A Comprehensive Manchu English Dictionary

Jerry Norman’s Comprehensive Manchu–English Dictionary, a substantial revision and enlargement of his Concise Manchu–English Lexicon of 1978, now long out of print, is poised to become the standard English-language resource on the Manchu language. As the dynastic language of the Qing dynasty (1644–1911), Manchu was used in official documents and was also the vehicle for an enormous translation literature, mostly from the Chinese. The newDictionary, based exclusively on Qing sources, retains all of the information from the earlier Lexicon, but also includes hundreds of additional entries cited from original Manchu texts, enhanced cross-references, and an entirely new introduction on Manchu pronunciation and script. All content from the earlier publication has also been verified. This final book from the preeminent Manchu linguist in the English-speaking world is a reference work that not only updates Norman’s earlier scholarship but also summarizes his decades of study of the Manchu language. The Dictionary, which represents a significant scholarly contribution to the field of Inner Asian studies and to all students and scholars of Manchu and other Tungusic and related languages around the world, will become a major tool for archival research on Chinese late imperial period history and government.

The Tungusic Languages is a survey of Tungusic, a language family which is seriously endangered today, but which at the time of its maximum spread was present all over Northeast Asia. This volume offers a systematic succession of separate chapters on all the individual Tungusic languages, as well as a number of additional chapters containing contextual information on the language family as a whole, its background and current state, as well as its history of research and documentation. Manchu and its mediaeval ancestor Jurchen are important historical literary languages discussed in this volume, while the other Tungusic languages, around a dozen altogether, have always been spoken by small, local, though in some cases territorially widespread, populations engaged in traditional subsistence activities of the Eurasian taiga and steppe zones and the North Pacific coast. All contributors to this volume are well-known specialists on their specific topics, and, importantly, all the authors of the chapters dealing with modern languages have personal experience of linguistic field work among Tungusic speakers. This volume will be informative for scholars and students specialising in the languages and peoples of Northeast Asia, and will also be of interest to those engaged with linguistic typology, cultural anthropology, and ethnic history who wish to obtain information on the Tungusic languages.

"Based on three slightly differently organised manuscripts"--P. [7]

Grammaticalization research has increasingly highlighted the notion of constructions in the last decade. In the wake of this heightened interest, efforts have been made in grammaticalization research to more precisely articulate the largely pretheoretical notion of construction in the theoretical framework of construction grammar. As such, grammaticalization research increasingly interacts and converges with the emerging field of diachronic construction grammar. This volume brings together articles that are situated at the intersection of grammaticalization research and diachronic construction grammar. All articles share an interest in integrating insights from grammaticalization research and construction grammar in order to advance our understanding of empirical cases of grammaticalization. Constructions at various levels of abstractness are investigated, both in well-documented languages, such as Ancient Greek, Latin, Spanish, German, Norwegian and English, and in less-described languages, such as Manchu and Mongolian.

The history of China, as any history, is a story of and in translation. Translating Early Modern China tells the story of translation in China to and from non-European languages and Latin between the fourteenth and the nineteenth centuries, and primarily in the Ming and Qing dynasties. Each chapter finds a particular translator resurrected from the past to tell the story of a text that helped shape the history of translation in China. In Chinese, Mongolian, Manchu, Latin, and more, these texts helped to make the Chinese language what it was at different points in its history. This volume explores what the form of an academic history book might look like by playing with fictioning as part of the historian's craft. The book's many stories—of glossaries and official Ming translation bureaus, of bilingual Ming Chinese-Mongolian language primers, of the first Latin grammar of Manchu, of a Qing Manchu conversation manual, of a collection of Manchu poems by a Qing translator—serve as case studies that open out into questions of language and translation in China's past, of the use of fiction as a historian's tool, and of the ways that translation creates language.