Knowledge base · Part II — Sources, Conventions, Glossing, and Orthography · this topic as a network
7. Written Sources: Grammars, Dictionaries, and the Philological Record
What written sources are available for the language, and how are they used in grammatical description?
The quarterly periodical Ainu Taimuzu is published in the Ainu language simultaneously using two different writing systems (Majewicz 2022: 4.6). Unless otherwise noted, the Ainu examples in this grammar were provided by Shirasawa Nabe and represent the Chitose dialect (Satō 2023).
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The classical grammars
What earlier grammars exist for the language, and how does the descriptive tradition develop over time?
Saru Ainu, spoken along the Saru River basin centered around Biratori, is the most thoroughly described in grammar and has the largest recorded vocabulary of all Ainu dialects (Nakagawa 2024: 90). Kindaichi Kyōsuke's (1931a) 'Yūkara gohō teiyō' was the first grammatical description of Ainu of reference value, and Kindaichi's (1960) 'Ainu-gogaku kōgi' was its revised edition (Nakagawa 2024: 91). Chiri Mashiho's 'Ainu gohō gaisetsu' (1936) was written within the framework of Kindaichi's (1931a) 'Yūkara gohō teiyō' as a comparative study of the Saru dialect described by Kindaichi and the Horobetsu dialect (Nakagawa 2024: 93). To date, no comprehensive grammar covering Horobetsu Ainu alone has been written (Nakagawa 2024: 93).
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Modern reference grammars
What modern reference grammars exist for the language, and which regional varieties do they cover?
Murasaki Kyoko authored Karafuto Ainugo: Bunpō-hen (1979), which was the first comprehensive Sakhalin Ainu grammar since Chiri's 1942 study (Nakagawa 2024: 83). Asai Tōru's sketch 'Ainu-go Ishikari hōgen bumpō no gairyaku' (1969) is the only coherent grammatical description of the Ishikari dialect (Nakagawa 2024: 94). Kirsten Refsing's 'The Ainu Language' (1986) is a comprehensive grammar of the Shizunai dialect based on a single speaker, Oda Suteno, and is the first full-scale grammar of Ainu written in English (Nakagawa 2024: 95).
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Dictionaries and lexical resources
What dictionaries and lexical resources record the language, and what kinds of information do they contain?
Uehara Kumajiro's 1792 vocabulary Moshiogusa, the first Ainu dictionary in the world, contains 2,740 words and served via its German translation as the basis for August Pfizmaier's grammar, the world's first grammar of Ainu (Bugaeva 2022: 3.1, Nakagawa 2024: 89). Around 1824, Uehara Kumajiro compiled a further Ainu vocabulary collection containing approximately 9,380 words (Nakagawa 2024: 89). In early Japanese documents recording Ainu, such as Matsumae no kotoba and Ezo-kotoba, Ainu words are written with hiragana including hentaigana (Bugaeva 2022: 3.1), and the oldest known record of Ainu written by a Japanese person is 'Matsumae no koto', estimated to have been copied around 1626–1627 (Nakagawa 2024: 89). Girolamo de Angelis's 1624 report contains 34 numerals, 16 nouns, and 2 compound expressions, which is regarded as the world's oldest vocabulary list of the Ainu language (Nakagawa 2024: 88). John Batchelor's 'An Ainu-English-Japanese Dictionary' (1889) was the first full-scale dictionary arranged by headword pronunciation, primarily based on the Saru