ("script with dots and circles"). As a result, the Manchu alphabet contains little ambiguity. Recently discovered manuscripts from the 1620s make clear, however, that the addition of dots and circles to Manchu script began before their supposed introduction by Dahai.

Dahai also added ten graphemes (tulergi hergen: "foreign (outer) letters"), to allow Manchu to be used to write Chinese and Sanskrit loanwords. Previously, these words contained sounds that did not have corresponding letters in Manchu.

Sounds that were transliterated included the aspirated sounds k^h, g^h, h^h; ts' (Chinese pinyin: c); ts (Chinese pinyin: ci); sy (Chinese pinyin: si); dz (Chinese pinyin: z); c'y (Chinese pinyin: chi); jy (Chinese pinyin: zhi); and ž (Chinese pinyin: r).
By the middle of the nineteenth century, there were three styles of writing Manchu in use: standard script (ginggulere hergen), semicursive script (gidara hergen), and cursive script (lasihire hergen). Semicursive script had less spacing between the letters, and cursive script had rounded tails.

Alphabet

Characters				Transliteration	Unicode	Notes
isolated	initial	medial	final	Transliteration	Unicode	Notes
Vowels
				a	1820
				a	1820
				e	185D	Second final form is used after [k] [g] [x] k^h g^h h^h
			()	e	185D	Second final form is used after [k] [g] [x] k^h g^h h^h
				i	1873



				o	1823
				o	1823
				u	1860
			??	u	1860
				ū/uu/v
	()			y/y/i'	185F
Consonants

}
| rowspan="2" |

| rowspan="2" |

???
| rowspan="2" |
| rowspan="2" | n
| rowspan="2" | 1828
| rowspan="2" | First medial form is used before vowels; second is used before consonants
|-
|

| rowspan="2" |

|-
|
|

|
| k [k]
| 1874
|
|-
|
|
|

|
|
| g [ɢ]
| 1864
|

|-
|
|
|
|
|
| g [g]
| 1864
|
|-
|
|
|
|
|
| h [χ]
| 1865
|
|-
|
|
|
|
|
| h [x]
| 1865
|
|-
|
|

|
| b
| 182A
|
|-
|
|
|
|
|
| p
| 1866
|
|-
|
|

|
| s
| 1867
|
|-
|
|
|
|
|
| š
| 1867
|
|-
| rowspan="3" |
|

| rowspan="3" |

| rowspan="3" |
| rowspan="3" | t
| rowspan="3" | 1868
| rowspan="3" | First initial and medial forms are used before a o i;

second initial and medial forms are used before e u ū;

third medial form is used before consonants
|-
| rowspan="2" |
|
|-
|
|-
| rowspan="2" |
|
|
| rowspan="2" |
| rowspan="2" |
| rowspan="2" | d
| rowspan="2" | 1869
| rowspan="2" | First initial and medial forms are used before a o i;

second initial and medial forms are used before e u ū
|-
|
|
|-
|
|

|
| l
| 182F
|
|-
|
|

|
| m
| 182E
|
|-
|
|

|
|
| c/ch/c
| 1834
|
|-
|
|

|
|
| j/zh/j
| 1835
|
|-
|
|
|

|
|
| r
| 1875
|
|-
| rowspan="2" |
|
|
| rowspan="2" |
| rowspan="2" |
| rowspan="2" | f
| rowspan="2" | 1875
| rowspan="2" | First initial and medial forms are used before a e;

second initial and medial forms are used before i o u ū
|-
|

|-
|
|

| —
|
| v (w)
| 1838
|
|}

Punctuation

The Manchu alphabet has two kinds of punctuation: two dots, analogous to a period; and one dot, analogous to a comma. However, with the exception of lists of nouns being reliably punctuated by single dots, punctuation in Manchu is inconsistent, and therefore not of much use as an aid to readability.
The equivalent of the question mark in Manchu script consists of some special particles, written at the end of the question.

Jurchen script

The Jurchens

Jurchens

The Jurchens were a Tungusic people who inhabited the region of Manchuria until the 17th century, when they adopted the name Manchu...

were the ancestors of the Manchus, and their language, the Jurchen language

Jurchen language

Jurchen language is an extinct language. It was spoken by Jurchen people of eastern Manchuria, the creators of the Jin Empire in the northeastern China of the 12th–13th centuries. It is classified as a Southwestern Tungusic language.-Writing:...

is ancestral to the Manchu language

Manchu language

, and their script was derived from the Khitan script

Khitan script

Khitan scripts may refer to one of two mutually exclusive scripts used by the Khitan people during the 10th-12th centuries:*Khitan small script – invented in about 924 or 925 CE by a scholar named Diela...

, which was in turn derived from Chinese.

External links

Unicode Manchu/Sibe/Daur Fonts and Keyboards
Manchu alphabet
Manchu script generator (Romanization → Manchu script (also for download))
ManchuFont — an OpenType
OpenType
OpenType is a format for scalable computer fonts. It was built on its predecessor TrueType, retaining TrueType's basic structure and adding many intricate data structures for prescribing typographic behavior...

font for Manchu writing
Jurchen Script

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