Jurchen Language - Ming Dynasty Jurchen Dictionaries

Ming Dynasty Jurchen Dictionaries

The two most extensive resources on the Jurchen language available to today's linguists are two dictionaries created during the Ming Dynasty by the Chinese government's Bureau of Translators (四夷馆, Siyi Guan) and the Bureau of Interpreters (会同馆, Huitong Guan). Both were found as sections of the manuscripts prepared by those two agencies, whose job was to help the imperial government to communicate with foreign nations or ethnic minorities, in writing or orally, respectively.

Although the Bureau of Translators' multilingual dictionary (华夷译语, Hua-Yi yiyu, 'Sino-Barbarian Dictionary') was known to Europeans since 1789 (thanks to Jean Joseph Marie Amiot), a copy with a Jurchen section (Hua-Yi yiyu) was not discovered until the late 19th century, when it was studied and published by Wilhelm Grube in 1896. Soon research continued in Japan and China as well. It was this dictionary which first made serious study of the Jurchen language possible. This dictionary contained translation of Chinese words into Jurchen, given in Jurchen characters and in phonetic transcription (rather imprecise, since the transcription was done by means of Chinese characters).

The vocabulary lists compiled by the Bureau of Interpreters became first known to the Western scholars in 1910, and in 1912 L. Aurousseau reported the existence of a manuscript of it with a Jurchen section, supplied to him by Yang Shoujing. This dictionary is similar in its structure to the one from the Bureau of Translators, but it only gives the "phonetic" transcription of Jurchen words (by means of Chinese characters) and not their writing in Jurchen script. The time of its creation is not certain; various scholars thought that it could be created as late as ca. 1601 (by Mao Ruicheng) or as early as 1450–1500; Daniel Kane's analysis of the dictionary, published in 1989, surmises, based on the way the Jurchen words are transcribed into Chinese, that it may have been written in the first half of the 16th century.

Both dictionaries record very similar forms of the language, which can be considered a late form of Jurchen, or an early form of Manchu.

According to modern researchers, both dictionaries were compiled by the two Bureaus' staff not very competent in Jurchen. They compilers of the two dictionaries were apparently not well familiar with the grammar of the language; the language, in Daniel Kane's words, was geared to basic communications "with 'barbarians', when this was absolutely inevitable, or when they brought tribute to the Court".