Manshu/Chapter 5

蛮书/卷05

Translator's note
The title and introduction of this chapter uses a very rare character. I presume the meaning is "markets". The character in question, which can be viewed at the internet archive's scanned copy of the Complete Library of the Four Treasuries《四库全书》edition (courtesy of Zhejiang University Library and archive.org) and which also has an entry at Chinese Wiktionary (with no known meanings listed), combines 贝 (meaning shell, and later shell money — as supposed in the Sino-Tibetan etymology notably including a similar phonetic in the Kachin language, and a not dissimilar Proto-Zhuang-Tai record) with 佥 (meaning a gathering), and is thus in a rough semantic sense plausibly a term used for local markets in the region where the use of shells as currency was widespread and well documented — to Westerners, famously allegedly by Marco Polo — through at least the Yuan dynasty. The character is actually 𧸘 in Unicode however that usually only displays as an empty box (sometimes known as "tofu") on most computers owing to font limitations on rare Chinese characters. Mandarin pronunciation (as irrelevant as that may be for a source of this age) is alleged by Chinese Wiktionary (probably direct from the Unicode Unihan database) as being liàn, biǎn, or jiǎn — for what that's worth... the earlier two having some plausible phonetic similarity with the Proto-Sino-Tibetan and Proto-Zhuang-Tai, respectively. My probably reliable general comprehension is that the closing consonant is the least reliable portion of a character's phoneme when brought forward to Mandarin from ancient pronunciation, with many closing sounds (evidenced for example with final 'k' in Cantonese, which is more honest with respect to Tang Dynasty pronunciations) dropped entirely or morphed in to softer variants. Thus instead of (lian or bian or jian) we can vaguely reconstruct the phoneme as follows — (l or b or j) + (possibly an ee type sound, or some longer form or dipthong variant thereof) + (optionally some kind of closing consonant: probably not n). We can probably get some further input from an appropriately experienced linguist here.

(Update: September 2017. User:Justinrleung pointed out that "When it refers to the administrative division, it is read as jiǎn (based on Song dynasty《唐書釋音》九儉切)." ... clarifying "Hanyu Da Zidian cites 唐書釋音 for the for 𧸘. I've checked 唐書釋音 at Chinese Wikisource and its corresponding scanned version; it seems to use 瞼 instead of 𧸘. 唐書 itself (editions: 欽定四庫全書, 武英殿二十四史, 摛藻堂四庫全書薈要) also uses 瞼 instead of 𧸘. That said, Hanyu Da Zidian also cites Gu Zuyu (a Qing dynasty scholar), who says 𧸘 is pronounced as 簡". So there you have it: jian.)

Introduction
This is apparently not part of the original text, because it consists of one short clarifying note and the rest is entirely latter-day comments; ie. those referencing later texts and those known from markup style to be added by later transliterators.