Long Vowels Transcribed into the Jurchen Script : A Criticism on Aisin Gioro Ulhicun`s " Jurchenistics "

서지정보

ㆍ발행기관 : 한국알타이학회 ㆍ수록지정보 : 알타이학보 / 11권
ㆍ저자명 : (Gisaburo N . Kiyose)

영어 초록

Manchu does not retain secondary long vowels, which occurred as a result of contraction of syllables in the language history, whereas in Jurchen they are still preserved as clearly transcribed in Jurchen characters for the fourteen words listed in the Jurchen section of the Sino-Babarian Glossaries with-script series of the Ming dynasty (1368-1644). Ulhicun Aisingioro, nevertheless, wholly denies the existence of the secondary long vowels in her article (in Chinese), published in Altai Hakpo 8, 1998, pp. 21-33. Attempting unpersuasively to criticize the methods of reconstruction claimed by the author of this paper, she insists that the Jurchens originally adopted complicated ways in the use of Jurchen characters, (1) adhesion use, (2) repetition use and so forth, and gives her own reconstructed forms of the fourteen words, holding no long vowels, by applying the "uses" just mentioned above. Since she argues without comprehending the meaning of the term "secondary," it is not clear whether she reconstructs the Jurchen sounds of the Chin time (1115-1234), when the script was created, or those of the Ming time. Her arguments are vitiated by ignorance of fundamental linguistic and phonemic premises, e.g. such concepts as diachrony, allophone, and distinctive feature. She also published another article (in Chinese) in Altai Hakpo 9, 1999, pp. 1-10, in which she claims that all the extant Jurchen inscriptions and the aforementioned Glossaries are written in the Jurchen Big Script, not in the mixture of the Big and Small Scripts. She states so as if it is her own new discovery, but the present author already pointed it out a long time ago, in Japanese in 1973 and in English in 1977.