I’ve recently read"The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World" and want to hear what all of you think the answer is, because I feel like the book was missing something in its thesis and I am not very sure what that is.
I’ve recently read"The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World" and want to hear what all of you think the answer is, because I feel like the book was missing something in its thesis and I am not very sure what that is.
It was an entirely different writing system based off of Chinese and Khitan. Its relationship with Chinese is more analogous to the Cherokee script’s relationship with the Latin alphabet. Plus I don’t think it’s “not a huge thing” considering imo this is why the Manchu language today is near extinct. Imagine how European history would’ve turned out if every major Germanic culture was suddenly wiped out or had all their writing destroyed.
we’re literally communicating in germanic rendered with the latin alphabet right now, not the alphabet the germans used. that’s all that happened with jurchen/manchu, its marginalization doesn’t have to do with its script (and it could be rendered in others if people were inclined) but the abandonment of it by the manchu themselves as the ruling caste of Qing, and also the reactionary anti-manchu policies of the early Republic
E: but yeah ‘chinese’ isn’t the appropriate term for that first jurchen writing system, it just shared the common ancestor of the chinese and khitan.
Well yeah. imagine if in the middle of the Renaissance, when Northern Europe finally approached the level of societal development as Southern Europe, a nomadic group of Germanics suddenly came and assimilated/killed off most Germanic cultures. All works written in the Latin alphabet are lost, no Shakespeare, Martin Luther or Chaucer. The Germanic languages that do survive now use a form of neo-hieroglyphic completely incompatible with the previous written corpus. It would be a tremendous loss of culture.
I admit this isn’t much of a material analysis. I’m just lamenting the loss of all these scripts. But changing writing systems isn’t a casual affair, especially in the premodern world where document preservation is difficult and you’re not going to have people sit down and transliterate every old book they come across. One contributing factor to the decline of the Manchu language is the lack of a corpus. Most texts were merely translations from Chinese. If the pre-mongol Jurchen corpus had survived I doubt the Qing nobility would’ve abandoned Manchu as readily.
Well not really. The Khitan Large script was explicitly created in the Liao dynasty based off the principles of Chinese (which at this point was already identical to modern day Chinese), a second semi-phonetic Small script was then created based off of that and old Uyghur, while the Jurchens used a script based off borrowings from both Chinese, the Khitan Large scrript, and possibly the Khitan small script.
okay mongolian used sogdian, a very successful and not unsophisticated system. i’m not of the opinion writing systems inherently advantage/disadvantage a language on their own. prominence of languages is political.
i mean no problem with that, but i don’t see how the Jurchens are that special or how whatever documents might’ve burned in Zhongdu couldve saved the manchu language 8 centuries afterward
I’m not arguing that modern Mongolic/Manchu script is inferior to Jurchen script because that would be chauvinistic. I’m saying any switch to a completely different writing system, especially one working on completely different principles basically renders all previous text inaccessible. We can see this basically any time a culture transitions to drastically different writing systems in the pre-modern era its accompanied by a complete abandonment of the previous written corpus even if you ignore the specific mechanics of the writing systems involved. We literally have no Jurchen documents written in paper, despite the fact that all Song sources point to the fact that the Jurchens were a relatively literate people who had access to printing for four centuries at that point. If that corpus survived then yeah the Manchu language would probably be like the Zhuang or Yi languages today, which never had the political prestige of Manchu/Jurchen, yet still persist and have relatively good access to their literary canon despite attempts at modern reforms.
i’m not particularly versed in extant primary documents in the area, but is it actually that weird to not have paper sources from a century-long conquest dynasty? do direct song documents even survive or are they copies?
i know china has had unusual luck/care in the preservation of documents compared to say, europe. but i also get the impression not all periods are as well attested and well preserved as others. doesn’t Khitan also lack paper?
but anyway while i was looking for what i think i read about policies of translating documents to manchu under the Qing i came on this thread talking about the language decline
A Reddit link was detected in your comment. Here are links to the same location on Teddit and Libreddit, which are Reddit frontends that protect your privacy.
I literally have a multiple scans of Song dynasty print books I use for my projects and I’m not even a history major or anything. The Song dynasty was THE dynasty that started mass production of books. What is considered the standard print font is called Song form. The amount of surviving prints from that era is immense considering the time period. Everything from construction manuals to poetry anthologies. Considering the Jurchens ruled over former Song territory in the North, it would be incredibly chauvinistic to assume that they had no interest or ability in producing books of their own, or that they did not produce any literature in their own language. We have Steles in the Stele Forest of their equivalent of the Thousand Character Classic, and we have records of programs to mass translate classical texts into Jurchen during the Jin dynasty, so clearly they cared about their language and its preservation. The contrast between the complete lack of any paper documents in language we know was mass producing paper books is incredibly stark.
Also the reddit thread you linked is incredibly sus(No hate to you I just can’t stand
) since it uses terms like “had an ancestor born in Manchuria”. Manchuria as a word is a Japanese invention and a misappropriation of a political term as a geographic term for a region that has many ethnicities. The Manchus themselves never used such a term geographically. Anyone who uses this term is a historically illiterate reactionary who probably has very chauvinistic views towards Manchus.
Sounds like some fash shit. This literally sounds like Khazar theory for Manchus. I don’t know why westerner “scholars” have such a hate boner for Manchus.
Lol, Lmao even.
This is what I’m talking about. The Jurchens are the Manchus.The change was a change in name only. There’s not really a stark linguistic change other than the transition in writing systems. Clearly there existed a Jurchen/Manchu language corpus of literature that was lost due to the Mongol conquest and the subsequent loss of the Jurchen script. If they had survived we would not be refering to a work written in 1743 as “one of the few original Manchu-language literary works” for a language that had writing since 1119 and was presumably mass producing paper books.
well a good question to ask would then be why Song books are preserved but Jin and Liao ones are not, no? why would so much Song production survive but no Jin if they had the same technology and both got conquered by the Mongols?
its just a geographical term to english speakers, could probably specify “territory of the Later Jin” or Fengtian, Jilin, Heilongjiang but i don’t think either of those are amenable to a very straightforward answer, without having to further explain what those mean. i didn’t link that to you to talk about semantics, the salient points about Manchu identity being tied to the banners and those banners being associated outwardly and internally with han-speakers are pretty compelling.
but i also disagree with the “a change in name only”, being organized into the banners, being given a new name, standardizing the language, and then becoming this de jure separate ruling caste over eventually all of China is a pretty huge deal culturally.
I didn’t expect you to defend “Manchuria” of all things. Go fuck yourself. As someone from the Northeast with Manchu relatives, people like you disgust me. You walk in here assuming things about Northern ethnicities that you’re too much of a coward to say, you cite
Bullshit with zero sources full of fascist dogwhistles and you outright use a term the Japanese fabricated to justify Genocide against my people. People like you are the exact same type to believe Israel’s bullshit pseudo-religious justifications for bombing the Palestinians. Fuck off back to r*ddit.