Man, Past and Present - Agustus Henry Keane, A. Hingston Quiggin, Alfred Court Haddon (most popular novels txt) 📗

a century, having been eclipsed by Jenghiz-Khan in 1234. But about the middle of the fourteenth century the Niu-chi again rose to power under Aishiu-Gioro, who, although of miraculous birth and surrounded by other legendary matter, appears to have been a historical person. He may be regarded as the true founder of the Manchu dynasty, for it was in his time that this name came into general use. Sing-tsu, one of his descendants, constructed the palisade, a feeble imitation of the Great Wall, sections of which still exist. Thai-tsu, a still more famous member of the family, greatly extended the Manchu Kingdom (1580-1626), and it was his son Tai-dsung who first assumed the imperial dignity under the title of Tai-Tsing. After his death, the Ming dynasty having been overthrown by a rebel chief, the Manchus were invited by the imperialists to aid in restoring order, entered Peking in triumph, and, finding that the last of the Mings had committed suicide, placed Tai-dsung's nephew on the throne, thus founding the Manchu dynasty (1644) which lasted down to 1912.

Such has been the contribution of the Manchu people to history; their contributions to arts, letters, science, in a word, to the general progress of mankind, have been nil. They found the Middle Kingdom, after ages of a sluggish growth, in a state of absolute stagnation, and there they have left it. On the other hand their assumption of the imperial administration brought about their own ruin, their effacement, and almost their very extinction as a separate nationality[624]. Manchuria, like Mongolia, is organised in a number of half military, half civil divisions, the so-called Paki, or "Eight Banners," and the constant demand made on these reserves, to support the dynasty and supply trustworthy garrisons for all the strongholds of the empire, has drawn off the best blood of the people, in fact sapped its vitality at the fountain-head. Then the rich arable tracts thus depleted were gradually occupied by agricultural settlers from the south, with the result that the Manchu race has nearly disappeared. From the ethnical standpoint the whole region beyond the Great Wall as far north as the Amur has practically become an integral part of China, and from the political standpoint since 1898 an integral part of the Russian empire. Towards the middle of the nineteenth century the Eight Banners numbered scarcely more than a quarter of a million, and about that time the Abbe Huc declared that "the Manchu nationality is destroyed beyond recovery. At present we shall look in vain for a single town or a single village throughout Manchuria which is not exclusively inhabited by Chinese. The local colour has been completely effaced, and except a few nomad groups nobody speaks Manchu[625]."

Similar testimony is afforded by later observers, and Henry Lansdell, amongst others, remarks that "the Manchu, during the two centuries they have reigned in China, may be said to have been working out their own annihilation. Their manners, language, their very country has become Chinese, and some maintain that the Manchu proper are now extinct[626]."

But the type, so far from being extinct, may be said to have received a considerable expansion, especially amongst the populations of north-east China. The taller stature and greatly superior physical appearance of the inhabitants of Tien-tsin and surrounding districts[627] over those of the southern provinces (Fokien, Kwang-tung), who are the chief representatives of the Chinese race abroad, seem best explained by continual crossings with the neighbouring Manchu people, at least since the twelfth century, if not earlier.

Closely related to the Manchus (of the same stock says Sir H. H. Howorth, the distinction being purely political) are the Dauri, who give their name to the extensive Daur plateau, and formerly occupied both sides of the Upper Amur. Daur is, in fact, the name applied by the Buryats to all the Tungus peoples of the Amur basin. The Dauri proper, who are now perhaps the best representatives of the original Manchu type, would seem to have intermingled at a remote time with the long-headed pre-Mongol populations of Central Asia. They are "taller and stronger than the Oronchons [Tungus groups lower down the Amur]; the countenance is oval and more intellectual, and the cheeks are less broad. The nose is rather prominent, and the eyebrows straight. The skin is tawny, and the hair brown[628]." Most of these characters are such as we should expect to find in a people of mixed Mongolo-Caucasic descent, the latter element being derived from the long-headed race who had already reached the present Mongolia, Manchuria, Korea, and the adjacent islands during neolithic times. Thus may be explained the tall stature, somewhat regular features, brown hair, light eyes, and even florid complexion so often observed amongst the present inhabitants of Manchuria, Korea, and parts of North China.

