A Comprehensive Manchu–English Dictionary by Jerry Norman (review)

Which linguist has not been asked how many languages she speaks? More often than not the reply is that being a linguist has little or nothing to do with speaking many languages. Yet such a response is a fairly recent development in the big picture of language study. Jerry Norman (1936–2012) was no man to use this line of argument, as a glance into his biography—a biography of language learning and study—reveals. A year after Norman’s death, the Harvard University Asia Center has published, in collaboration with Harvard University Press, the final tome in this scholar’s career. And while neither of the current review authors ever had the chance to meet him, it is obvious that Norman must have been a linguist-scholar with not only a profound appreciation and love of languages, but with a mission to make the less-widely-used language of Manchu more accessible to English speakers.

Published with the assistance of Keith Dede and David Prager Branner, A Comprehensive Manchu–English Dictionary (CMED) presents itself as a unidirectional dictionary for the English-speaking learner of the Manchu language. In total CMED—thirty-five years in the making—is a considerable improvement over Norman’s 1978 Concise Manchu – English Lexicon and is boasting some 25,000 lexemes, which would suffice for many learner levels. The 1978 Concise, the first Manchu–English dictionary on the market, has been the standard for English-speaking learners and is now updated and enlarged by about a third of its former scope. Soon, the name came to symbolize the genre—what “Webster” is for American English or the “Duden” for German, the “Norman” is for English-speaking Manchuists. The editor’s and author’s prefaces sketch a picture, when the Concise was first envisaged, of a time when linguists chose not to rely on second-hand speaker information but to learn a language from scratch. As David Prager Branner puts it in his introduction, “[Jerry Norman’s] memory for words and expressions, even in tongues he did not know, left people floored” (x).

The Language of Manchu

Manchu is a language of great historical import in Asia. From 1644 to 1911, it was the dynastic language of the Qing dynasty, the last empirical dynasty of China, but it is now virtually extinct with the exception of the Sibe dialect, which CMED harnesses in interesting ways. The decline of the language is particularly interesting sociohistorically: Manchu served as the vehicle for an enormous amount of translation from Chinese literature in “virtually every genre” (xi), though its decline as a spoken language began as early as around 1800 so that it existed only as a written medium for some time, perhaps much like Classical Arabic or Sanskrit. In Manchuria, some oral forms were widely spoken until the twentieth century, but one can find only a handful of elderly speakers today. Fieldwork undertaken in the 1990s by Li Bing, the coauthor of this review, indicates that there are no more than twenty fluent L1 (first-language) speakers in Heilongjiang, the province that is Manchu’s ancestral home. The term Manchu generally refers to the written form of the language, often referred to as “Classical” or “Written Manchu.” As is common in historical lexicography, all lexical entries in CMED derive from original texts.

Previous Dictionaries

Because of Manchu’s status as a written language with official functions, dictionaries of the language were first compiled by and for Chinese government officials. In addition, the European philological tradition has produced Manchu dictionaries; Erich Hauer’s Manchu–German Handwörterbuch der Mandschusprache (1952–1955, new edition by Oliver Corff 2007) has long been considered the “standard dictionary” for western Manchu scholars (Haenisch 1957: 239). For the Chinese market, there is Hu Zengyi’s Xin Manhan Dacidian (A New Manchu–Chinese Dictionary) published in 1994. Both Handwörterbuch...