Verwandte Artikel zu The Early Modern Travels of Manchu: A Script and Its...

The Early Modern Travels of Manchu: A Script and Its Study in East Asia and Europe (Encounters With Asia) - Hardcover

Buch 17 von 18: Encounters with Asia

Söderblom Saarela, Mårten

 
9780812252071: The Early Modern Travels of Manchu: A Script and Its Study in East Asia and Europe (Encounters With Asia)
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0812252071 ISBN 13: 9780812252071
Verlag: UNIV OF PENNSYLVANIA PR, 2020

Inhaltsangabe

A linguistic and historical study of the Manchu script in the early modern world

Manchu was a language first written down as part of the Qing state-building project in Northeast Asia in the early seventeenth century. After the Qing invasion of China in 1644, and for the next two and a half centuries, Manchu was the language of state in one of the early modern world's great powers. Its prominence and novelty attracted the interest of not only Chinese literati but also foreign scholars. Yet scholars in Europe and Japan, and occasionally even within China itself, were compelled to study the language without access to a native speaker. Jesuit missionaries in Beijing sent Chinese books on Manchu to Europe, where scholars struggled to represent it in an alphabet compatible with Western pedagogy and printing technology. In southern China, meanwhile, an isolated phonologist with access to Jesuit books relied on expositions of the Roman alphabet to make sense of the Manchu script. When Chinese textbooks and dictionaries of Manchu eventually reached Japan, scholars there used their knowledge of Dutch to understand Manchu.

In The Early Modern Travels of Manchu, Mårten Söderblom Saarela focuses on outsiders both within and beyond the Qing empire who had little interaction with Manchu speakers but took an interest in the strange, new language of a rising world power. He shows how—through observation, inference, and reference to received ideas on language and writing—intellectuals in southern China, Russia, France, Choson Korea, and Tokugawa Japan deciphered the Manchu script and explores the uses to which it was put for recording sounds and arranging words.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Marten Soderblom Saarela is an assistant research fellow at the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica, Taiwan.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Introduction
A Cultural History of the Manchu Script

The subject of this book is Manchu, a language first written down as part of the Qing state-building project in Northeast Asia in the early seventeenth century. After the Qing invasion of China in 1644, Manchu was a language of state in one of the early modern world's great powers for two and a half centuries. Its prominence and novelty made the language interesting to Chinese literati as well as foreign scholars.

Manchu was a living language, and its script was in active use in one of the world's major empires. Yet scholars in Europe and Japan, and occasionally even within China itself, were compelled to study the language without access to a native speaker. Through observation, inference, and reference to received ideas on language and writing, scholars in southern China, Russia, France, Choson Korea, and Tokugawa Japan deciphered the Manchu script, describing it in terms that made sense to them. Generations before the decipherment of the forgotten scripts of the ancient Mediterranean and Near East became one of the success stories of European nineteenth-century philology, scholars across Eurasia worked on the common problem of making sense of the new Manchu script and the uses to which it was put: recording sounds and arranging words.

The history of the Manchu script's study at both ends of Eurasia was not just contemporaneous; it was connected. The Jesuit missionaries in Beijing sent Chinese books on Manchu to Europe, where scholars struggled to make it into an alphabet conformable to Western-language pedagogy and printing technology. In southern China, meanwhile, an isolated phonologist with access to Jesuit books relied on expositions of the Roman alphabet to make sense of the Manchu script. When Chinese textbooks and dictionaries of Manchu eventually reached Japan, scholars there used their knowledge of Dutch to understand Manchu. In East Asia and Europe, Manchu was studied using partially shared resources. Yet local differences shaped the understanding and usage of the script in the alphabetical, letterpress world of Paris and Saint Petersburg and the predominantly xylographic Sinosphere of Beijing, Hansong, and Edo.

The shared preoccupation with Manchu brought Europe and East Asia closer. In China, the encounter with Manchu inspired the invention of a specialized, phonographic usage of the Chinese writing system. European observers, duly impressed, declared that the Chinese characters had been made into an alphabet like their own. Korean scholars, conversely, adapted their hangul recording of spoken Chinese to the Manchu script, creating a commensurability between Choson and Qing linguistic technologies. Tokugawa scholars, finally, were able to read letters from Russia once they had acquired the Northeast Asian lingua franca of Manchu, which was the language of the Russian missives. Through these developments, Manchu emerges as intimately related to the globalization of the early modern period.

