open access

https://hdl.handle.net/2115/45236

On the Person for Narrators in Ainu Epic Songs

日本語

2011-03-25

Graduate School of Letters, Hokkaido University

Northern Language Studies

1

139-156

It has been well known that in the several genres of Ainu narrative stories are narrated from the viewpoint of the main character(narrator), and that the person of the narrator is different from the ordinal 1st person singular. Moreover, it has been said that the person which depicts the narrator of folktales and heroic epics is marked with the personal affixes a(n)=, =an or i= (A will be used to represent it), and that the person which depicts the narrator of epic songs is marked with ci=, =as or un= (C will be used to represent it). Mashiho Chiri and Itsuhiko Kubodera, who were the disciples of Kyosuke Kindaichi, the founder of the Ainu language and folklore studies, said that in Horobetsu, Bihoro, Chikabumi, Memuro and Sakhalin areas they kept rigidly to use C depicting the narrator of epic songs, but that in Saru they used mainly A. In the famous “Ainu Epic Songs” written by Yukie Chiri, who was the elder sister of Mashiho Chiri and born in Horobetsu, all of the narrators of 13 songs were depicted with C so that it seems to support the remarks by Chiri and Kubodera. Detailed surveys of the materials which Chiri and Kubodera collected, however, reveal that their remarks were not accurate and that the distribution of A and C is not so clear-cut. Also in the areas of Horobetsu, Bihoro, Chikabumi and Sakhalin, they used not always C and on the contrary in Saru area using C is not a rare case. The thorough using of C in Yukie Chiri’s “Ainu Epic Songs” has been considered to be “an ancient style” and caused by its conservativeness. Its probability, however, must be low, since almost all of the reciters elder than her, including her aunt Matsu Kannari, from whom Yukie was considered to be handed down those texts, didn’t use C in such a consistent manner. The main difference between Yukie Chiri’s and the other texts is that the latter was orally dictated or recorded by tape recorders, but the former is written down by the author herself. Therefore the former had chances of elaboration to approach her ideal style.

紀要論文

Version of Record

2185-7121

AA12516968