Chapter 172A Glossed Sakhalin (Enciw) Text with Hokkaido Contrast
A Sakhalin Ainu text glossed and annotated against Hokkaido norms, foregrounding phonemic vowel length, the final-h reflex, and divergent person, number, and negation morphology.
172.1 Source, speakers, and orthographic conventions
The sentences glossed in this chapter come from Murasaki (2025), Murasaki Kyōko's revised introductory textbook of West-Sakhalin (Enciw) Ainu. The primary data were elicited at Tokoro on the Sea of Okhotsk coast, chiefly from Fujiyama Haru (c. 1895–1974) and Asai Take (c. 1916–1994), the two principal consultants in Murasaki's fieldwork programme spanning 1960–1994. A small number of illustrations also draw on Nagara Iso (Shiretoko/Chirijiri). The dialect represented is the western coastal (Raichiishka/Laichiśka) variety; minor contrasts with the slightly more southerly Maoka variety and the northeastern Taraika variety are noted where they bear on the comparisons below Tangiku (2022: ch. 9).
The orthography follows Hattori's phonemic transcription (Hattori 1964), as adopted by Murasaki. Long vowels are written double (aa ee oo etc.); every vowel-initial syllable carries the glottal onset written ʼ; the six permissible coda consonants are -h -m -n -s -w -y. A person prefix is separated from its verb stem by =. Piłsudski's 1912 Sakhalin corpus Piłsudski (1912), the earliest substantial Enciw text collection, uses a different Romanization; forms cited from that source elsewhere in this grammar have been converted to the Hattori convention following Dal Corso (2024). No Cyrillic script is reproduced. The broader typological and diachronic profile of Sakhalin Ainu relative to Hokkaido is developed in Chapter 162 (Sakhalin and Kuril Ainu: The External Comparison).
172.2 Interlinear text and free translation
Five sentences drawn from Murasaki's lesson dialogues are glossed below. Together they sample existential predication, attributive and locative structure, equational copula, analytic negation, suppletive verbal number, and the first-person object prefix. Each sentence was produced by Fujiyama Haru or Asai Take in elicitation sessions conducted by Murasaki Murasaki (2025).
‘There is a bowl here.’
Murasaki 2025: 16; Sakhalin (cited for contrast), Raichiishka; speaker Fujiyama Haru
SA teeta 'here' carries the phonemic long vowel ee; the Saru cognate locative is ta (short). 'an is the singular existential; the suppletive plural form 'okay appears in (2).
‘There are many birds on that lake.’
Murasaki 2025: 16; Sakhalin (cited for contrast), Raichiishka; speaker Fujiyama Haru
'okay is the suppletive plural existential (singular 'an). kaa is the position noun 'above (in contact)' in the elderly register, taking the locative suffix -ta. SA enforces strict grammatical number agreement; the singular 'an would be ungrammatical with a plural subject here.
‘This is not a dog.’
Murasaki 2025: 12; Sakhalin (cited for contrast), Raichiishka; speaker Fujiyama Haru
SA analytic negation: the focus particle ka is followed by the negative predicate hannehka (< han- NEG + copula root), with the copula nee optionally omitted. Hokkaido Saru uses somo ne (NEG COP) instead, an entirely distinct form.
‘Everyone came together.’
Murasaki 2025: 22; Sakhalin (cited for contrast), Raichiishka; speaker Fujiyama Haru
'ariki is the suppletive plural stem of 'come' (singular 'eh); =hci is the SA third-person plural subject suffix cliticized to the verb. HK uses the cognate suppletive plural stem arki, but has no suffix cognate to =hci in this position.
‘Grandmother sang while crying and had me listen.’
Murasaki 2025: 30; Sakhalin (cited for contrast), Raichiishka; speaker Fujiyama Haru
'en= is the SA first-person singular object prefix (1SG.O), cognate with HK en=. The verb yuukara 'recite oral literature' is the SA cognate of HK yukar; the long initial vowel yuu- in SA corresponds to the short yu- of the HK form, consistent with the SA length–accent correspondence discussed in the preceding section.