dialect (Nakagawa 2024: 91). In 1996, 'Kayano Shigeru no Ainu-go jiten' and Tamura Suzuko's 'Ainu-go Saru hōgen jiten' were published successively, making Saru the dialect with the most comprehensive dictionaries (Nakagawa 2024: 91). Hattori Shirō's (1964) dialect dictionary compiles lexical data across ten dialects: nine surveyed using a common questionnaire (Yakumo, Horobetsu, Saru, Obihiro, Bihoro, Asahikawa, Nayoro, Sōya, and Rayciska Sakhalin) plus Torii Ryūzō's Kuril Ainu recordings (Nakagawa 2024: 99). Chiri Mashiho's 'Bunrui Ainugo Jiten: Shokubutsu-hen' specifies forty-nine localities as collection or usage locations in its explanatory notes (Nakagawa 2024: 100), and his 'Chimei Ainugo Shōjiten' (1956) lists forty-one localities, including broad designations such as Hokkaido (Nakagawa 2024: 101). Russian naval officer G. I. Davidov compiled an Ainu dictionary containing approximately 2,000 words following his voyages in 1806–1807 (Nakagawa 2024: 80). Mikhail M. Dobrotvorsky's posthumous manuscript was edited by his brother Ivan Dobrotvorsky and published in 1875 as an Ainu-Russian dictionary (Nakagawa 2024: 80); it contains 10,930 headwords, nearly half of which were compiled from previously published European vocabularies (Nakagawa 2024: 80), while more than half of the vocabulary (5,733 words by his own count) was recorded directly by himself in the field, making it the largest dictionary of Sakhalin Ainu to date (Nakagawa 2024: 81). In Dobrotvorsky's (1875) dictionary, only words that Dobrotvorsky recorded himself from first-hand fieldwork are marked with accent (Majewicz 2022: 4.4). Stepan P. Krasheninnikov published a 253-word Northern Kuril Ainu vocabulary collected in 1738 on Shumshu and Paramushir in his Description of Kamchatka Land (1755) (Nakagawa 2024: 84). Georg W. Steller collected 378 words of Northern Kuril Ainu in 1743, which Heinrich J. Klaproth published in Asia Polyglotta (1823) under the name 'Kamchatka Ainu' (Nakagawa 2024: 84). Benedykt Dybowski's dictionary published in 1891, containing approximately 1,900 words, is the largest vocabulary compiled for North Kuril Ainu (Nakagawa 2024: 85); Dybowski's Shumshu Kuril vocabulary contains a strikingly disproportionate number of nouns, often derivatives rather than simple basic forms, in relation to other lexical categories (Majewicz 2022: 4.4). In 1787, Jean François de La Pérouse visited Tomari-Oro (Kushunnai Bay) on the west coast of Sakhalin and recorded 161 words, which is considered the world's first vocabulary of the Sakhalin dialect (Nakagawa 2024: 79). In 1872, Alphonse L. Pinart collected 295 Kuril Ainu words from an Aleut speaker, Paul Uiai, in Alaska, which were transcribed and published by Toru Asai in 1974 (Nakagawa 2024: 85). In 1899, Ryuzo Torii conducted research on the language and culture of Kuril Ainu people relocated to Shikotan Island and collected approximately 900 words (Nakagawa 2024: 85). Ezo kotoba irohabiki (1848), compiled by Kizaemon Itoya in Otaru, contains forms of an extinct west-coast Hokkaido Ainu dialect arranged by the Japanese Iroha syllabary (Bugaeva 2022: 3.4). Chiri Yukie's 'Ainu Shin'yōshū' (1923) is known as the work of the first Ainu person to print her own language in movable type (Nakagawa 2024: 92).
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The philological record
What older philological works document the language, and what role do they play in grammatical analysis?
