Николас Остлер - Empires of the Word - A language History of the World

In 1369 Togan Timur and his Mongols ended up chased out by a popular Chinese warlord turned national hero, who established himself as the first Ming emperor. There was then for three centuries no interference by outsiders in the government of China.

Then the Tungus-speaking Jurchen people, now to be known as the Manchus, gained a second chance to dominate China. This invasion was the last permanent penetration of China by speakers of a foreign language.

In the early seventeenth century, the Manchus had been reorganised, under two able leaders, and advanced into the northern marches of Chinese territory to establish a capital at Mukden. Then, in 1644, they had the luck to be invited into Beijing as a tactical move in a struggle between two generals contending to replace the Ming. The Manchus took the opportunity to install themselves, styling their new dynasty with the name Qīng ( , ‘Pure’), and by 1651 had put down all resistance in the rest of China. Although they came speaking their own language, and it remained an official written language of the Chinese state until the end of the dynasty in 1911, it had died out in speech even at court by the eighteenth century. The language did not survive even in Manchuria itself, a curious victim of its people’s successful takeover of China and its way of life. Today it is only spoken, under the name of Xibo, by the descendants of a detachment of troops dispatched from the Manchurian capital Mukden to Xinjiang in 1764—a north-eastern language now spoken only in the Chinese north-west.

It was into the north that the invaders came, and the Chinese spoken in the north went on to become the standard language for the country. But although the northern dialect underwent significant changes, they can only partly be put down to the particular difficulties that Xiongnu, Tabgach, Jurchen, Mongol or Manchu would have encountered as they tried to get by in Chinese. [69] The Statute of Kilkenny was passed in 1366, requiring the English colonists (section III) ‘to use the English language, and be called by an English name, leaving off entirely the manner of naming used by the Irish …’ There is the interesting fact that Mandarin Chinese can distinguish wômen , ‘we (excluding you)’, from zšnmen , ‘we (including you)’, just as Mongol and Manchu do; this is an innovation since Middle Chinese. And perhaps one can point to the absence of consonant clusters in modern Chinese, some of which were allowed in Middle Chinese. For example, sniwər , ‘appease’, and t’nwšr , ‘secure’, have become sūi and tŭo. Altaic languages cannot abide more than one consonant at the beginning of a syllable. [70] Briefly put, northern Chinese lost all its final consonants; and strings of previously free monosyllables became congealed into longer words. No one knows why, but some explanations for the changes have been proposed. Perhaps the semantic vagueness of Chinese morphemes, after losing so many distinctive consonants, meant that reinforcing one word with another was necessary in order to communicate effectively. Perhaps the sheer phonetic weakness of the new shorter syllables meant that doubling up had to occur to give the language an acceptable speech rhythm (Feng 1998). Perhaps the advent of Buddhism, with chanting in Sanskrit and Pali which introduced longer words, and the complicated expressions that arose when they were translated into Chinese, inured people to polysyllabism. The various trends and possible influences are clearly discussed in Wilkinson (2000:31-40).

There are in fact a few written relics of the kind of Chinese that was spoken in one of the intermediate periods before the invaders were absorbed. The thirteenth-century Chinese translation of The Secret History of the Mongols is full of Altaic patterns such as postpositions instead of prepositions, verbs following the object, and existential verbs at the end of the sentence, all weird in Chinese, whose basic word order is much more like English:

Da-fan nyu-hai-er sheng liao lao zai jia-li de

Generally daughter born past always stay home-at particle

li wu

reason is-not

There is no reason why a daughter, born to you, should always stay at home.

And there is copious evidence for mixtures of Manchu and Mandarin in the zî-dì-shū , ‘Son’s Books’, which are a written record of the narrative entertainment the Manchu enjoyed in their early days in Beijing (1736-96), though they are written more with Chinese word order scattered with Manchu vocabulary.

In northern dialects there is still a tendency for direct objects to occur rather often before the verb, and for than -phrases to occur before comparative adjectives, features that might be attributed to Altaic influence. But in general this mixed style of Chinese did not establish itself. [342] Hashimoto (1986) argues a little too desperately that Chinese was effectively ‘Altaicised’ in the north, but his evidence is confined to transitory pidginised states of the language in Beijing, and a deviant contemporary dialect in Qinghai, where speakers are probably bilingual in Tibetan. Later generations of invader families picked up Chinese naturally from their Chinese mothers, nurses and schoolmasters; probably the Altaic patterns were just too far opposed to Chinese for any compromise to develop. This is typical enough of Chinese linguistic relations: in general, there are not many loan words in Chinese borrowed from other languages in any direction, and certainly no structural influences; dú , ‘calf, does seem to have come from Altaic, characteristically enough since its peoples lived by stockbreeding (cf. Mongol tuγul , Manchu tukšan , Evenki tukučən , all meaning ‘calf), but the many Mongol words that are found in the drama of the Yuan dynasty have since been lost again. [343] Norman (1988: 20).

Although Chinese has spent its three and a half millennia almost wholly confined to East Asia, it did put out some feelers across the sea to its south. In the last thousand years, this led to some permanent residence of Chinese abroad; in the last two hundred, partly as a reaction to—or exploitation of—European settlement, serious overseas communities have grown up, which may be significant in the future spread of the language.

The earliest inklings of Chinese in Nán-yáng , ‘the Southern Ocean’, as the Chinese called the shores of the South China Sea, are visits of merchants to Tongking (northern Vietnam) in the third century BC. [344] Wang (1992: 11). They were followed up in 111 BC by troops, and China annexed Tongking, along with Nan-yue [71] But this same trend can be seen in all Chinese dialects (and indeed farther south in the Yi and Vietnamese languages). (modern Guangxi and Guangdong). China was to hold Tongking for over a thousand years, in fact until AD 938, despite sporadic and increasing resistance. China attempted to assimilate it culturally, with Chinese classics for the local elite, competitive examinations for administrators, and official use of wényán. There was Chinese immigration, and some married into Vietnam’s princely families, providing many later leaders. Mahayana Buddhism, introduced under the Tang dynasty, became the majority religion. [345] Hall (1981: 212). Despite all this, the Chinese language did not spread permanently to this part of the world.

Somewhat later than the advance into Tongking, Chinese proceeded farther south, though apparently with instincts more scholarly than materialist. In the third century AD, two Chinese envoys, Kang Tai and Ju Ying, wrote a report on the foundation of Funan (in modern Cambodia). [346] Coedès (1968: 37). See Chapter 5, ‘Sanskrit in South-East Asia’, p. 204. There is little more to be said of it, or what the Chinese were doing there; but the route via Śri Vijaya (in Sumatra) to India became quite well travelled by China’s Buddhist scholars a little later, in the fifth to eighth centuries. (See Chapter 5, ‘Outsiders’ views’, p. 192.)