Manchu Transliteration of Chinese Names and its Implications

One thing that has bedeviled the study of the Chinese language of earlier periods is the fact that the script has tended to change very little over the centuries and what may have been a good phonetic representation of the language when it was first developed, later gives no indication of how pronunciations have changed over time. This is in contrast to languages represented by “alphabetic” type scripts, which though they also have a tendency toward fossilization, are still much more likely to change as pronunciations change. As a result, even though China has employed a script from very early times, reconstruction of earlier forms of Chinese is still subject to much uncertainty. This situation changed somewhat when other types of script began to be used in China and elsewhere to represent Chinese language. In Yuan (1271–1368) times the Phags-pa script based on Tibetan forms and introduced by the Mongols provides information on the pronunciations of those times. Later in the early part of the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644) the Han’gûl script of Korea was used to indicate Chinese pronunciations in such texts as the Hongmu chông’un yôkhun, Pônyôk Nogôltae, Pônyôk Pakt’ongsa and others. Latin based scripts used by Western missionaries and traders also began to be used during this time to transcribe Chinese sounds. Both these sources provide valuable information about the phonology of Middle Mandarin. When the Manchus developed their script in the first part of the seventeenth century, basing it on the Mongolian script they had been using earlier, they also used it to represent the Chinese language in transcribing proper names. But if one looks at the transliterations used in the earliest translated Chinese texts and the transliterations later specified later as standard by the Qian Long emperor (r. 1736–1796), there are differences in pronunciations, not from the natural evolution of the sounds but because a different dialectal standard is being transcribed. South Coblin (2000, 2003, 2007) and others have indicated that a type of Southern Mandarin based loosely in the Nanjing area was still considered the most elegant type of speech well into the Qing dynasty (1644–1911) even though the capital of the Chinese nation had moved to Beijing early on in the Ming dynasty and remained there throughout the Qing. This paper looks at the transliterations made of Chinese names made in the Manchu version of the Chinese novel Sānguó yǎnyì and compares it with later transliterations to more fully understand the interplay between Northern and Nanjing pronunciations of Chinese guānhuà 官話 of that time.