The Ainu language has no indigenous writing system (Satō 2008: 5; reported in Majewicz 2022: 4.9), and until modern times the Ainu themselves had no practice of writing their language down in a script (Nakagawa 2024: 13); Ainu-language texts began to be documented by Ainu people themselves only in the twentieth century (Nakagawa 2024: 13). There are very few reliable and sizable documents of the Ainu language dating back as far as the 17th century or the first half of the 18th century (Bugaeva 2022: 3.1). The two words in a record dated 1591 by Morera are most probably the earliest Ainu words ever documented in a Western language (proposed in Majewicz 2022: 4.2); in that record, the form Ainomoxori represents Ainu ainu mosir 'the Ainu country or land' (Majewicz 2022: 4.3), and the form Rebuncur represents Ainu repun kur 'alien people from beyond the sea' (Majewicz 2022: 4.3). In the earliest Japanese documents of Ainu, such as Matsumae no kotoba and Ezo-kotoba, Ainu words as well as Japanese are written with hiragana, including hentaigana (Bugaeva 2022: 3.1), and the hentaigana characters 川 (tsu) and 志 (shi) are used more frequently to transcribe Ainu than Japanese in these early documents (Bugaeva 2022: 3.1). In later Edo-era documents, Ainu tends to be written with katakana, whereas Japanese is generally written with Chinese characters and hiragana (Bugaeva 2022: 3.1). Bugaeva proposes that the modern Ainu form iwanpe 'six' may historically have had a shape like *iwanp or *iwanpə, as suggested by the 17th-century kana spelling yuwanfu in Matsumae no kotoba (proposed in Bugaeva 2022: 3.2). Whereas okkay in modern Ainu usually means 'adult man', in 17th-century documents such as Angelis's record and Matsumae no kotoba it meant 'young man, boy' (Bugaeva 2022: 3.2). In the early 18th century, the Ainu pronunciation of hu was either [hu] or [xu], rather than the modern pronunciation [ɸu] (Bugaeva 2022: 3.3). Bugaeva proposes that the root rep 'center of hearth or sea' may historically have contained a consonant *H (*reHp), as evidenced by the spelling 'あへ連んほう' (aherenhou) in Ezo kotoba (proposed in Bugaeva 2022: 3.3). Ezo sōshi (1790) employs the special kana character ト゜ to transcribe the syllable /tu/ (Bugaeva 2022: 3.3). Matsumae no kotoba (17th c.) contains kana spellings such as reira for modern réra 'wind' and teita for modern téta 'here', suggesting long vowels that are absent in modern Hokkaido Ainu (reported in Bugaeva 2022: 3.5). Old Japanese documents frequently record modern Hokkaido Ainu tókap 'daytime' with kana spellings indicating a long first syllable, such as tofukatsufu or toogapu (Bugaeva 2022: 3.5). In early Japanese documents such as Ezo kotoba (1704), Matsumae no kotoba, and Ezoki (1795), the coda /r/ in pirka 'good' is predominantly written with the kana る (ru) or ル (ru), rather than り (ri) or リ (ri) (Bugaeva 2022: 3.5); in contrast, other words containing /ir/ such as sirkunne 'dark', sir 'land', and kikir 'bug' are consistently written in early Japanese documents with kana り (ri) or 里 (ri), never る (ru) (Bugaeva 2022: 3.5). In the Edo-period text Ezo chiyaranke narabini jōrurigen, the Ainu syllable tu is transcribed with the kana sequence トウ, as in ヱホマトウ for ehomatu 'to be surprised at' (Bugaeva 2022: 3.6). The east-coast Sakhalin greeting form iyankarahte was already in use by at least the mid-17th century, as attested in Vries's 1643 logbook form Jankarate (Nakagawa 2024: 79). Tangiku and Ogiwara (2001) transcribed and translated an Ainu-language letter written in Cyrillic script sent by Sentoku Taroji to Bronisław Piłsudski (Nakagawa 2024: 82). Ainu was spoken in the Tsugaru region of Honshu well into early modern times, but no concrete vocabulary was recorded aside from personal names (Nakagawa 2024: 87).
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Source gaps and the reported-evidence convention
How are sources cited but not directly consulted handled in grammatical description?
The Ainu language has no indigenous writing system, and very few attempts have ever been made by speakers to compose written texts directly in Ainu (Satō 2008: 5; reported in Majewicz 2022: 4.9, 4.6). There are very few reliable and sizable documents of the Ainu language dating back as far as the 17th century or the first half of the 18th century (Bugaeva 2022: 3.1).
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