A Brief History of Manchu Language Study in the United States[1]

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ABSTRACT

Compared to other Western countries, the teaching of Manchu Language came late to the United States. And rather than being a part of a Chinese studies program as in Europe, it appears nearly all Manchu class offerings were appendages to Mongolian language studies programs. Though it is stated in historical sources on the University of California at Berkeley that Ferdinand Lessing brought Altaic language classes, including Manchu, there in the first half of the twentieth century there is little evidence that he actually taught Manchu at Berkeley. Francis Cleaves, as part of the rapid proliferation of "Area Studies" on US campuses following World War II, established Mongolian classes at Harvard by mid-century. Cleaves knew Manchu and may have offered it on an ad hoc basis. He must at least have taught some Manchu to Joseph Fletcher who succeeded him at Harvard and did offer Manchu language courses on at least two occasions.

James Bosson began to teach Mongolian and Manchu classes at UC Berkeley in the sixties. It was at this time that regular Manchu classes finally entered the catalog at an American university. At about this same time at Indiana University, Denis Sinor was also establishing Mongolian language classes. Although Prof. Sinor is a Manchu scholar of note and had taught Manchu at least once in Europe, he never taught it at Indiana. Professors who came afterward, however, did begin to offer Manchu classes there on an ad hoc basis. Later, in the seventies, when Jerry Norman arrived at University of Washington, he began to teach Manchu classes. These were at first taught as overload courses but later Manchu was added to that university's regular curriculum.

Of these four fledgling Manchu language programs in the United States, two have disappeared entirely with the retirements of the professors who began them. Manchu is no longer taught at Berkeley or at the University of Washington. Manchu is still taught occasionally at Indiana but is not, nor was it ever, according to some, part of the regular curriculum. In the United States now, only Harvard offers regular Manchu language classes. Manchu, however, is still being taught at other universities here and there as an ad hoc overload class.

Several outstanding Qing dynasty historians have recently demonstrated the value of looking at Manchu language sources to reconstruct the history of the Qing, yet Manchu language offerings in the United States appear to be faltering. It remains to be seen if this trend will continue.

Manchu Language Study in the West

Throughout many centuries of history, contacts between East and West were limited, many times purposely so, to allow brokers between the two to maintain monopolies of trade. With the rising of the great naval powers of Western Europe, these limits began to be broken, and direct contacts were made for the first time on a relatively large scale. With the beginning of contacts between Asia and the West, after some initial lag time, people from Western countries began to learn the languages of Asia in order to trade, proselyte, negotiate, etc. The earliest of these direct contacts occurred during the late Ming dynasty in China, but it wasn't long after these contacts began to be made that the Manchu conquest engulfed the Ming, as well as Mongolian, Uighur and Tibetan kingdoms and established a massive empire within continental Asia. As a consequence, there began to be felt a need by some to study the languages of this empire that had a written tradition: i.e. Chinese, Uighur, Tibetan, Mongolian, and Manchu. Of course Chinese held the most interest because it was the most widespread spoken language of the five and had a very long literary tradition and high prestige. But most who engaged in the study of "China" in subsequent years would routinely study not only Chinese but also Manchu, Mongolian, Tibetan and Uighur.

To the extent that these languages were deemed worthy of academic study in the various countries of Europe, academic chairs and programs were established at universities in those countries. The Manchu empire was established in 1644, and the study of Chinese and Manchu begun on an ad hoc basis by Westerners shortly thereafter. In regard to Manchu, the first Western grammar of that language was made by Ferdinand Verbiest in 1668, published under the title Elementa Linguae Tartaricae (Poppe 1965, 95). Manchu dictionaries soon followed both in France and Germany.

The study of Chinese and other languages of the Qing Empire was not formally instituted in the colleges of the West until a century or so after the empire had been established. Though there were scholars before him who studied the languages of the Far East as an addition to their regular studies, Jean Pierre Abel Remusat (1788-1832) could be considered the pioneer of the academic study of Chinese since he occupied the first Chinese language chair in the West. This was not until 1815 (Honey 2001, 27). Remusat not only studied Chinese but also Mongolian, Tibetan, Eastern Turki (Uighur) and Manchu; and incorporated Manchu language in his Chinese language classes. The French scholars who followed him all routinely studied not only Chinese but also the other written languages of the Qing Empire. Manchu, being considered an easier language to learn than Chinese, primarily because of the difficulty of the Chinese script, was often learned first, and was used as an aid to learning Chinese.

