The following 10 handouts were prepared by Mark Elliott for his Summer 2013 Manchu class. They are quite useful as references, and cover most of the major topics of Manchu orthography and grammar.
Handout 1: Orthography Rules
This handout explains some of the common points of confusion in reading Manchu script, including the two different forms of k/g/h and t/d, the use of dots and circles (especially in conjunction with the letters k/g/h and t/d), the difference between f and w, and the use of diphthongs (which diphthongs are possible and which are not).
Handout 2: Noun Plurals
This handout explains the variety of forms used in Manchu to create plural nouns. It also includes a section on how to recognize that a Manchu word is a noun.
Handout 3: Verbs
An extremely useful reference to 20 different Manchu verb endings (from –mbi to –tai/-tei/-toi). Almost any verb ending that appears in Manchu texts is covered here; if you can’t remember the meaning of a rare form, this is the place to look.
Handout 4: Derivational Suffixes
A great complement to the previous handout, this covers the most common derivational suffixes, attached to the end of the stem (but before the endings of Handout 3) of a Manchu verb to modify its meaning. Does a verb look like one you know or can find in a dictionary, except that it has an extra –bu-, –ndu-, –na-, etc? Use this handout to figure out what’s going on.
Handout 5: Postpositions
Manchu uses a huge variety of postpositions (like prepositions, except they follow nouns instead of preceding them). This handout is a guide to many of the most common, and also explains which case marker is necessary to connect each of them to the noun it follows.
Handout 6: Questions, Exclamations, and Onomatopoeia
Can’t figure out why a Manchu sentence ends the way it does? Check out this handout, which begins by covering various ways a Manchu sentence can end, other than with a finite verb form, including question particles like –o and –ni and emotive particles/exclamations like kai and ayoo. The final section of the handout introduces one of the Manchu language’s most fun features: its extremely frequent use of onomatopoeia.
Handout 7: Interrogatives
Manchu has a bewildering variety of question words, most beginning with ai-. Ai- words appear in a varieties of parts-of-speech, from nouns like ai, to adverbs like aika, to verbs like ainambi. And then the confusion deepens when you add a case particle to an ai- noun, as in aibide or change the form of an ai- verb, as in ainaha seme, or simply add an extra word, as in ai jergi. Figure out what’s going on with your confusing question words in this handout (don’t worry, words not starting with ai-, like we and adarame, are covered too!)
Handout 8: Constructions with -ci
Though you will learn -ci as the conditional converb (as well as the ablative case particle; be careful to distinguish!), when combined with other words, -ci takes on a variety of meanings that stray from a conditional sense. Here you can find many of the most common, and learn to tell your -ci ombi from your -ci acambi, and figure out what’s going on with sentences that start bi donjici.
Handout 9: Directions
Simple but very useful, the chart in this handout correlates the four forms of many directional words (north, up, outside, etc), to help you keep track of the way that Manchu distinguishes, say, the noun “north” from the postposition “to the north of” from the adverb “northward.”
Handout 10: Irregular Verbs
Not all Manchu verbs follow the basic rules that you may have learned; in this handout you can learn something about which verbs deviate and why and how they do. Learn to tell saha from sangka or jetere from jendere. And what’s going on when a verb ends –mpi? (hint: it’s actually a variant on –fi, not on –mbi)