Permalink : http://hdl.handle.net/2115/80938

KEYWORDS : Ainu;Hokkaido;Nevskij;folklore

Nikolaj Aleksandrovich Nevskij (1892-1937) was an outstanding Russian Japanologist who spent 14 years of his research career in Japan focusing on the study of Ainu and other East Asian languages . Most of his works were pub lished posthumously , yet many remain unpublished. After Ajnskij Fol’klor (Ainu Folklore) (1972), this is the first publication of an Ainu folklore text from Nevkij’s archive preserved at the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts of the Russian Academy of Scie nces in St. Petersburg. The text was narrated by an Ainu female speaker Kopoanu in Otaru on February 22, 1922 . We have added to the original a Latin morphophonemic transcription of the Ainu text, English glosses and an English translation from Ainu. As usual for an uwepeker folktale ””, the story is told by a human main character, here a younger sister, who wants to record the events of her life before dying of old age. The synopsis of the story is as follows. Two sisters lived together. Then the older sister made love to a snake husband, gave birth to a snake child and turned into a snake herself. The younger sister would have repeated the same fate unless she was warned by the old elm tree.