Meanwhile, in Germany, Georg von der Gabelentz (1840-1893) was appointed to a chair of general linguistics in 1878 after having mastered Chinese, Japanese and Manchu as well as other Asian languages (Honey 2001, 124). A chair in Chinese was established in Hamburg in 1909 and as in France, Asian languages in addition to Chinese were routinely studied and taught.

In Russia, as the empire expanded into lands of speakers of Altaic, the Altaic languages, including Manchu began to be studied and taught. The University of St. Petersburg became a center of Manchu language study. Ivan Ilyic Zakharov (1817-1885) published an excellent grammar and dictionary of Manchu when he became a professor of that university (Poppe 1965, 95-96). He was followed somewhat later by Vera Ivanovna Tsintsius, who studied and taught Tungusic languages, including Manchu at Leningrad University. The Russian scholars were somewhat different than the Manchu scholars in Germany and France in that they would often study Manchu exclusively, or else Manchu and other Tungusic languages, rather than as an appendage to Chinese studies. It is not my intention to cover the study and instruction of Europe but suffice it to say that from the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries in Europe, scholars specializing in Chinese also routinely knew Manchu and often knew Mongolian, Tibetan and Uighur as well. Paul Pelliot, Henri Mapero, Eric Hauer, Erich Haenisch were all both Manchu and Chinese scholars.

With the demise of the Qing dynasty, interest in Manchu waned among Chinese scholars. That is probably one of the reasons that Manchu and the other written languages of the Qing Empire were not studied nearly as often when Chinese language studies began in the United States. Another reason is perhaps because at the very time Manchu language classes were getting their start in the U.S., academia itself was in the middle of a radical change in philosophy. There was a marked movement away from philological study, replaced by what was known as "area studies." The study of older literary languages was increasingly abandoned in favor of modern spoken languages, or perhaps no languages at all. Nevertheless, there was some carry-over of the older tradition into Chinese studies in the United States. The other impetus for the study of Manchu came from another quarter. As Altaic studies began to be introduced into the United States, primarily from scholars who had received their training in St. Petersburg (aka Leningrad), the study of Manchu language was sometimes included.[2]

Manchu Language Study in the United States

Though the study of Asian languages in the United States was an outgrowth and extension of Asian language study in Europe, one likely candidate for the honor of being the first to institute Manchu language studies in the United States goes to one born in the United States rather than a transplant from Europe. Francis Woodman Cleaves (1911-1995) was born in Boston the year the Manchu empire fell. He first studied at Dartmouth. After graduating in 1933 he came to Harvard for graduate study, enrolling in the Department of Comparative Philology but soon transferring to the Department of Far Eastern Languages. He received a scholarship to study in Europe and studied Mongolian, Uighur and Manchu, as well as Chinese from Paul Pelliot in 1934-35 (Honey 2001, 280; Richard Frye, et.al. 1998, 1). He then traveled to Beijing, living and studying there from 1937-1941 (Honey 2001, 280; Frye 1998, 1). When he returned to the United States in 1941, he began teaching in his old department: the Department of Far Eastern Languages. During the war years he enlisted with the Navy and served in the Pacific (Frye 1998, 1), returning to Harvard in 1946. He taught from then until his retirement in 1980. His particular interest was in Mongolian (he worked with the Reverend Antoine Mostaert in Beijing) and his classes were in Chinese and Mongolian, but like his French mentor, he knew Manchu and apparently was willing to teach it on demand. I don't have information on when and how many times Cleaves taught Manchu but he at least taught it to one of his students, Joseph Fletcher. We will return to him later.

