The proper names of the saha islands

In a couple of recent posts, I've been gnawing on the names of some islands at the mouth of the Tumen river, where the word saha appears to mean "island".

Initially I was working from European maps, which alternated between saba and saha, and I had thought that the word must be saba.

However, today I remembered a volume at the Bibliothèque national de France containing a long list of Manchu place names. I skimmed through it, and managed to find the page shown below, which now allows me to give the proper names for the islands, as transcribed from Manchu script.

The islands listed on Danville's map are (from South to North) Taitou saha, Siské loun, Tayam ou saha, Sarbatchou saba, Mama saba, and Youanga toun. The names, as transcribed from the page below in Manchu script, are Daidu saha, Sishe tun, Dayanggū saha, Sarbacu saha, Mama saha and Yohangga tun (not shown on this page, but on a later page).

Also listed on this page is a river called Fiya bira (bira meaning "river"), which bears a passing resemblance to the ethnic name Fiyaka.

A possible candidate for the saha-islanders

In my last post I remarked on the word saha, apparently meaning "island" in the names of some islands just north of the mouth of the Tumen river.  As far as I can tell, this is not a word in a known language of the area.

In this post, I will propose two possible candidate ethnic groups for the speakers of that language. The following text is a Manchu-language description of groups of people called Fiyaka and Kiyakara who brought tribute to the Qing:

fiyaka, fiyaka sunggari ulai dergi ergi ten i bade bi, mederi tun i jakarame son son i tembi. nimaha butame gurgu buthašame banjimbi. hahasi hehesi gemu indahūn sukū be etuku arafi etumbi. juwari forgon de nimaha sukū i arambi. banin doksin becunure de amuran. tucire dosire de kemuni jeyengge agūra gaifi yabumbi. aniyadari seke jafambi.

kiyakara, kiyakara huncun mederi, jai fucin yose i jergi birai biturame son son i tembi. haha hehe gemu ferten de muheren etufi jurhun isire menggun teišun i araha niyalma be miyamigan obume tuhebumbi. hahasi buhū i sukū be mahala arambi. bosoi etuku etumbi. bethe niohušulembi. hehesi funiyehe be tuhebume, sifikū sifirakū, adasun de halai hacin i šeoleme wangnambi. boo ūlen jahūdai weihu be gemu alan i weilembi. ese asu baitalame bahanarakū. nimaha šakarame gurgušeme banjimbi. banitai heolen sula iktambume asaraha hacin akū. ceni ba i ici gisurere be kiyakaratambi sembi. aniyadari seke jafambi.

"The Fiyaka. The Fiyaka are in the high places on the east side of the Sunggari river. They are scattered along the island(s) of the sea. They make their living fishing and hunting. Men and women all make and wear clothing of dog skins. In the summer they make them from fish skins. By nature they are cruel and they love to fight. When they are out and about they walk carrying bladed spears. Every year they bring sable as tribute.

"The Kiyakara. The Kiyakara are scattered along the Hunchun Sea, and along such rivers as Fucin and Yose. The men and women all wear rings in their noses, and hang figurines as ornaments made of silver and copper as much as an inch long. The men make hats from deerskin, wear cloth, and go barefoot. The women let their hair down, and do not wear hairpins. They embroider their lapels with all kinds of different designs. They make every kind of house and boat from birch bark. They do not know how to use nets. They make their living by spearing fish and hunting. They are naturally lazy and idle, and do not customarily accumulate and set aside stores. The speech of their land is called kiyakaratambi. Every year they bring sable as tribute."

The Fiyaka and Kiyakara occupied similar territories, as far as I can tell. Both groups are now said to have been Tungusic, but I think the evidence for this is based largely on the fact that Tungusic speakers are known to have lived in the areas they inhabited. The same section of the tribute records also mentions Nanai (heje) and Udeghe (nadan hala), as well as non-Tungusic Ainu (guye or kuye) and Nivkh (kilen).

In what language does saha mean "island"?

This evening, I have been poring over Danville's beautiful 18th century map of Korea and Manchuria, looking at the tangled area where Korean toponyms give way to Manchu/Jurchen (and other non-Korean) toponyms.

I started out hunting for two places called (in Manchu) ehe kuren and gūnaka kuren, which I expect to find on Danville's map with a spelling like *eghe couren, *counaca couren. I have not found them yet, but I have found something else that is interesting.

