Function words in Manchu lexicographic representation
67th Annual Meeting of the PIAC, Gotemba 2025
Since the introduction of the Qing dynasty in China (1644) its official language became Manchu and all documents were written in Manchu. Ever since the Manchus were intensely engaged in compiling, publishing, and distributing dictionaries and handbooks. This especially intensified during the 18th century, when the Manchus produced various explanatory dictionaries and translation dictionaries. Among these, the dictionaries with the phrase han-i araha ‘written by the emperor’ hold a special place. These dictionaries were published during the course of that century as a ‘series’. Four of them are explanatory dictionaries. They are all organized thematically.
These explanatory dictionaries have a special chapter called Sula gisun-i hacin ‘Empty Words’, which reflects the traditional classification of parts of speech in Manchu and Mongolian. In grammars of the Mongolian language, a similar chapter corresponds to the unchangeable parts of speech that remain after separating the declinable (nouns) and conjugated (verbs). The Manchu word sula means “empty, free, loose”. Each of these meanings can in its own way characterize the words collected in this chapter. In modern Mongolian, the term “сул үг” refers only to particles
Such chapters in the explanatory dictionaries contain the most diverse words: interjections, correlative words, particles, adverbs, conjunctions, postpositions and even suffixes. Certainly, a large amount of grammatical information can also be obtained from the explanatory texts given for each word that is placed in this chapter.
In this presentation, we will discuss in detail the function words in Manchu dictionaries.