Reading Jakdan’s poetry: an exploration of literary Manchu phonology

Harvard University, 2007, September. — 165 p. Submitted to the committee on regional studies - East Asia in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the A.M. degree in regional studies - East Asia.The purpose of this paper is to reconstruct, as precisely as possible, the phonological aspects of the language of a set of unique poems, composed in the Manchu language by a translator named Jakdan, at some time early in the 19 th century. Drawing on both Asian and European sources contemporary to the poet, I will create an initial outline of Manchu phonology, including the inventory of phonemes, major allophonic variations, diphthongs, triphthongs, syllable stress,and syllable quantity. I will then use meter and rhyme in Jakdan’s poetry to proveand refine my description of Manchu pronunciation. Through reconstructing the phonology of an idiolect—the language of an individual—I hope to add to our understanding of the phonology of Literary Manchu overall, including the ways in which it has changed over time, and the relationships between the language of the Manchu court and the surviving spoken Manchu dialects. I will begin by reviewing the history of the study of Manchu phonology, and outlining the relationships between important scholars of the Manchu language and the spoken language of the court. I will argue that each scholar should be considered an expert on a particular phase or dialect of the language, butthat a single scholar’s statements can’t be expected to hold for all dialects and all phases of the language. I will choose a set of sources that I consider to be closest to the language of Jakdan’s poetry, and then, through a detailed analysis of rhyme, meter, and alliteration, refine my description of the pronunciation of Jakdan’s poetry,and finally discuss the linguistic implications of my conclusions.