All along the Korean coast, small islands are given names ending in tao, which no doubt corresponds to Chinese 島, "island" (Mandarin dǎo).

Some Korean islands with names ending in "tao"

Along the Japanese coast, of course, we have small islands whose names end in sima, corresponding to the Japanese word shima, "island".

Some Japanese islands with names ending in "sima"

But at the mouth of the Tumen river, there is something I did not expect. Some of the islands have names ending in toun, which must be Manchu tun, "island", and some have names in loun, which I am certain is a scribal error for toun. But others have names in saba and saha, which I don't recognize.

A mix of islands with names ending in "toun/loun" and "saba/saha"

I expect saha is a scribal error for saba, because I see the same error in the name of one of the tributaries of the Tumen, called Cahari at one point and Cabari at another. It is more likely that the correct form is saba because intervocalic -h- is rare in these place names, being usually represented by -kh- or -gh-. But in what language does saba mean island?

Note 3 February 2014: It turns out I was wrong. The word is saha, as I note in a later post. I've corrected the remainder of this post.

The major language families of the area (broadly speaking) are Tungusic, Japonic, Korean, Nivkh, Ainu, Mongolic and Chinese. Of all of these, the only thing I have found so far that looks similar is Korean seom 섬, "island", which really looks closer to Japanese shima, as far as I know.

It looks like there is a somewhat large island called mama saha, and a smaller one called sarbatchou saha. Given similar island names throughout the world, it would not surprise me if these are "mother island" and "daughter island", so maybe that is a place to start.

In Manchu, sargan means "woman" or "wife", and sargan jui means daughter. However, Tsintsius lists this as a Manchu morpheme only, not attested in other Tungusic languages, so it falls into what I call the "enigmatic vocabulary" of Manchu: common words with no known origin.

I have often felt that the enigmatic vocabulary of Manchu provides evidence of close contact between the ancestors of the Jurchens and speakers of an otherwise unattested language. Under this theory, words like sargan would have been loaned into Manchu from the other language, which then disappeared. If sarbatchou saha really does mean "daughter island", perhaps it comes from the same source language, or a close relative.

A close study of the place names in Danville's map may lead to more interesting discoveries.

渤海 Language

There was a kingdom called 渤海 in what is now North Korea and North-Eastern China.  For nationalistic reasons, certain modern nations are keen to assert that the people of that kingdom belonged to their own ethnic group and spoke their own language. The system of romanization you use has intense political ramifications. (Just read the talk pages on Wikipedia for this and related kingdoms.)

In order to sidestep this debate, I will use Chinese characters instead of contested historical names throughout this post.

No texts in the 渤海 language survive, so all we can do is speculate based on historical sources.  In fact, it appears that the 渤海 may have used the Chinese language as their literary language, based on a passage from the history of the Jurchen Jīn dynasty:

乙未，诏百官诰命，女直、契丹、汉人各用本字，渤海同汉人。
On the yiwei day, [the emperor] issued edicts to the hundreds of officials.  For the Jurchens, Khitans and Chinese, he used their own scripts; For the 渤海, [he used] the same as the Chinese.

Ethnically, the Jurchens seem to have believed that they were related to the 渤海, since the Taizu of the Jīn dynasty promulgated an edict saying:

女直、渤海本同一家。
The Jurchens and 渤海 are originally one family.

Indeed, the history of the Jurchen Jīn says:

粟末靺鞨始附高麗，姓大氏。李績破高麗，粟末靺鞨保東牟山。後爲渤海，稱王，傳十餘世。有文字、禮樂、官府、制度。有五京、十五府、六十二州。 

The 粟末靺鞨 allied themselves to 高麗, and took the surname Dashi.  After [the Tang official named] Li Ji destroyed 高麗, the 粟末靺鞨 guarded over Dongmo Hill.  Later, they became the 渤海, were called kings, and for ten generations had writing, laws, music, official courts, systems, customs, five capitals, fifteen prefectures, and sixty-two districts.

The 粟末靺鞨 here are one of the seven tribes of 靺鞨 from whom the Jurchens held themselves to be descended.  The characters 粟末 are reconstructed as *sok-mat in OCM (Minimal Old Chinese), and represent an ancient name for the Sunggari river (now called Songhua).  I expect the river name was something like *sugmar, which became *sumgar through metathesis, *sunggar through assimilation.