But no admixture, except of Chinese literary terms, is seen in the Manchu language, which, like Mongolic, is a typical member of the agglutinating Ural-Altaic family. Despite great differences, lexical, phonetic, and even structural, all the members of this widespread order of speech have in common a number of fundamental features, which justify the assumption that all spring from an original stock language, which has long been extinct, and the germs of which were perhaps first developed on the Tibetan plateau. The essential characters of the system are:--(1) a "root" or notional term, generally a closed syllable, nominal or verbal, with a vowel or diphthong, strong or weak (hard or soft) according to the meaning of the term, hence incapable of change; (2) a number of particles or relational terms somewhat loosely postfixed to the root, but incorporated with it by the principle of (3) vowel harmony, a kind of vocal concordance, in virtue of which the vowels of all the postfixes must harmonise with the unchangeable vowel of the root. If this is strong all the following vowels of the combination, no matter what its length, must be strong; if weak they must conform in the same way. With nominal roots the postfixes are necessarily limited to the expression of a few simple relations; but with verbal roots they are in principle unlimited, so that the multifarious relations of the verb to its subject and object are all incorporated in the verbal compound itself, which may thus run at times to inordinate lengths. Hence we have the expression "incorporating," commonly applied to this agglutinating system, which sometimes goes so far as to embody the notions of causality, possibility, passivity, negation, intensity, condition, and so on, besides the direct pronominal objects, in one interminable conglomerate, which is then treated as a simple verb, and run through all the secondary changes of number, person, tense, and mood. The result is an endless number of theoretically possible verbal forms, which, although in practice naturally limited to the ordinary requirements of speech, are far too numerous to allow of a complete verbal paradigm being constructed of any fully developed member of the Ural-Altaic group, such, for instance, as Yakut, Tungus, Turki, Mordvinian, Finnish, or Magyar.

In this system the vowels are classed as strong or hard (a, o, u), weak or soft (the same umlauted: ae, oe, ue), and neutral (generally e, i), these last being so called because they occur indifferently with the two other classes. Thus, if the determining root vowel is a (strong), that of the postfixes may be either a (strong), e or i (neutral); if ae (weak), that of the postfixes may be either ae (weak), or e or i as before. The postfixes themselves no doubt were originally notional terms worn down in form and meaning, so as to express mere abstract relation, as in the Magyar vel = with, from veli = companion. Tacked on to the root fa = tree, this will give the ablative case, first unharmonised, fa-vel, then harmonised, fa-val = tree-with, with a tree. In the early Magyar texts of the twelfth century inharmonic compounds, such as halal-nek, later halak-nak = at death, are numerous, from which it has been inferred that the principle of vowel harmony is not an original feature of the Ural-Altaic languages, but a later development, due in fact to phonetic decay, and still scarcely known in some members of the group, such as Votyak and Highland Cheremissian (Volga Finn). But M. Lucien Adam holds that these idioms have lost the principle through foreign (Russian) influence, and that the few traces still perceptible are survivals from a time when all the Ural-Altaic tongues were subject to progressive vowel harmony[629].

But however this be, Dean Byrne is disposed to regard the alternating energetic utterance of the hard, and indolent utterance of the soft vowel series, as an expression of the alternating active and lethargic temperament of the race, such alternations being themselves due to the climatic conditions of their environment. "Certainly the life of the great nomadic races involves a twofold experience of this kind, as they must during their abundant summer provide for their rigorous winter, when little can be done. Their character, too, involves a striking combination of intermittent indolence and energy; and it is very remarkable that this distinction of roots is peculiar to the languages spoken originally where this great distinction of seasons exists. The fact that the distinction [between hard and soft] is imparted to all the suffixes of a root proves that the radical characteristic which it expresses is thought with these; and consequently that the radical idea is retained in the consciousness while these are added to it[630]."

This is a highly characteristic instance of the methods followed by Dean Byrne in his ingenious but hopeless attempt to explain the subtle structure of speech by the still more subtle temperament of the speaker, taken in connection with the alternating nature of the climate. The feature in question cannot be due to such alternation of mood and climate, because it is persistent throughout all seasons, while the hard and soft elements occur simultaneously, one might say, promiscuously, in conversation under all mental states of those conversing.

The true explanation is given by Schleicher, who points out that progressive vocal assimilation is the necessary result of agglutination, which by this means binds together the idea and its relations in their outward expression, just as they are already inseparately associated in the mind of the speaker. Hence it is that such assonance is not confined to the Ural-Altaic group, analogous processes occurring at certain stages of their growth in all forms of speech, as in Wolof, Zulu-Xosa, Celtic (expressed by the formula of Irish grammarians: "broad to broad, slender to slender"), and even in Latin, as in such vocalic concordance as: annus, perennis; ars, iners; lego, diligo. In these examples the root vowel is influenced by that of the prefix, while in the Mongolo-Turki family the root vowel, coming first, is unchangeable, but, as explained, influences the vowels of the postfixes, the phonetic principle being the same in both systems.

Both Mongol and Manchu are cultivated languages employing modified forms of the Uiguric (Turki) script, which is based on the Syriac introduced by the Christian (Nestorian) missionaries in the seventh century. It was first adopted by the Mongols about 1280, and perfected by the scribe Tsorji Osir under Jenezek Khan (1307-1311). The letters, connected together by continuous strokes, and slightly modified, as in Syriac, according to their position at the beginning, middle, or end of the word, are disposed in vertical columns from left to right, an arrangement due no doubt to Chinese influence. This is the more probable since the Manchus, before the introduction of the Mongol system in the sixteenth century, employed the Chinese characters ever since the time of the Kin dynasty.

None of the other Tungusic or north-east Siberian peoples possess any writing system except the Yukaghirs of the Yasachnaya affluent of the Kolymariver, who were visited in 1892 by the Russian traveller, S. Shargorodsky. From his report[631], it appears that this symbolic writing is carved with a sharp knife out of soft fresh birch-bark, these simple materials sufficing to describe the