Manchu Handwriting

The Staatsbibliothek manuscript is written in at least three distinctive but related styles. By comparing these with the handwriting of known authors, perhaps we could eventually make a guess at who the author(s) of the Staatsbibliothek manuscript might have been.

But what features can we reliably compare between different writers?

One that leaps out when looking at a page of Manchu text is the shape of the left and right tails in words like be and de. These can be written in quite different ways, as can be seen in these examples drawn from Jakdan and Mucihiyan:

Jakdan’s left tail usually goes out in a long, relatively straight line with a small hook at the end. His right tail is usually shaped like a fishhook. Mucihiyan, in contrast, makes his left and right tails quite short, and his right tail is consistently thick while his left tail is consistently thin.

In both Jakdan and Mucihiyan’s handwriting, the be has a small left-pointing tooth before the tail. Contrast that with the handwriting in the Staatsbibliothek, where there is usually a small right-pointing tooth before the tail in be:

Based on these examples, as well as my general feeling from spending many hours reading these texts, it seems unlikely that the Staatsbibliothek manuscript was written by either Jakdan or Mucihiyan. It is unclear, though, whether the SB was written by one hand or by three. Is the thick right tail of SB-B a stylistic flourish, or the work of a different writer? Is the flatter right tail of SB-C just a way to conserve space on the page?