Though Francis Cleaves was born in the United States, many of the early academics in the field of Asian language study in the U.S. were European immigrants. Nearly all had studied Manchu and could theoretically have taught it. The department of Oriental Languages was established at Berkeley in 1896 but was for the first while staffed by professors who could not or would not offer any languages other than classical and modern Chinese. With the arrival of Ferdinand Lessing (1882-1961) from Germany in 1935 to assume the chair of Agassiz Professor, the other important languages of the former Qing dynasty could be taught. In the University of California History Digital Archives it is stated that at his arrival "An expansion of offerings followed; courses in Manchu, Mongolian, and Tibetan were inaugurated....”[3] David Honey (2001, 294) indicates that Peter Boodberg, an immigrant from Russia who also had studied Altaic languages before coming to the United States, offered a class during the 1939-40 school year called "Introduction to the study of Manchu and Mongol texts." Honey speculates that the students in this class would probably have come from Lessing's language classes—implying that Lessing taught both Mongolian and Manchu. In the memory of contemporaries of Lessing and Boodberg however, neither professor actually taught Manchu language at Berkeley[4] Lessing studied in Germany under F.W.K. Muller at the Berlin Ethnological Museum. He lived in China for seventeen plus years, and is known for his studies on the Yonghe gong temple in Beijing and his accompanying Sven Hedin on the Sino-Swedish expedition of the thirties. After moving to Berkeley in 1935, he remained there, except for brief research trips to Asia, the rest of his life. Like Cleaves, his interest was more with Mongolian than Manchu.

Wolfram Eberhard, who studied Manchu under Eric Hauer in Germany also taught at Berkeley. He arrived in 1948 to teach in the Sociology Department. There is no record of him teaching Manchu either. A third transplant to Berkeley was Peter Boodberg (1903-1972) mentioned above. Boodberg was born in Vladivostock and spent a number of years in Harbin and studying in St. Petersburg before moving to the United States. By the time he arrived, he was acquainted with a number of Altaic languages including Manchu (Honey 2001, 287-88). But other than the notice of the 1939-40 class mentioned in Honey (2001) above, there is no indication that he taught Manchu.

The first solid date we have for a Manchu class taught in the United States was 1964 when James Bosson, newly arrived to Berkeley, offered a class. Professor Bosson thinks that there may have been two people who attended that initial class. One was William Boltz, currently a professor at University of Washington. Jerry Norman, who I will talk about below, later joined the Manchu class in the Spring of 1965. Professor Bosson actually learned his Manchu in the United States but not in a formal class. He was at University of Washington studying Mongolian and Tibetan with Nicholas Poppe and Cyril Wylie respectively. He doesn't remember if Prof. Poppe encouraged him, or if it was his own idea, but he began to study Manchu on his own, with the help of Poppe as an informant on matters of grammar. He said he was fortunate that Hidehiro Okada happened to be at University of Washington during that period of time and he benefited greatly by his expertise in Manchu.[5] When he finished his graduate work at University of Washington he began teaching Mongolian and Tibetan at Berkeley. It was during his second year there that he began offering Manchu classes, at first simply under a general Oriental languages number but eventually it was changed to appear in the catalog under the title "Manchu language." Prof. Norman remembers that in the first classes he attended they read something out of the Manchu version of the New Testament, from St. Luke. There were no dictionaries available so Prof. Bosson prepared his own word lists and used the grammar out of von der Gabelentz's book. The classroom was in an old WWII barracks. At first Manchu was only offered occasionally as there was demand but eventually it became fairly frequent, it being offered nearly every year by the time Prof. Bosson approached retirement. Materials were somewhat limited but whatever they had available he would use. Some of his most notable students were Jerry Norman, mentioned above; Mark Gimpel, who taught the Manchu courses when Prof. Bosson was away on leave; and Mark Elliott, of whom, more later.

