History

According to the Veritable Records (Manchu: Manju-i Yargiyan Kooli; Chinese: 满洲实录; pinyin: Mǎnzhōu Shílù), in 1599 the Manchu leader Nurhaqi (Nurhaci) decided to convert the Mongolian alphabet to make it suitable for the Manchu people. He decried the fact that while illiterate Han Chinese and Mongolians could understand their respective languages when read aloud, that was not the case for the Manchus, whose documents were recorded by Mongolian scribes. Overriding the objections of two advisors named Erdeni and G’ag’ai, he is credited with adapting the Mongolian script to Manchu. The resulting script was known as tongki fuka aku’ hergen (“script without dots and circles”).

Revision

In 1632, Dahai added diacritical marks to clear up a lot of the ambiguity present in the original Mongolian script; for instance, a leading k, g, and h are distinguished by the placement of no diacritical mark, a dot, and a circle respectively. This revision created the Standard script, known as tongki fuka sindaha hergen (“script with dots and circles”). As a result, the Manchu alphabet contains nearly no ambiguity. Recently discovered manuscripts from the 1620s make clear, however, that the addition of dots and circles to Manchu script began before their supposed introduction by Dahai.

Dahai also added ten graphemes (tulergi hergen: “foreign (outer) letters”), to allow Manchu to be used to write Chinese loanwords. Previously, these words contained sounds that did not have corresponding letters in Manchu. Sounds that were transliterated included the aspirated sounds k’, g’, h’; c (Chinese pinyin: c); ci’ (Chinese pinyin: ci); si’ (Chinese pinyin: si); z (Chinese pinyin: z); c’i (Chinese pinyin: chi); j’i (Chinese pinyin: zhi); and r’ (Chinese pinyin: r).

Sequel

In 1947, Manchu was slightly adapted to Sibe script. In fact, Manchu and Sibe are the same script with slightly different orthographies.

Application

During the time of the Qing dynasty, Daur has been written with the Manchu alphabet.

the Development and Inclusion Relation of Mongolic Letters

The above figure shows all the scripts of Mongolic letters. The scripts in green bold style are still in use now. The scripts in red italic style are not in use or seldom used now.