The Study of the Ainu Language
スポンサーリンク
概要
- 論文の詳細を見る
The purpose of this short essay is to introduce to the readers the general knowledgeabout the Ainu people and their language, as well as to stress the urgency of the linguistic andcultural study. In addition,as a case study,I discuss the problem ofʻglide insertionʼin Ainu insome detail. In previous studies the glides in question have been supposed to be perfectlypredictable from the phonological environment. Therefore, they have often been ignored inphonological notation. However, I argue that there are a number of cases in which these glidesdo not happen in spite of the same environment. In short, the appearance of the glides is notonly controlled by the phonological environment, but also depends strongly on the morphologicalproperties of the preceding elements. The glides serve to make a given word-structuremore transparent. This claim is supported by a number of facts. First, the phenomenon (theoccurrence or non-occurrence of the glides) can be seen clearly in the soundspectrograms of theforms in question. The claim is also supported by studying Ainu texts written by an Ainu nativespeaker him/herself. In fact, we can find that the glides in question are almost always clearlywritten, for example, in Yukie Chiriʼs famous Ainu text Ainu shinyoshu (a collection of Ainuepics of gods). Moreover, there is morpho-syntactic evidence as well as phonological for thesignificance of these glides. We should predict that the non-occurrence of the glides indicates theindependent nature of the preceding element. This is supported by the fact that nominal formswith the prefix si-ʻoneselfʼ,which does not trigger glide insertion,cannot always be incorporated,but may be separated from verbs (i. e. expressed syntactically) in the Horobetsu dialect of Ainu.
- 北海道大学の論文
著者
関連論文
- 18世紀前半のいくつかのアイヌ語資料について
- アイヌ語古文献における言語学的諸問題
- 『藻汐草』の「一冊本」について
- The Study of the Ainu Language
- 六種対照『アイヌ神謡集』 (一) : 校本作成のための資料と本文をめぐる諸問題
- アイヌ文学における一人称体の問題
- 酒田市立光丘文庫所蔵「蝦夷記」のアイヌ語について