MANCHU LANGUAGE

the most important of the Manchu-Tungus language group (a subfamily of the Altaic languages), formerly spoken by the Manchu people in Manchuria. Fewer than 100 Manchu are believed to still speak the Manchu language. However, there are several thousand speakers of Sibo (Pinyin: Xibe), a closely related language found in the I-li region of Sinkiang. Vowel harmony, in which vowels are divided into two or three classes, with the restriction that suffixes added must use vowels of the same class, is generally typical of the Altaic languages but is not as strictly observed in Manchu as in, for example, Mongol. The Manchu verb, like that of Chinese, distinguishes neither person nor number. Manchu has no relative pronouns and expresses relative clauses by means of participles and gerunds. A peculiarity of Manchu is the indication of masculine and feminine, or strong and weak, in a certain group of words by the alternation of the vowels a and e; thus, ama father' becomes eme mother.' Manchu has been a written language since the 17th century, using a script borrowed from the Uighur alphabet.