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0393 Notes on Marco Polo : vol.1
Notes on Marco Polo : vol.1 / Page 393 (Color Image)

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doi: 10.20676/00000246
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161. CIORCIA   377

Orient, I, 175). Here again TERRIEN DE LACOUPERIE (JRAS, 1889, 438) absurdly transcribes «Tchu-erh-tch'ek », as if a pronunciation êrh could be contemporaneous with a pronunciation in which the ancient -k of ch'ih (t's'iäk) was still preserved. As to Hai-hsi, TERRIEN DE LACOUPERIE, unable to explain it, thinks that it probably « is a simple pun ». I see things differently. I have no access to the original edition of the Têng-t'an pi-chiu, nor do I suppose had DEVLRIA either. In my nineteenth-century reprint (ch. 22), Chu-êrh-ch'ih occurs twice; once (No. 77) it is given as the equivalent of Hai-hsi, but the second time (No. 183) the Chinese equivalent has been suppressed. The Manchus, holding themselves to be the descendants of the Chin, expurgated most of the works in which the name of the Nü-chên or Nü-chih occurred, and I have little doubt that the original edition of the Têng-t'an pi-chiu had in one place Nü-chih, which has been left blank in modern editions, and in the other place Hai-hsi, which was a regular geographical name in the region in northern Manchuria occupied by the Nü-chên of Ming times (cf. SHIRATORI, Beiträge, II, 527). As to Chu-êrh-ch'ih itself, the term, contrary to what DEVtRIA and TERRIEN DE LACOUPERIE thought, has no real bearing on the forms used in China and by the Chinese; the section in which it appears is a Sino-Mongolian Vocabulary and Chu-êrhch'ih merely represents the Mongolian form, which we know to have been Jürdit in late Ming and early Ch'ing times. In the transcriptions of the Têng-t'an pi-chiu, the final -t is omitted in künji[t] = künjit, «sesamum» (No. 445); the case is almost certainly the same with Chu-êrhch'ih, which is accordingly to be restored as the regular Mongol form Jürdit.

The true name of the Nü-chên appears in native writing in the Vocabulary of the Board of Translators of c. 1500 published by GRUBE (No. 324); it is written with two Juden characters

which are phonetically transcribed i   Chu-hsien, with the Chinese equivalent Nü-chih. But
this Chu-hsien must be explained. Seemingly, it renders a native pronunciation *Risen, but this need not have been the pronunciation of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The first Jue'en character used in the name does not occur elsewhere, but its original value was probably *jur-, not ju-. As to the second character, it is also used as the second element of the Juden word

meaning «kettle », transcribed phonetically 7[c   mu-hsien (GRUBE, No. 244), *muten. But the
same word is transcribed 4c i mu-ch'ê, *mute, in the Sino-Juden Vocabulary of the Board of Interpreters acquired by AUROUSSEAU for the Ecole Française d'Extrême-Orient, and the corresponding word in Manchu is muten. We may therefore safely conclude that the forms in -sen are due to dialectical variations or to an unsatisfactory notation of the Board of Translators, but that the true Juden forms were Jurgen (? > *Juden Jusen) and mucen, respectively.

The late form *Risen receives apparent support from a Manchu word. In his preface to the Man-chou yüan-liu k'ao, the Emperor Ch'ien-lung says : « When the Dynasty was founded, the ancient name which designated those belonging to the j 7ç Man-chu was TEfi Chu-shên; later, this name [Chu-shên] was changed to Man-chu (Man-1u), but in the end the Chinese characters [Man-chu] became altered to i si Man-chou. The truth is that the ancient [name] Su-shên is a phonetical change from Chu-shên, and this gives an additional proof in favour of the territorial identity [of the Su-shên and the Man-chu]. » DEVÉRIA'S translation (Rev. de l'Extrême-Orient, I, 174-175) is somewhat different, but would imply that the text is self-contradictory (cf. moreover I, 3 a). Ch'ien-lung's assertion that the Chinese characters were