Permalink : http://hdl.handle.net/2115/73723

KEYWORDS : History of Ainu;Hokkaido;Kurils;Old documents;Sakhalin

Focusing on cross-dialectal comparison is particlarly important in the case of language isolates like Ainu, which lack outside comparisons. Unfortunately, Kuril Ainu, which is absolutely indispensable for the reconstruction, disappeared in the late 19th century with just few old documents left. This study presents several newly discovered unpublished Kuril Ainu documents, i.e. Opisanie na pervom ostrovu zhivuscikh kurilov... [A description of the Kuriles living on the first island...] by O. Argunov (1742) and Kuril'skie slova [Kuril Words ; I.G. Voznesensky's archive] (1844?) from the St. Petersburg Branch of the Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences and attempts to revise Murayama's (1971) overview of Kuril Ainu and pursue historical research on a number of isues. Though Murayama (1971) notes that Kuril Ainu is extremely important for Ainu dialectology and history of Ainu, he does not give any concrete examples of how it can actually be used for this purpose. This paper suggests that Kuril Ainu old documents can reveal a lot only when compared with old documents of other dialects, i.e. Hokkaido and Sakhalin Ainu. Despite many difficulties in accessing and deciphering, the study of old Kuril Ainu documents and their comparison with Hokkaido and Sakhalin Ainu documents is very promising because it is quite possible to find previously undocumented vocabulary items (e.g. obscenities including the word unatara which appeared in both unpublished Kuril Ainu materials in Cyrillic and kana materials), identify new meanings of words (e.g. in Kuril Ainu, kotan means not only ‘village’ but also ‘island’), and even attempt to recover Proto-Ainu through the reconstruction in phonology (e.g. *CVHC syllable structure in PA based on words for ‘good’ and ‘dark’ in Hokkaido, Sakhalin and Kuril Ainu old records) and grammar (person marking and negation).