Here's a simple question. What is the Jurchen word for 'six'? Here is the Jurchen character 'six' in the date "25th day of the 12th month of the 6th year of the Jingtai era (1455)". But how is the character pronounced?
Reconstructed Jurchen pronunciations are primarily based on the Chinese phonetic glosses given in the Berlin ms copy of the Sino-Jurchen Vocabulary. However, the reading for 'six' is given as '寧住' ningzhu which is clearly a mistake for the reading for 'sixty' (Manchu ninju).
Luckily, the Sino-Jurchen glossary without Jurchen characters (here the now destroyed Awanokuni Bunko ms) gives the gloss 寧谷 ninggu for 'six', which corresponds to Manchu ninggun (root ninggu), and so the accepted reconstruction for Jurchen 'six' is 'niŋgu'
But this is not entirely satisfactory. The Awanokuni ms gives the gloss 納荅 nada for seven, whereas the Berlin ms gives 納丹 nadan, which more closely corresponds to Manchu nadan, and so throws some suspicion on the reading 寧谷 for 'six'.
Until recently the Berlin ms was thought to be the only copy of the Jurchen-script Sino-Jurchen Vocabulary with an entry for 'six', but in fact the woodblock edition at the Tianyige Library (not known to earlier Jurchenologists) also includes this entry
引用ツイート
Andrew West
@BabelStone
·
The Tiānyīgé 天一閣 library in Níngbō holds two of the original three volumes (71 out of 108 folios) of the only surviving example of a woodblock printed edition of the Jurchen section of the Sino-Foreign Vocabularies 華夷譯語 produced during the Ming dynasty.
And, lo and behold, it gives the phonetic gloss 寧共 ninggong for 'six', suggesting a reconstructed reading of niŋguŋ, which is closer to Manchu ninggun than the accepted reconstruction niŋgu.
Just guessing: does it represent a morphological shift towards nasalized finals in modern Manchu, actually absent in old Jurchen? Not remotely a jurchenologist myself - my apologies if this may sound trivial