寒冷気候とアイヌ語 (寒冷気候にまつわる諸問題(特集)) -- (寒冷気候とひと)

概要

論文の詳細を見る
The study of the language or foklore of the tribe may suggest what kind of the climate their ancestors experienced in the past. The author has tried to discover this from a study of the Ainu language and its oral tradition.The Ainu language, like English or Japanese, does not have many different morphemes for snow or ice when compared with Eskimo or Manchu. In some of “Yukar” legends of the Ainu, the serpent is thought to be a kind of taboo among the ancient Ainus. The snake was an alien creature, inhabiting no single category of the Ainu configuration of nature (sky, mountains, land, and water), but forever acrossing the boundaries between them.It is thus inferred that the ancient Ainus had some contact with snakes, animals that can hardly survive in the absence of a warm summer. From this we may venture to guess that the ancient Ainu people may have lived in a mild climate, or that the original Ainu culture might have dedeveloped in a land with a snowy winter and a warm summer. Ice and icebergs were not a feature of their world. The regions which the Ainus inhabited were sub-frigid at their coldest and there is no evidence that the Ainus had come from a very cold land such as the arctic regions.