The book shows that Manchu, which thus far has primarily been studied within the context of the expanding Qing empire's imperial and military institutions, is also a topic for cultural and intellectual history both inside and outside China. Rather than being of interest only to the Manchus themselves, the language was studied by the Chinese and by people outside the Qing domain who had little interaction with Manchu speakers, but who took an interest in the strange, new language of a rising world power. These individuals, spread across several countries, were in a similar situation in that Manchu for them meant written Manchu. Until they could properly read it, written Manchu was, in turn, limited to the Manchu script, which they set out to understand and manipulate in various ways. By focusing on their first encounters with Manchu, the book contends that the script—the medium rather than the message—has a rich cultural history. By looking at contemporaneous, comparable, and at times connected scholarly engagements with the Manchu script in East Asia and Europe, the book further argues that a global history of the humanities should look to forms of linguistic scholarship other than philology. Identifying nonphilological linguistic scholarship in China, finally, is a way to show that the preoccupation with the classical corpus was not as pervasive as often presented, and that the current humanities disciplines might have genealogies that do not lead through the exegetical and philological examination of the classical texts, but through studies of modern and non-Chinese languages.

This brief introduction will discuss the unfolding of the Manchu language in history, its study since the fall of the Qing, and the intervention that this book makes in Manchu and Chinese studies and the history of the humanities. A summary of the core chapters then follows.

Manchu in History

The more than two and a half centuries of Manchu Qing rule in China were one of several periods in which China was part of an Inner Asian empire that operated in more languages than classical, or literary, Chinese. Yet there is a persistent image of Chinese history as a succession of states or regimes ("dynasties") united by Confucian ideology and statecraft, expressed precisely in literary Chinese and in no other language. Unsurprisingly, this bird's-eye view snapshot of imperial China has a great deal of truth to it. Even the Manchu regime used classical Chinese texts to legitimize its rule to the educated Chinese elite, who in turn were tested on the Confucian texts in the examinations leading to civil office. The dominant ideology exalted written monolingualism for centuries. According to Zhongyong ([Doctrine of] the mean), one of the classical texts studied by virtually every elite Chinese male during the late imperial period, a single and unified written language was one of the hallmarks of a unified empire. Indeed, the standardization of writing was hailed as an achievement by the founder of the first integrated empire in antiquity, both in his own propaganda and in later and very well-known historiography. This idea of the Chinese empire as imposing a single language has remained in the scholarly imagination, even though the Manchus for centuries upheld a plurilingual empire in China and beyond. The first of the interventions that this book will make is to acknowledge Qing—and by extension Chinese—plurilingualism, through a focus on Manchu.

The Manchu language was named as such shortly after it was committed to writing in Jianzhou, just north of the Chinese border close to the Bohai gulf and not far from the Korean Peninsula. The Jurchen people living there spoke a language related to that of the Jin dynasty, which controlled north China in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The Jurchen once possessed their own writing system, but it was forgotten in Jianzhou by the early seventeenth century. The aspiring state-builders there instead looked to the neighboring Mongols for inspiration, and adopted their ultimately Near Eastern script to write their own language. With some modifications, the new written language became the medium for day-to-day administration and the expression of the ruler's will in the state that from 1636 was called Daicing in Manchu or Da Qing in Chinese.

As Manchu power grew north of the Great Wall, the new state entered into conflict with the Chinese Ming empire and its ally, Choson Korea, then recently assisted by the Chinese in a destructive defensive war against Japan. The Manchus invaded Korea twice in the 1620s and 1630s. For geopolitical reasons, the Choson government supported some study of the Jurchen language for centuries. They then started to train interpreters in Manchu. The Korean efforts to study the new language of Jianzhou represent the first of the many encounters with the...

„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Verlag
UNIV OF PENNSYLVANIA PR
Erscheinungsdatum
2020
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0812252071
ISBN 13 
9780812252071
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
288
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Mare Nostrum Group B.V.
gpsr@mare-nostrum.co.uk

Doelen 72
Breda
4831 GR
Niederlande