Mandarin over Manchu: Court-Sponsored Qing Lexicography and Its Subversion in Korea and Japan

The Manchu language studies of the Qing empire emerged in Beijing during the late seventeenth century and spread to Chosŏn Korea and Tokugawa Japan during the eighteenth century. The Qing court sponsored the compilation of multilingual thesauri and thereby created an imperial linguistic order with Manchu at the center and vernacular Chinese, or Mandarin, in a subordinate position. Chosŏn and Tokugawa scholars, by contrast, usually placed Mandarin—not Manchu, Korean, or Japanese—as the leading language in the new multilingual thesauri they compiled on the basis of Qing works. I show how the balance between Manchu and Mandarin changed as Korean and Japanese scholars reworked lexicographic books from Beijing. The lexicographic evidence demonstrates that the international languages of pre-twentieth-century East Asia included Manchu and vernacular Mandarin as well as literary Chinese.

摘要:

本文以乾隆『御製增訂清文鑑』為例，探討清朝構造的以滿文為中心的多 語言制度及其在朝鮮和日本的傳播和轉變。日本和朝鮮學者利用滿語辭書所載的 漢語白話譯文與官話注音來學習漢語。漢語對學習滿文必不可少，於是日朝學者 往往把辭書中的漢語白話部分作為研究的對象。