http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandarin_Chinese#Koin.C3.A9_of_...
-- but that's not where it originated. My mistake, good correction.
> The Forbidden City, as the residence of the terrestrial emperor, was its earthly counterpart. Jin, or "Forbidden", referred to the fact that no-one could enter or leave the palace without the emperor's permission.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yue_Chinese#Twentieth_century
And I acknowledged them. Similarly, southern Chinese languages feature borrowings from Tai, Austro-Asiatic, and Austronesian languages.
Sanskrit is another source of borrowings for many Chinese languages, due to the influence of Buddhism. The word "Mandarin", coincidentally, comes from the Sanskrit word mantrin (मन्त्रिन्), meaning "minister" or "councillor", although that is not used in Mandarin itself to refer to the language.
So it's not just Mandarin that has been influenced by foreign languages. The borrowing of words is very common when two languages come into contact. A prime example is the internet-speak used by Chinese netizens, which is replete with English-based neologisms.
However, that doesn't change the fact that modern Mandarin overwhelmingly bears more similarity to Classical Chinese than it does to Manchu.
> More importantly, Mandarin is heavily influenced by Manchu in other ways, for example, tones. Southern languages like Cantonese, Minnan have more tones (Cantonese 9, Minnan 8, vs Mandarin 5).
Do you have any proof that Manchu influence is the reason for Mandarin's relative paucity of tones in comparison to southern Chinese languages? Middle Chinese, which goes back nearly a millenium before the advent of the Qing dynasty, already had only 4 tones[0]. According to the relationship between Middle Chinese tones and modern Mandarin tones[1], the 4 tones of modern Mandarin are descended from the Ping (平), Shang (上), and Qu (去) tones of Middle Chinese, with some redistribution according to consonant type.
> Some Chinese believe Mandarin is a language polluted/reduced by Manchu, and they consider southern languages to be more elegant and culturally richer and purer.
And one of the major proximal causes of this is the loss of tones, since it's lead to homophonic ambiguity, which has been corrected through the formation of polysyllabic neologisms, which break many millenia-old connections with Classical Chinese. It's not just the addition of Manchu vocabulary and/or phrases.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_tones
1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Chinese_phonology#Rela...
It's very hard to prove. There are materials from Qing Dynasty that still have the 入(entering) tone, this indicate the tone disappeared sometime during the late Qing. But others hold belief that the northern language lost the entering tone long before Qing, maybe as early as Yuan.
Say what? Mandarin Chinese was originally spoken by Han Chinese only and is nothing like the original language spoken by the Manchu (save for a few loanwords). The Manchu language is from the Tungusic language family, and has absolutely no genealogical relation to Mandarin or any other Sino-Tibetan languages.
As it says on Wikipedia[0]:
> By the end of the 19th century the [Manchu] language was so moribund that even at the office of the Shengjing (Shenyang) general, the only documents written in Manchu (rather than Chinese) would be the memorials wishing the emperor long life; at the same time period, the archives of the Hulan banner detachment in Heilongjiang show that only 1% of the bannermen could read Manchu, and no more than 0.2% could speak it.
Manchu now has ~20 native speakers, with its closest non-endangered relative being Xibe, with ~30,000 native speakers[1].
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manchu_language#History_and_si...
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xibe_language