Chronologically, perhaps the next regular class in Manchu was instituted by Joseph F. Fletcher (d. 1984), a student of Cleaves, who taught in the History Department at Harvard. He taught Manchu just twice at Harvard, once in 1967, with two students, and again in 1982 just before his untimely death in 1984 (Roth Li 1989, 3). The 1967 class included Gertraude Roth-Li. Professor Roth-Li recounts how this class came about: "I was in my second year of Chinese [and] was looking for [classes in] Mongolian or Tibetan. I was especially interested in modern Mongolian or Tibetan but Harvard didn't offer either. Once in a while they had classical Mongolian (Cleaves) or classical Tibetan, but even that wasn't taught the years I was there. So when [I] shared my disappointment with Joe about this while chatting with him about his Inner Asia history course, he said: 'I am teaching Manchu his year. Why don't you take that? We've only had one class [session] so far, so here (pulling out the little Haenisch Manchu grammar) this is how the alphabet goes.' That was it! I walked away with a copy of the Haenisch grammar and showed up for the next class, only to find that there was only one other student there."[6]

No one seems to know why there was such a long hiatus between the first and the second Manchu class Fletcher taught. It has been conjectured that there weren't any students interested in Manchu, or that Prof. Fletcher was too busy with the Cambridge History of China project to have another class. In any case in 1982 he again held a class. Among the students of this class were Beatrice Bartlett now at Yale University and Pamela Crossley currently at Dartmouth. Prof. Crossley indicates that she was steered towards studying Manchu from Fletcher by Jonathan Spence. More about Prof. Crossley below.

After Joseph Fletcher passed away in 1984, Cleaves came out of retirement to teach his classes. Roth-Li (1989, 3) indicates he taught Manchu for two successive years at this time, training, among others, Elizabeth Endicott West, who stayed on at Harvard to teach Manchu and Mongolian after Cleaves again went back into retirement. Roth-Li (1989, 3) indicates that as of 1989 Professor Endicott had taught one Manchu class, including the students Tak Sing Kam, Wang Xiang Yun, Yuan Shi Min and Ross King. Professor Endicott apparently left Harvard shortly afterward. She is currently Professor

of History at Middlebury College.

In 1993 Nicola Di Cosmo came to Harvard and taught Manchu and Classical Mongolian on alternate years until 1999. He said the number of students in the Manchu classes varied but he remembers there were seven or eight students in the class the last year he taught there.[7]

After Prof. Di Cosmo left Harvard, James Bosson was invited to teach Manchu there. Beginning in 1999, he taught a total of five years with one year in-between (2000-2001 where Prof. Mark Elliott taught as a visiting professor. Professor Elliott said he had about six students that year, including Loretta Kim, Pär Cassel, Jing Fang, Yudru Tsomi and Li Haihong.) Professor Bosson says his most talented student in the years he was teaching at Harvard was Dr. Hoong Teik-Toh, who taught the beginning Manchu classes last year at Harvard and prepared a catalog of the Manchu holdings in the Harvard-Yenching library, yet to be published. He currently is a research professor at Academia Sincia in Taiwan.

Professor Mark Elliott taught a second year Manchu course in 2004 at Harvard, which included two students from his 2000-2001 classes: Loretta Kim and Li Haihong. In addition to his responsibilities in history, Prof. Elliott is the now the Manchu language teacher at Harvard.

In the Pacific Northwest Jerry Norman began to teach Manchu at the University of Washington in 1973. As mentioned above Prof. Norman began studying Manchu from James Bosson in the spring of 1965. Bosson had arrived at Berkeley in 1963 and Norman immediately began taking Mongolian classes from him. When asked how he came to study Manchu he relates that he started out by taking Mongolian from Bosson. Once when looking over the Mongolian materials in Bosson's office he happened upon Haneda's Manchu-Japanese dictionary which piqued his interest in Manchu.

