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Sibe (Manchu: ᠰᡳᠪᡝ, Sibe: ᠰᡞᠪᡝ, DAO: Sibe, Simplified Chinese: 锡伯, Traditional Chinese: 錫伯, Pinyin: Xībó, Japanese: シボ) is also translated as Xibe, Sibo or Xibo. I personally prefer Sibe. The Sibe language is a dialect of the Manchu language. It is spoken by members of the Sibe ethnic group in Xinjiang, in the northwest of the People's Republic of China.
The Sibe languages and script were born in 1947. The Sibe script is a modification version of Manchu script.
1) Most of the letters of Manchu script and Sibe script are the same but there are seven different letters. Those different letters are encoded differently in Unicode.
They are i (ᡳ,ᡞ), f (ᡶ,ᡫ), k (ᡴ,ᡣ), ng (ᠩ,ᡢ), j (ᠵ,ᡪ), j’ (ᡷ,ᡲ) and r (ᡵ,ᠷ). See the picture below.
[The other forms of the above letters] and [all the other letters] are the same.
2) Sibe is said to have only 5 vowel letters and does not use the 6th Manchu vowel letter u' (ᡡ) (in most cases including the isolate form). But Sibe does use it after k (ᡣ), g (ᡤ) and h (ᡥ).
3) In Manchu, there are only wa (ᠸᠠ) and we (ᠸᡝ), no wi, wo or wu. In Sibe, all of them are available.
a) No words contains wi (ᠸᡞ), wo (ᠸᠣ) or wu (ᠸᡠ) in Sibe. They are, actually, placeholders.
b) Sibe wi, wo and wu look the same as Manchu fi, fo and fu. (Of course, they use different codes.)
4) In Manchu, the negative suffix is =raku' (᠊ᡵᠠᡴᡡ). In Sibe, it is written as =rku' (᠊ᠷᡣᡡ).
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