Overview
A linguistic and historical study of the Manchu script in the early modern world Manchu was a language first written down as part of the Qing state-building project in Northeast Asia in the early seventeenth century. After the Qing invasion of China in 1644, and for the next two and a half centuries, Manchu was the language of state in one of the early modern world's great powers. Its prominence and novelty attracted the interest of not only Chinese literati but also foreign scholars. Yet scholars in Europe and Japan, and occasionally even within China itself, were compelled to study the language without access to a native speaker. Jesuit missionaries in Beijing sent Chinese books on Manchu to Europe, where scholars struggled to represent it in an alphabet compatible with Western pedagogy and printing technology. In southern China, meanwhile, an isolated phonologist with access to Jesuit books relied on expositions of the Roman alphabet to make sense of the Manchu script. When Chinese textbooks and dictionaries of Manchu eventually reached Japan, scholars there used their knowledge of Dutch to understand Manchu. In The Early Modern Travels of Manchu, Marten Soederblom Saarela focuses on outsiders both within and beyond the Qing empire who had little interaction with Manchu speakers but took an interest in the strange, new language of a rising world power. He shows how-through observation, inference, and reference to received ideas on language and writing-intellectuals in southern China, Russia, France, Choson Korea, and Tokugawa Japan deciphered the Manchu script and explores the uses to which it was put for recording sounds and arranging words.
Full Product Details
Author: Mårten Söderblom Saarela
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Imprint: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 9780812252071
ISBN 10: 0812252071
Pages: 288
Publication Date: 19 June 2020
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Tertiary & Higher Education
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: In Print
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Reviews
Ranging widely across China, Korea, Japan, Russia, and western Europe, from the seventeenth to the end of the eighteenth century, The Early Modern Travels of Manchu demonstrates convincingly that a form of global philology connected the early modern world. -Peter C. Perdue, Yale University Marten Soederblom Saarela's book is a major achievement in several fields: Altaic linguistics, Manchu studies, Qing intellectual history, Chinese phonology, and European historical linguistics on Asian languages. Manchu linguistics in particular has never been treated in such a comprehensive manner, and this book lays a solid foundation for further study. -Nicola di Cosmo, Institute for Advanced Study
Marten Soederblom Saarela's book is a major achievement in several fields: Altaic linguistics, Manchu studies, Qing intellectual history, Chinese phonology, and European historical linguistics on Asian languages. Manchu linguistics in particular has never been treated in such a comprehensive manner, and this book lays a solid foundation for further study.--Nicola di Cosmo, Institute for Advanced Study Ranging widely across China, Korea, Japan, Russia, and western Europe, from the seventeenth to the end of the eighteenth century, The Early Modern Travels of Manchu demonstrates convincingly that a form of global philology connected the early modern world.--Peter C. Perdue, Yale University
The Early Modern Travels of Manchu is a prime example of how to successfully conjoin the microhistorical with the global...The narrative plumbs into the social lives of the Manchu script, unfolding the reverberations of individual agencies, while keeping the readers updated of broader temporal and spatial movements. Needless to say, the book will not only inspire historians of global microhistory. Those of cultural mobility and early modernity, and not least, scholars of Manchu studies, will equally be engrossed. * Journal of Early Modern History * Ranging widely across China, Korea, Japan, Russia, and western Europe, from the seventeenth to the end of the eighteenth century, The Early Modern Travels of Manchu demonstrates convincingly that a form of global philology connected the early modern world. * Peter C. Perdue, Yale University * Marten Soederblom Saarela's book is a major achievement in several fields: Altaic linguistics, Manchu studies, Qing intellectual history, Chinese phonology, and European historical linguistics on Asian languages. Manchu linguistics in particular has never been treated in such a comprehensive manner, and this book lays a solid foundation for further study. * Nicola di Cosmo, Institute for Advanced Study *
Marten Soederblom Saarela's book is a major achievement in several fields: Altaic linguistics, Manchu studies, Qing intellectual history, Chinese phonology, and European historical linguistics on Asian languages. Manchu linguistics in particular has never been treated in such a comprehensive manner, and this book lays a solid foundation for further study. --Nicola di Cosmo, Institute for Advanced Study Ranging widely across China, Korea, Japan, Russia, and western Europe, from the seventeenth to the end of the eighteenth century, The Early Modern Travels of Manchu demonstrates convincingly that a form of global philology connected the early modern world. --Peter C. Perdue, Yale University
Author Information
Marten Soderblom Saarela is an assistant research fellow at the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica, Taiwan.