After taking one quarter of Manchu from Bosson, Norman went to Taiwan in the fall of 1965 originally intending to study Sibe with Guang Lu, a native Sibe who was at that time at Taiwan National University, but he found it impossible to do so since whenever he would ask Mr. Guang for a word in Sibe, he would invariably give it to him in Manchu. He did share office space at Taida with Guang Lu and Li Xueqi and had the idea that it would be useful to have a Manchu-English dictionary. He had available to him Haneda's dictionary as well as the Wuti Qingwenjian (The mirror of Imperial Scripts in Five Forms), the Qingwen zonghui (The Comprehensive Dictionary of Qing Writing), and Hauer's dictionary. So during the time he was there he produced a draft of his Manchu-English dictionary as well as teaching a class of Manchu at Taida. From Taiwan he returned to the United States to take a position at Princeton University in 1967. When he arrived there he got a letter from Joseph Fletcher saying they were starting a Manchu class at Harvard and he had heard Jerry had a Manchu-English dictionary, would he be willing to make it available to the students at Harvard? During Prof. Norman's four years at Princeton he taught Manchu once. Then in 1972 he left to take a position at University of Washington. He indicated that Manchu was already on the books at University of Washington by the time he arrived since Okada had taught Manchu there. Unfortunately I don't have information on when Prof. Okada began teaching there or other information on his classes.

Prof. Norman began offering classes at University of Washington in the fall of 1973. His only student in that first class was Stephen Durrant, currently at University of Oregon. The class was taught for the full year as an overload class. Prof. Durrant indicated the first text they read was the Manchu version of the Gospel of Luke. This text was read from right to left in Chinese style rather than Manchu. After that they read sections of the Manchu LaoQida, Manchu translations of Jin Ping Mei, and Liaozhai zhiyi and the Nisan Sama i bithe. This last work Prof. Durrant later translated and co-authored a book about with Margart Nowak.[8] After a few years the Manchu class was added to the catalog as a regular class and was taught on a regular basis until Prof. Norman's retirement several years ago. He has since returned to UW and taught the class a couple more times.[9]

The only other place in the United States where Manchu may have been offered as a catalog class is at Indiana University, although the director of the Inner Asian and Uralic Center at Indiana indicates Manchu language was never offered at Indiana University except perhaps on an ad hoc basis.[10]

In 1956, a couple of centers of Uralic and Altaic Studies were established, one at Columbia University and one at the University of Indiana (Sinor 2003, 1). Unfortunately, there was no one at either institution able to teach any of the Altaic languages. The director of the center at Columbia managed to get Karl Menges, a Turkologist and student of Bang-Kaup (though he also apparently knew Manchu, see note 1 above) to come teach there, while Indiana recruited Denis Sinor, a student of Pelliot, who was at that time teaching at Cambridge. He came to Indiana while on leave from Cambridge, intending to only stay the one year of his leave, but they gave him an offer he couldn't refuse. He realized they would give him full rein to set up a program as he saw fit. Sinor, who had been trained by Pelliot, knew Manchu well, had taught it when he was in Paris, and could have taught it at Indiana, but concentrated instead on the other branches of the Altaic family. Included among his publications is an Introduction to Manchu Studies but he never used it to teach. In fact he maintains that Manchu was never taught at Indiana, except perhaps on a tutorial basis by Hangin, by Doerfer as a visiting professor, or by Grigory Kara as an ad hoc class (Sinor 2005, 1). Others have a different memory.

Prof. Roth Li (1989, 6) indicates that Larry Clark taught Manchu at Indiana University in 1976 and again in 1978. Prof. Nicola Di Cosmo, who studied Manchu from Giovanni Stary before coming to the United States to continue his studies, taught Manchu at Indiana as a graduate student from 1986 until 1989 when he left Indiana. He says that Grigory Kara then began offering classes in Manchu language and Manchu historigraphical texts.[11] Prof Kara learned his Manchu in Hungary from Louis Ligeti and others, initially developing a curiosity about Manchu from looking at the Manchu inscriptions on two large cannons that were on exhibit outside the Budapest museum of war. He writes that he has taught Manchu structure "two or three times" to graduate students at Indiana, using Professor Roth Li's book. And that he has read additional texts with his "few but enthusiastic" students."[12] One of Kara's students described to me his introduction into Manchu: "I first began studying Manchu in the spring of 2000, during my last year of high school. I had ordered a copy of Dr. Roth Li's book before it had been printed, and as soon as it arrived in the mail, I began teaching myself.... In the fall of 2001, my first year of undergraduate study at Indiana University, I began studying the language officially with Prof. György Kara, and took two semesters with him. We mostly used Dr. Roth Li's textbook, and supplemented it with translations of Pu Songling's Liaozhai zhiyi, Paul Georg von Möllendorff's A Manchu Grammar, the Manju-i yargiyan kooli, and some modern Sanjiazi subdialect texts in IPA transcription from the Daur scholar Enhebatu [Engkebatu]'s monograph Manyu kouyu yanjiu. During our readings, Prof. Kara pointed out the many parallels with, and loanwords from Mongolian. Now I am pursuing a joint M.A. degree in Mongolian Studies and Linguistics here at IU. Regarding course credit, both Prof. Kara and I got credit for our two semesters of Manchu.... Kara teaches Manchu whenever one requests it be taught. Several years before me, in 1998, a few colleagues (sic.) of mine studied the language with Kara,... and a couple of years after me, someone else also took it with Kara."[13] I checked the Central Eurasian Studies list of courses at Indiana University and found the course "Introductory to Manchu" listed in their linguistics offerings.

