Jurchen language is the Tungusic language of the Jurchen people of eastern Manchuria, the founders of the Jin Empire in northeastern China of the 12th–13th centuries. It is ancestral to Manchu. In 1635 Hong Taiji renamed the Jurchen people and Jurchen language, "Manchu".
Writing
A writing system for Jurchen language was developed in 1119 by Wanyan Xiyin. A number of books were translated into Jurchen, but none have survived, even in fragments. Surviving samples of Jurchen writing are quite scarce. One of the most important extant texts in Jurchen is the inscription on the back of "the Jin Victory Memorial Stele", which was erected in 1185, during the reign of Emperor Shizong. It is apparently an abbreviated translation of the Chinese text on the front of the stele. A number of other Jurchen inscriptions exist as well. For example, in the 1950s a tablet was found in Penglai, Shandong, containing a poem in Jurchen by a poet called Aotun Liangbi. Although written in Jurchen, the poem was composed using the Chinese "regulated verse" format known as qiyan lüshi. It is speculated that the choice of this format—rather than something closer to the Jurchen folk poetry was due to the influence of the Chinese literature on the educated class of the Jurchens.
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 and the Bureau of Interpreters. Both dictionaries 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 was known to Europeans since 1789, a copy of the Huá-Yí yìyǔ with a Jurchen section 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 into 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 and not their writing in Jurchen script. The time of its creation is not certain; various scholars thought that it could have been created as late as or as early as 1450–1500; Daniel Kane's analysis of the dictionary, published in 1989, surmises that it may have been written in the first half of the 16th century, based on the way the Jurchen words are transcribed into Chinese. 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, who were not very competent in Jurchen. The compilers of the two dictionaries were apparently not very familiar with Jurchen grammar. 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".
Jurchen words in Chinese texts
Besides the inscriptions and one or two surviving manuscripts in Jurchen script, some important information on the Jurchen language is provided by the Jurchen words, transcribed using Chinese characters in Chinese documents. These include:
The list of 125 Jurchen words in , an appendix to the History of Jin. Alexander Wylie translated the list into English and Manchu.
Jurchen names and words throughout the History of Jin.
An appendix with Jurchen words in Da Jin guozhi, the text prepared in 1234 by Yuwen Mouzhao.
Researches on Manchu Origins contained a list of corrections of transcribed Jurchen language words found in the History of Jin in Chapter 135 – , using the Manchu language to correct them, in Chapter 18 – . The Jin dynasty referred to the Jurchen language with the term Guoyu, which was also used by other non-Han dynasties in China to refer to their languages, like the Manchu language during the Qing dynasty, the Mongolian language during the Yuan dynasty, the Khitan language during the Liao dynasty, and the Xianbei language during the Northern Wei.
Writing Jurchen names in English
Due to the scarcity of surviving Jurchen-language inscriptions, the overwhelming majority of primary documentary sources on the Jurchen people available to modern scholars are in Chinese. Therefore, when names of Jurchens, or Jurchen terms, are written in English, the same writing convention is usually followed as for Chinese words, that is, the English spelling is simply the Romanization of the Modern Standard Mandarin pronunciation of the Chinese characters that were used to render the Jurchen name or word. This standard presentation does not attempt to reconstruct the original Jurchen pronunciation of the word, or even the 12th-century Chinese pronunciation of the Chinese characters Thus, for example, the Jurchen name of the first Jin emperor is written in Chinese as :zh:完颜阿骨打, and appears in English scholarship as Wanyan Aguda or Wan-yen A-ku-ta.
