The Language and Folklore of West Sakhalin Ainu
A Re-edition of Murasaki Kyōko’s ‘Karafuto Ainugo’ with translation and grammatical notes
E. Dal Corso
Università Cà Foscari di Venezia
Originally published in Japanese in 1976 as Karafuto Ainugo – Shiryō (The Ainu language of Karafuto – Materials), the corpus of folktales and conversations that constitutes this volume is to date one of the few resources on the extinct Sakhalin (Karafuto) variety of Ainu (isolate). Together with the corpus of texts, the sketch grammar Karafuto Ainugo – Bunpō (The Ainu language of Karafuto – Grammar), that appeared in 1979, illustrates the language of Haru Fujiyama and Yuk Ōta, who were two of the last native speakers of Sakhalin Ainu born on the Sakhalin west coast. This publication presents a re-edition of both Karafuto Ainugo volumes for the first time in English. All folktales and conversations have been re-transliterated on the basis of the original audios and the texts come with interlinear linguistic glosses, notations, and English translation. The section of the book dedicated to grammatical notes has been fully restructured, with respect to the 1979 original, to discuss the phonology, morphosyntax, and semantics of West Sakhalin Ainu, with a specific focus on nominal and verbal morphosyntax. The book will be of interest to specialists in the Ainu language as well as to readers interested in endangered languages, folklore, morphosyntax, and language typology.
ISBN 9783969390795 (Hardbound). LINCOM Studies in Asian Linguistics 95. 596pp. 2021.