172.3 Phonological contrasts: vowel length and the final-h reflex
The most immediately audible distinction between SA and Hokkaido (HK) Ainu is prosodic. Where Saru and other HK varieties carry a lexically contrastive pitch accent on stems, West-Sakhalin has phonemic vowel quantity — long vowels (written double) versus short vowels — with no accentual contrast. The two systems correspond diachronically: what HK encodes as a high pitch on a short vowel, SA encodes as length on that vowel Itabashi (2001); Tangiku (2022: ch. 9). A selection of cognate pairs from Murasaki's textbook illustrates the pattern Murasaki (2025: 5):
| gloss | SA (Raichiishka) | HK (Saru) |
|---|---|---|
| year | paa | pa |
| child | poo | po |
| fat, grease | kee | ke |
| laugh | miina | mina |
| drink/smoke (tobacco) | 'ikuu | 'iku |
A second phonological divergence involves the coda consonants. HK retains the Proto-Ainu coda obstruents /-p -t -k -r/ directly in the citation form of nouns and verb stems. SA replaces all four with a single surface segment /-h/, which is the reflex of the historical closure when no vowel follows; the original coda emerges when a vowel-initial suffix is added Murasaki (2025: 2); Tangiku (2022: ch. 9). The affiliative (possessed) suffix therefore restores the underlying consonant, as the table of nominal pairs shows:
| gloss | SA citation | SA affiliative | HK citation (Saru) | HK affiliative |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| fish | ceh | cep-ihi | cep | cep-ihi |
| hand | teh | tek-ihi | tek | tek-e |
| eye | sih | sik-ihi | sik | sik-i |
| skin, bark | kah | kap-uhu | kap | kap-uhu |
The SA citation forms ceh teh sih kah all surface with /-h/; the historical /-p -k -k -p/ re-emerge in the affiliative. HK retains the coda obstruents in the citation form itself. The HK affiliative suffix morphophonology is described in Chapter 45 (Morphophonology of the Affiliative Suffix and Echo/Copy Vowels); the diachronic correspondence between the SA surface /-h/ and the HK retained obstruents, with its implications for the internal reconstruction of Proto-Ainu codas, is the subject of Chapter 157 (The Final-h Problem and Its Sakhalin Vowel-Length Reflex) ‹consensus›.
172.4 Morphosyntactic contrasts
172.4.1 Analytic negation: hannehka versus somo
Example (3) illustrates the SA negative copula construction. The sequence ka hannehka (nee) negates an equational proposition: ka is the focus particle, and hannehka is the negative predicate, historically the copula root with the negative prefix han- prefixed Murasaki (2025: 11, 15). The same prefix attaches directly to verb stems for verbal negation: hannehka ku='oman 'I did not go'. The copula nee following the negative is frequently omitted in conversational speech.
HK Saru negates an equational predicate with the independent negative particle somo before the copula, yielding somo ne (NEG COP). The HK somo particle and its distribution across existential, copular, and verbal contexts are described in Chapter 126 (Standard Clausal Negation with somo). Dal Corso's study of SA negation Dal Corso (2025) treats the structural history of the SA han- series and its divergence from the Hokkaido system in detail ‹contested›.
172.4.2 Person and number marking
The SA person-prefix inventory parallels HK in its core forms — first-person singular ku= (A/S), first-person singular object 'en= — but diverges in what it assigns to the paradigm cell that HK labels 'fourth person' or 'indefinite'. In SA the morpheme 'an-/='an functions as first-person plural in the speech of younger speakers, and as first-person singular in the elderly register, the inverse of its value in HK Murasaki (2025: 84–85); Sakaguchi (2024). SA accordingly has no productive indefinite/fourth-person paradigm of the HK type; the HK system is described in Chapter 67 (The Indefinite/Fourth Person: Forms, Reference, and Agent-Defocusing) and Chapter 62 (Architecture of the Personal-Affix System: The Four Persons and the S/A/O Paradigms).
Example (4) shows the SA third-person plural subject suffix =hci cliticizing to the verb: 'ariki=hci 'they came'. HK grammars report no cognate suffix in this structural position; Dal Corso's alignment study Dal Corso (2025) traces the SA morpheme to a grammaticalized pronoun and argues that the SA system encodes a richer nominal-tracking morphology than any Hokkaido variety. Sakaguchi Sakaguchi (2024) provides the most detailed morphological analysis of the SA person–number paradigm to date ‹speculative›.
172.4.3 Suppletive verbal number
SA and HK share suppletive verbal number — distinct verb stems indexed to the number of the core argument — but enforce it differently. In SA, grammatical number agreement is strict: a plural subject requires the plural verb form, with no tolerance for the singular at low counts that is documented in Hokkaido Murasaki (2025: 84–85). The existential opposition in examples (1) and (2) — singular 'an versus plural 'okay — is cognate with HK an versus oka=an Tangiku (2022: ch. 9). Similarly, 'eh (singular 'come') and 'ariki (plural 'come') in example (4) are cognate with HK ek / arki. The final long vowel in SA 'ariki versus the short vowel in HK arki is consistent with the length-accent correspondence Itabashi (2001) noted in the preceding section. The HK suppletive verbal number system is described in Chapter 58 (Verbal Number: Suppletive Stems and the Pluractional -pa) ‹consensus›.
References cited in this chapter
Dal Corso (2024) ·Dal Corso (2025) ·Dal Corso (2025) ·Hattori (1964) ·Itabashi (2001) ·Murasaki (2025) ·Piłsudski (1912) ·Sakaguchi (2024) ·Tangiku (2022)