Manchu language / Manju gisun / Манж хэл / 만주어 (5/12) Korean movie

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• published: 11 Mar 2013
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Manchu (Manchu: ᠮᠠᠨᠵᡠᡤᡳᠰᡠᠨ) is an endangered Tungusic language spoken in Northeast China; it used to be the native language of the Manchu, though now most Manchus speak Mandarin Chinese and there are fewer than 70 native and semi-speakers of Manchu out of a total of nearly 10 million ethnic Manchus. Although the Xibe language, with 40,000 speakers, is in almost every respect identical to Manchu, Xibe speakers, who live in far western Xinjiang, are ethnically distinct from Manchus. Manchu is an agglutinative language that demonstrates limited vowel harmony. It has been demonstrated that it is derived mainly from the Jurchen language though there are many loan words from Mongolian and Chinese. Its script is vertically written and taken from the Mongolian alphabet (which in turn derives from Aramaic via Uyghur and Sogdian). Although Manchu does not have the kind of grammatical gender that many Indo-European languages do, some gender-related words in Manchu are distinguished by different stem vowels; in such cases, "a"s are sometimes used to indicate masculine ones, as in ama "father", and "e"s are sometimes used to indicate feminine ones, as in eme "mother" Altaic is a proposed language family that includes the Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic, Koreanic, and Japonic languages. These languages are spoken in a wide arc stretching from northeast Asia through Central Asia to Anatolia and eastern Europe (Turks, Kalmyks). The group is named after the Altai Mountains, a mountain range in Central Asia. These language families share numerous characteristics. The debate is over the origin of their similarities. One camp, often called the "Altaicists", views these similarities as arising from common descent from a proto-Altaic language spoken several thousand years ago. The other camp, often called the "anti-Altaicists", views these similarities as arising from areal interaction between the language groups concerned. Some linguists believe the case for either interpretation is about equally strong; they have been called the "skeptics". Another view accepts Altaic as a valid family but includes in it only Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic. This view was widespread prior to the 1960s, but has almost no supporters among specialists today. The expanded grouping, including Korean and Japanese, came to be known as "Macro-Altaic", leading to the designation of the smaller grouping as "Micro-Altaic" by retronymy. Most proponents of Altaic continue to support the inclusion of Korean and Japanese. The assumption that Altaic is a valid family, but only consists of Japonic, Korean and Tungusic, appears to be restricted to Unger (1990). Micro-Altaic includes about 66 living languages,to which Macro-Altaic would add Korean, Japanese, and the Ryukyuan languages for a total of about 74. (These are estimates, depending on what is considered a language and what is considered a dialect. They do not include earlier states of language, such as Middle Mongol or Old Japanese.) Micro-Altaic has a total of about 348 million speakers today,[citation needed] Macro-Altaic about 558 million Altaic Geographic distribution: East, North, Central, and West Asia and Eastern Europe Linguistic classification: Proposed major language family Subdivisions: Turkic Mongolic Tungusic Koreanic (generally included) Japonic (generally included)