If we assume that the collective name of the seven tribes, 靺鞨, was pronounced the same as the phonetics 末曷, then that gives is an OCM reconstruction of *mat-gât.  The Early Middle Chinese reconstruction of 渤海, for comparison, is *bət-xəy'.  It seems like it is not entirely impossible to say that the name 渤海, which appeared in the Táng, is a later form of the older 靺鞨, having undergone some sound changes.  The sound change from m > b is not well represented, though we do find it in the Manchu words for "monkey", monio and bonio.

The language of 渤海, if it was anything other than pre-Jurchen, should have left some loan words in Manchu.  Indeed, the Manchu language has a large store of enigmatic words whose etymologies can't be found in Tungusic, Mongolic or Chinese.  Much of these will no doubt be Khitan, but some of them may be 渤海.  Khitan itself is likely to have some 渤海 loans, as well.

Someone really needs to do a careful archeology of Manchu in order to make sense of the enigmatic vocabulary.  Among the words whose origins are indeterminate are many words containing palatal velars (represented by -giy-, -kiy-, -hiy- in the Manchu script), including the name of the Manchu royal clan, gioro.  The following relatively common words are also enigmatic: boigon, "family"; boo, "house"; bonio, "monkey"; abka, "heaven"; aga, "rain"; wece-, "to shamanize"; ganio, "supernatural".

Someone also needs to do an analysis of the pre-Chinese place names of the Changbaishan, among which there are a fair number with palatal velars.  I wonder if a careful linguistic archeology might not reveal the presence of an otherwise unattested substratum language in the area of the Yalu river and Changbaishan.

East/West

In the Ili valley of Xinjiang province, in China, there is an ethnic group called the Sibe, who speak a dialect of Manchu, and use a form of the Classical Manchu language as their written language.

One of the odd differences between Sibe and Manchu is that their words for East and West are reversed.  The Manchu words for East and West are (respectively) dergi and wargi, while the Sibe words are vɛrɣi and dirɣi.  (They're reversed...trust me).

As far as I know, no one has ever explained this.  It is generally assumed that the Manchu words originally referred to the rising and setting of the sun.  So, for example, dergi, "East", is related to words like dekde-, "rise", deye-, "fly", desi, "upward"; while wargi, "West", is related to words like wasi, "downward", wasihūn, "low", etc.

But then why are they reversed in Sibe?  The sun surely rises and sets the same for the Sibe as for the Manchus.

The Manchu language is based on the language of Nurhaci and his people, who lived on the Suksuhu river.  It is probably a sister to the Sibe language, both being dialects of Jurchen.  The Sibe do not consider themselves Manchus, and they did not come from the Suksuhu river area, they lived along the Amur river.

Guess what?  The Suksuhu river runs West, and the Amur river runs East.  If dergi and wargi originally meant "upstream" and "downstream", then that would explain why they are now reversed in Sibe and Manchu.

The Roasted Cake Song

There is a Classical Chinese text called the Roasted Cake Song (燒餅歌), supposedly composed by the Ming official Liu Ji (劉基) who was posthumously named Liu Bowen (劉伯溫).  The song is cryptic, and is traditionally held to be prophetic, but is often considered a recent hoax.

I can't comment on whether it is prophetic or not, but I am pretty sure it is not a recent hoax.  Here is a page from the Old Manchu text Jiu Manzhou Dang, detailing a letter sent by the Manchu chieftain Nurhaci to the Khalkha of the Five Encampments in 1620.  I translate the highlighted section below.

The highlighted section says (in Old Manchu):

te geli liobe uwen-i gisunde latunahabi.  tere liobe uwen serengge dūleke julgei [n]iyalma kai. ganio joriha gese. liobe uwen-i gisun ehe sain ojibe emgeli jorime waciha kai.

Which I translate as:

Now again [events] adhere to the words of Liu Bowen.  That Liu Bowen was a person of the ancient past.  It is like he indicated supernatural things.  Regardless of whether his words were of good or evil, what he indicated came to pass.

So, at the very least, we can say that in 1620 there was some text attributed to Liu Bowen that was considered to be strange and prophetic.  It is possible that the Roasted Cake Song that survives to the present day is a hoax, but unless there is something in the content of the surviving text that is clearly anachronistic, we can probably assume that it dates at least to 1620.