Difference between revisions of "Han'er Language"

Revision as of 01:29, 14 December 2005

The Han'er language is a sort of lingua franca based primarily upon Beifanghua which is primarily spoken by nomads of Mongolian descent who live in Nuzhen. Over the centuries it has been heavily influenced by non-Han Chinese langauges, especially Mongolian and Manchurian. In recent times, a number of technical terms have been incorporated from the Russian language.

History and Development

While the beginnings of the Han'er language are disputed by many scholars, it is believed that Han'er first emerged as the lingua franca of trade in Northern China by the 10th century AD. Northern China was long inhabited by groups icluding the Khitan and Jurchen, who lived in close proximity to the Hans. Eventually, with Han influence growing in the region, the Han language eventually became extensively used, causing interference with Altaic languages to alter its spoken form.

There exist a collection of documents called the "Crude Mongol-Han Chinese Translation of Official Documents," which are a collection of edicts, laws, and scholarly works published during the Yuan dynasty. These documents are crude proto-translations of Chinese texts in which Chinese vocabulary is used with Mongolian grammar and case endings. The result was a highly stylised written form which had little or no relation to the grammar and vocabulary of Classical or Beifanghua Chinese. While these Documents are not written in the Han'er as we know it today, the development of the written language used in the Crude Mongol-Han Chinese Translations has influenced the spoken language, and to some degree has provided linguists with a base for standardizing the syntax and vocabulary of the Han'er language.

Another early mention of the Han'er language occurs in a Korean novel called Nogeoldae (老乞大) about a merchant who travelled in northern China sometime in the 1300's. Several of the dialogues in the text of the Nogeoldae are in the Han'er language, although they are written down in Chinese characters.

Features

Noun Inflection

Han'er differs most from the Beifanghua in that most of its nouns can be inflected to indicate plurality, case, gender. There are a total of seven cases in Han'er: nominative, accusative, dative, locative, ablative, comitative, and instrumental. These can further be modified to indicate gender (male, female, or neuter) and plurality. Altogether, a noun may have 42 forms. The different verb forms are formed agglutinatively, by adding each one-syllable marker after the verb. In a few cases, the genitive case may be postpositioned, but this is often not done because of ambiguity. It should be noted that the endings are completely phonetic in nature.

Verb Conjugation

Orthographic Issues

Because of the complex nature of the Han'er language, primarily the noun endings and loan words, some linguists have proposed that it is not suited for being written in Chinese Characters. A few schemes have been made to write out the Han'er language in Cyrillic characters or modifying the current Chinese script by using auxillary characters similar to the "Bopomofo" (ㄅㄆㄇㄈ) system used in Taiwan.

Sample Sentences

Han'er: 後日俺爹喻城鎮裏閒閒.
Transliteration (Pinyin): Houri an die-yu chengzhen-li xianxian.
Translation: "Two days ago, I went for a stroll in the town with my father."

Han'er: 兒第常川喫肉的人每
Transliteration: Erdi changchuan chirou de renmei.
Translation: "The brothers habitually consume meat."