The Manchus were born as Jurchen tribe. Since Wanyan Aguda unified the Jurchen tribes in the 12th century and established the Golden State, they have suffered from language but no written language, and they urgently need a written language that belongs to their ethnic group to facilitate their rule. So Wanyan Agu killed Yan Xiyin to create characters, and the "Golden History" contained: "Wanyan Xiyin's real name is God...The Jin people had no written words at the beginning, and the country became stronger and better with neighboring countries, so they used Khitan characters. Too The ancestor ordered Xi Yin to write the national characters and prepare the system. Xi Yin is based on imitating the Han characters, because of the Khitan character system, and the native language, making the female straight characters. In August of the third year of Tianfu (1119), the characters were written, Taizu Joy, fate and act."
In the past, under the rule of Liao, the Jurchen aristocrats had long been in contact with the Khitan culture, and were familiar with the "Khitan characters" under the guise of Chinese characters. So Wanyan Xiyin invented the "Jurchen characters" based on the Khitan writing system and regular script of Chinese characters. ", the shape and writing method are similar to Chinese characters, and they also have strokes such as horizontal and vertical strokes. Then Jin Xizong Wanyanquan (1119-1150) created the "Jurchen small characters" based on the "Khitan small characters", which was promulgated in the first year of Tianjuan (the eighth year of Shaoxing in the Southern Song Dynasty, 1138). The large Jurchen characters and the small Jurchen characters were used simultaneously. It is a pity that Jurchen writing was exclusively owned by the ruling class after its creation, and all the Jurchen writing studies were set up exclusively for the children of the nobles, and the writing was not further promoted to the people. Until the fall of Jin, the Jurchen script was lost. After Mongolia conquered the Kingdom of Jin, the powerful Yuan Dynasty gradually made the Jurchen people get used to another script system, which is Mongolian.
Under the rule of the Mongols, the Jurchen aristocracy was quite familiar with Mongolian scripts. After Nurhachi came up to unite the Jurchen tribes, they once again faced the problem of lack of native scripts. So Nurhachi ordered Erdeni and Gagai, who are proficient in Chinese and Mongolian, to create Manchu. This is the second time the Jurchen people have created their own script, from the small Jurchen (1119) to the Manchu (1599), separated in between. For nearly 500 years, writing has been created in a similar context.
The Manchu language created during the Nurhachi era mainly borrowed Mongolian letters to spell the Jurchen phonetic. There are no circles or dots beside the words, which are called "Uncircled Manchu" or "Old Manchu". However, the old Manchu has the shortcoming that the sound and meaning are not clear. It was in the era of Huangtaiji that Dahai, who knew the meaning of Chinese and Mongolian words, improved the old Manchu. "New Manchu" and Yan were born. The Qing History Draft contains:
"Dahai's book of the rule of state, supplemented by Erdeni and Gagai, has been added to the twelve-character head... Taizong (Huang Taiji), Yu Dahai said:'The twelve-character head is not recognized, and the upper and lower characters are the same. To learn it, ordinary language is still easy to understand; if a person's name, mountains, rivers, and land have no literal meaning to be found, they must be mistaken. Erqi, add a circle around the word to make the sound and meaning clear, so that the reader can easily understand it. In order to seek interpretation, add a circle next to the word. Also use the Chinese book and the Chinese character to complement the unprepared".
Dahai finds out those letters that look the same but are pronounced differently, and add dots or circles to distinguish different consonants and vowels, so that people will be clear at a glance and will never be mispronounced. He also adds diphthong prefixes. Corresponds to Chinese pronunciation. Since then, Manchu has become a kind of script similar to traditional Uighur Mongolian, but not the same.
With the establishment of the Qing Dynasty, Manchu and Manchu became the dominant language, and through the "Mengqi system" (a political system implemented for the Qing Dynasty to divide the Mongolians and control their upper-class nobles), the Mongolian government offices at all levels passed a large number of , Mongolian parallel official documents to perform government affairs, which in turn affect Mongolia. With reference to the writing norms of Chinese official documents in the past dynasties, the Qing government formulated the formats of Manchu and Mongolian official documents. The writing rules of the two are the same, both are "from top to bottom, from left to right", and the content of the official document It is composed of six parts: the author, the recipient, the reason, the main body, the concluding remarks and the latter part, and the order cannot be reversed.
is the prototype of Manchu, and the influence of Mongolian on Manchu is obvious. However, under the frequent exchanges of official documents, Manchu as the language of the ruler has gradually affected the usage habits of Mongolian, resulting in full writing at the same time. There are many influences from Manchu in the Mongolian official documents. For example, the names of titles and official titles in Manchu are directly written in Mongolian official documents by transliteration, paraphrase, or transliteration and paraphrase. For example, the Manchu writing of Prince Heshuo is "ᡥᠣᡧᠣᡳ ᠴᡳᠨ ᠸᠠᠩ" ( hošoi cin wang), and the Mongolian writing method is "ᠬᠤᠱᠥᠢ ᠴᡳᠨ ᠸᠠᠩ" (qošui čin wang), which can be said to be a direct transliteration, and the recipients did not notice the difference. Although the Mongolian script was in the fifteenth year of Ming Shenzong Wanli (1587), a phonetic transcription system "Ali Gali" was improved and established,Can be used to mark foreign words. Under the leading role of Manchu, Mongolian in the Qing Dynasty also began to use the "dotted Manchu" writing method to spell, such as adding a "dot" after the letter or directly using the Manchu alphabet to spell.
, which is born out of Mongolian script, has many similarities with Mongolian script, and the two have also changed other people's writing habits through rule. Through the Manchu and Mongolian official documents preserved to this day, we can see the Mongolian language that is gradually "manchurian" in terms of words, which also shows important evidence of the influence of the exchange of two different ethnic cultures.
