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The Sino Jurchen Vocabulary of the Bureau of Interpreters (Uralic and Altaic Series, V. 153)

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A thousand years ago, the Jurchen were a people living in the forests of Manchuria, remote cousins to the Evenk reindeer herders of Siberia and the Nanai (Goldi) fishermen of the Amur. Around 1115, they stepped from the obscurity of the taiga forest and into the limelight of world history, proclaiming the Jin Dynasty (from whose name the English word "China" is derived) that was within the next 12 years destroy the Liao Empire and seize the Song's capital, Kaifeng. The Jurchens ruled northern half of China for the next century, until their state was in their turn destroyed by the Mongols, and those Jurchens who had not been killed by the Mongols or fully assimilated into the Chinese nation have retreated into the depth of the Manchurian taiga again.

Despite Jurchen's running half of China for a century, having an Imperial Academy, and publishing Jurchen translations of a number of Chinese classics (using the script designed Wanyan Xiyin, the erstwhile Chief Shaman of the Jurchens, and later the Chancellor of the Jin Empire), we know remarkably little of their language. Practically everything that they wrote in their own language themselves has been destroyed, unless it was literally written in stone. In the first half of his books the Australian linguist Daniel Kane, who is probably one of the few experts on the Jurchen language in the English-speaking world, gives an overview of practically all surviving material written in Jurchen. It is mostly limited to nine inscriptions on stone stelae or simply rock walls - some badly eroded. A few other inscriptions were earlier thought to be in Jurchen, but were later found to be written in an even more enigmatic Khitan (Kidan) language, or to be forgeries. Two Jurchen manuscripts were also found, one in Xi'an, China, one in Saint Petersburg, Russia.

Jurchen's own surviving material being so scarce, the main information modern scholars do have about their language has come from much later documents - two small dictionaries compiled much later by the translators and interpreters working for the Ming Dynasty government. The translators, apparently, were not all that competent in Jurchen, and strived, at most, "to communicate, on the basic level, with 'barbarians', when this was absolutely inevitable, or when they brought tribute to the Court". That being the case, just the choice of the words and phrases that they included into the dictionary gives a fascinating insight into the stuff about which the envoys of the Beijing's rulers would want to talk with Manchurian chieftains. If you ever wanted to know how to say in Late Jurchen, "Don't sit on the road leading to the imperial palace!" (<em>Hirle dolo ume te-re</em>), or "green-haired tortoise" (<em>niengia funhe ai'uma</em>), this is the book for you!

The second half of Kane's book presents the full content of one of these two dictionaries. It was compiled by the Bureau of Interpreters, and therefore, unlike its analog from the Bureau of Translators, it does not contain Jurchen script - it merely gives translation of Chinese words into Jurchen, represented "phonetically" - as much as that is possible when your only transcription tool in Chinese characters! (Interestingly, this venerable tradition is alive and well: just a few months ago I've seen this approach used in a series of recently published phrase books intending to help (?) their Chinese readers to speak English, Russian, and other foreign languages).

Kane annotates the original text of the dictionary (thought by him to date from the early 16th century) with English translations, Manchu cognates, and the ca. 1500 pronunciation of the Chinese characters that the Ming translators used to transcribe Jurchen words, and tries to approximately reconstruct the actual Jurchen words based on this (as well as on our knowledge of the Jurchen's later form, the Manchu language).

If you are a Manchurologist, or representing a major research library that buys everything that's important, you should have this book - but then, you probably already have. For the rest of us, it is good to know that someone has made an effort to save this piece of history - a 500-year-old snapshot of an otherwise little-documented language - from oblivion.