Beyond the offerings in these institutions, I have discovered that a number of professors in various institutions offer courses in Manchu on an ad hoc basis, as an overload class, or even after hours as a Manchu reading "club," not for college credit. Professor Mark Elliott offered Manchu one year as a teleconference course for the University of California System. Students in the course were Dan Shao from UC Santa Barbara, Michael Chang, Liu Lu and Marta Hanson from UC San Diego and Cynthia Col and Patricia Berger from UC Berkeley. He additionally taught one student separately, Elena Chiu from UCLA. His most serious students were Marta Hanson, currently professor at John's Hopkins University, and Patricia Berger, who established a Manchu studies webpage first at Berkeley and later transferred to Ohio State University. Professor Elliott used Prof. Roth Li's book Manchu, a Textbook for Reading Documents as well as additional readings each time he taught Manchu[14]

My own initiation into Manchu occurred when Stephen Durrant, Jerry Norman's first student of Manchu at University of Washington, offered Manchu as an overload class at Brigham Young University in 1977. Besides myself, there were two or three other students, none of whom continued on in Manchu. Prof. Durrant, who is currently at the University of Oregon, indicates that this was the only time he offered a Manchu class.[15]

In addition, Manchu is or has been taught at a number of schools by former students of Bosson, Fletcher, Norman, or by people who have taught themselves Manchu. Professor Gertraude Roth Li, a former student of Fletcher, taught a summer intensive course in Manchu in 1996 at University of California at Berkeley. 6 students attended. She offered it at University of Hawaii in the year 2000 and had one student, Sigrid Lambert (Roth Li 1989, 4). Professor Pamela Crossley who was part of Fletcher's 1982 class, and who has published copiously on Manchu history, indicates she has taught Manchu twice at Dartmouth, to a single student each time. One went on to graduate study in Qing history at Harvard, the other was a linguistics major.'[16] Professor Alexander Vovin at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa indicates that his Manchu was self-taught. He occasionally offers courses in Manchu as "Directed Readings in East Asian Languages and Literatures" to one or occasionally two students at a time. Only one has continued on in Manchu more than one semester. All were graduate students in Japanese linguistics, which is Professor Vovin's speciality. There may be other offering of Manchu by former students that I am unaware of, since these classes do not generally appear in the university's catalog and are taught on an ad hoc basis. Finally, I was persuaded by a student of Chinese to offer Manchu at Portland State University about six years ago. I offered the class as an overload class for two years, but since those who continued with the class were almost none of them students at Portland State, it was dropped as a class in the course schedule and we now meet once a week as simply a "reading group." Members of the group include Dr. Tom Larsen at PSU, Prof. Keith Dede at Lewis and Clark and Brian Tawney who is now in graduate study at Harvard.

Some Students Who Have Studied Manchu in the United States

A roster of the students who have stood out among the various classes that have been offered over the years at the various places in the United States are:

At Harvard: Gertraude Roth Li (1967), now at University of Hawai'i; Pamela

Crossley (1982) now at Dartmouth; Beatrice Bartlett (1982) now at Yale, Elizabeth

Endicott West, now at Middlebury, Tak Sing Kam, now at University of Hong Kong and Dr. Hoong Teik Toh, now at Academia Sinica.

At Berkeley: Jerry Norman (retired); Bill Boltz now at University of Washington; Mark Gimpel, not presently in academia; Mark Elliott, now at Harvard; Chia Ning, (Prof. Roth Li's student,) now at Central College (Pella Iowa).

At University of Washington: Stephen Durrant, now a University of Oregon;

Laura Hess, now at Brown University, Evelyn Rawski, now at University of Pittsburgh.

References

• Frye, Richard, Nicola Di Cosmo, James Hightower, Mastoshi Nagatomi, Rulan Pian, and Edward Wagner. 1998. Memorial minute: Francis W. Cleaves. In The Harvard University Gazette, January 22, 1998.
• Honey, David. 2001. Incense at the Altar: Pioneering Sinologists and the Development of Classical Chinese Philology. American Oriental Series Volume 86. New
• Haven Connecticut: American Oriental Society.
• Poppe, Nicholas. 1962. American Studies in Altaic Linguistics. (Uralic and Altaic Series Volume 13). Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
• ___________. 1965. Introduction to Altaic Linguistics. Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz.
• Roth Li, Gertraude. 1989. Manchu studies in the United States. Unpublished paper presented at the First Symposium on Manchu Culture, held in Dandong, People's Republic of China, October 8-13, 1989.
• Sinor, Denis, 2003. A word from the director. Inner Asian and Uralic National Resource Center Newsletter. Winter 2003. Bloomington: Indiana University

1. This article was first presented as a paper at the Second North American Conference on Manchu Studies held at Harvard University, May 2005. The author thanks the conference participants as well as others throughout the United States who offered information and suggestions on the topic.

2. It seems very little was done in Manchu-Tungus studies however. In 1962 Nicholas Poppe, in an introductory essay in his book American Studies in Altaic Linguistics (Indiana University Ural and Altaic Series Vol. 13), states that there were, prior to his book, only two articles published by scholars in the United States on Manchu-Tungus. Both were articles on Tungusic by Karl Menges. Included in his book were two articles on Manchu: one on Manchu color words by Hidehiro Okada and the other on the phonemics and morphophonemics of Manchu by William Mandeville Austin (1914-). Austin also collaborated with Hangin and Onon to produce a Mongol Reader in Indiana's Ural and Altaic series. I don't know however where he learned Manchu and if he himself ever taught it in the United States. In Poppe's book he is affiliated with Eastern Pennsylvania Psychiatric Institute. I don't expect he offered Manchu classes there.

3. Found in the University of California History Digital Archives: http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/uchistory/general-history/campuses/ucb/departmentse.html#eastasian_lang.

4. James Bosson (personal communication) said he recently talked to Mike Rodgers, a contemporary and colleague of Boodberg and Lessing, who said neither one, to his knowledge, ever taught a class in Manchu.The late C.R. Rudolph, a professor at UCLA who studied at Berkeley knew Manchu however. Where did he learn it? It would have to have been at Berkeley or in Taiwan-where he went for a portion of his schooling.

5. It is possible Okada taught Manchu at the University of Washington, though I have as yet found no evidence for it. Jerry Norman (personal communication) indicated that Manchu was already on the books when he arrived at University of Washington in the 1970s and he speculated that Okada was responsible for Manchu being listed in the catalog. No one has come forward indicating (s)he was taught Manchu then or that was aware it was taught.

6. Gertraude Roth Li (personal communication)

7. Nicola Di Cosmo (personal communication)

8. Nowak, Margaret and Stephen Durrant. 1977. The Tale of the Nisan Shamaness: A Manchu Folk Epic. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press.

9. Jerry Norman (personal communication)

10. Denis Sinor (personal communication

11. Nicola Di Cosmo (personal communication)

12. Grigory Kara (personal communication)

13. Andrew E. Shimunek (personal communication)

14. Mark Elliott (personal communication)

15. Stephen Durrant (personal communication)

16. Pamela Crossley (personal communication)