Talk:Ainu language

"Languages"?

Shibatani (1990) speaks of "Ainu languages".

In the source cited, the Languages of Japan, Shibatani makes no mention of anything other than dialects of Ainu.

Hattori and various contributors, whom Shibatani cites in talking about dialects, only speak of dialects in Ainugo Hōgen Jiten ("Ainu Dialect Dictionary"). Vovin, in Proto-Ainu also speaks only of dialects.

As a linguistics student interested in the language, nothing I have ever read nor anyone I have ever spoken with have even mentioned "Ainu languages".

This is a very serious error, and I would say, calls into question the need for this page. --Limetom 08:44, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

"Murasaki's work [with] the last fluent speaker of Sakhalin Ainu [...] stands out as a great addition to the corpus of data on Ainu languages. (Shibatani 1990:9) Notable that in one of the very few passages to deal with good data on something other than Hokkaidō, he uses the plural.

Remember too, Shibatani speaks primarily of "Japanese dialects", where we have an article on Japonic languages; Japanese scholars worked almost exclusively with just one of the Ainu languages, Hokkaidō; and back when the other varieties of Ainu were still vibrant, Japanese and Westerners alike considered both Japanese and Chinese to be single languages, and Japanese was considered a language isolate. (I've seen plenty of English encyclopedias which speak of Japanese that way.) Ainu is a lot like Japanese in this regard, but without the present-day diversity to force reevaluation. Nonetheless, historical records speak of a great deal of diversity in 19th century Ainu, and that some of these were mutually unintelligible, though we can't know if this reached the level of Japonic. kwami (talk) 09:24, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

This is interesting, quoting the ICRAP Ainu wax-cylinder preservation project: "The linguistic analysis of the information taken from the (...) cylinders will not only contribute to the progress of the study of the Sakhalin Ainu language as well as of the comparative study of the Sakhalin and the Hokkaidō Ainu languages but also [...]" (Bronisław (1998) The Collected Works of Bronisław Piłsudski: The aborigines of Sakhalin, p 2) That is, Sakhalin and Hokkaidō are considered separate languages, not dialects of a single language.

There are other mentions of "Ainu languages", but usually by people without direct knowledge, such as Cavalli-Sforza, or translated from Japanese, which doesn't have plurals. And true, Vovin does speak of dialects, not languages, and evidently they are not terribly divergent. But then, the same can be said of Japanese and Chinese. kwami (talk) 09:48, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

Personally, I am more tempted to believe that this is simply a typo on Shibatani's part. As you pointed out, Japanese does not have plurals, and confusing the singular and the plural is a very common mistake among Japanese second-language speakers of English. Nowhere else in the book does he mention multiple Ainu languages or an "Ainu language family", indeed, he talks about "...the Kurile [dialect] group, the Sakhalin [dialect] group, and the Hokkaidō [dialect] group." (Shibatani 1990: 7) --Limetom 07:58, 21 April 2009 (UTC)

Yes, could be a typo, or an editing error. However, a "Sakhalin dialect group" does not entail that Sakhalin and Hokkaido are therefore in turn dialects of a still larger group. Also, Shibatani's definition of a "language" is based on ethnicity rather than straight linguistics. kwami (talk) 09:01, 21 April 2009 (UTC)

Firstly, what, then, is a straight linguistic definition of a "language" as opposed to a "dialect"? I don't think you'll get people to agree on an exact border there.

Shibatani, I think, intends that these three (Kuril, Sakhalin, and Hokkaido) are dialect groups of one, single, overarching language: Ainu. I still think that that one mention of "Ainu languages" is simply a typo.

Further, I don't think you'll find much support from anyone, aside from the handful of sources that you point out, all of which are dated, that support any kind of idea that there is a family of languages, rather than a grouping of dialects. --Limetom 05:11, 5 January 2010 (UTC)

I should have said by mutual intelligibility.

Shibatani has Japanese as a single language, but we treat it as a Japonic language family. IMO Ainu is similar.

We can't just assume a typo when we have no real reason to believe that's the case. "Could be" doesn't mean "is".

There aren't many sources on this period, dated or otherwise, as all other Ainu lects are extinct. kwami (talk) 05:31, 5 January 2010 (UTC)

Some individuals interchange "dialects" with "languages" fairly often, even if they know it's semantically incorrect. ···日本穣^? · 投稿 · Talk to Nihonjoe 05:27, 5 January 2010 (UTC)

Basically, my problem here is that really the only good source for this is from Piłsudski. I can find no sources in Japanese, no sources in Russian, and basically only Piłsudski in English who ever mention Ainu as a family of languages. It seems the scholarly consensus is that Ainu is a language isolate, with three dialect groups: Hokkaido, Sakhalin, and Kuril. This is the view on both the Russian and Japanese Wikipedias, as well as in Ethnologue and various other composite sources.

And in terms of mutual intelligibility, at least based off of Vovin's work (1993), all I have easy access to at the moment, most dialects seem to be fairly intelligible with one another, both in terms of lexicon and grammar. --Limetom 00:14, 6 January 2010 (UTC)

The problem with Japanese sources is that many of them treat Japanese as a language isolate, or at most split off Luchuan. As for Ethnologue, things could well be different if those lects were extant--Ethnologue cares little about extinct languages. I agree though that it's a rather unclear situation. kwami (talk) 06:36, 6 January 2010 (UTC)

There are numerous mentions of "Ainu languages" that come up on Google books, such as Materials for the Study of the Ainu Languages and Folklore, Rozwadowski ed. 1912, and European Studies on Ainu Languages and Culture, Josef Kreiner 1993. But the most explicit one I have access to is Patrick Heinrich (2008) "Casting Light on the Past: Lessons on the Origin and Formation of Japanese-Ryūkyūan", in Theories and methods in Japanese studies. He explicitly discusses "Ainu languages" and an "Ainu language family":

It needs to be determined how far southward the Ainu languages ever extended on the Japanese archipelago.

The myth that the Ainu languages are part of the Indo-European language family ... [failure to establish any external connections] As a result, Ainu continues to be regarded as an isolated language family.

these [indigenous] languages are Sakhalin Ainu, Kurile Ainu, Hokkaidō Ainu, ... Japanese-Ryūkyūan is generally regarded as an isolated language family, as is the Ainu language family.

kwami (talk) 07:09, 6 January 2010 (UTC)

Heinrich is a Ryukyuanist and his work is on Japonic--specifically the Ryukyuan subgroup, not Ainu. While he did say "the Ainu language family," I see no real reason to take him as an authority in this area. Piłsudski's Materials for the Study of the Ainu Language and Folklore (emphasis mine) never mentions, at least anywhere I can find, "Ainu languages;" he consistently refers to Ainu in Sakhalin, the Kurils, and Hokkaido as a single group. Kreiner's work is called European Studies on Ainu Language and Culture.

I'm really just not seeing a scholarly consensus that there are multiple Ainu languages. --Limetom 09:48, 30 October 2010 (UTC)

Checked one more source really quickly, Izutsu's I/Yay-Pakasnu; it too makes no mention of a family of Ainu languages, just dialects under the Ainu language. --Limetom 10:11, 30 October 2010 (UTC)

The singular dominates in the lit, but it seems to me that's because most of the lit deals exclusively with Hokkaido Ainu. "Dialects" then generally refers to the dialects of Hokkaido.

Pilsudski, Material for the Study of the Ainu Languages (plural) is also cited in Buchli, in Yotte (French), and in Rocznik Biblioteki Polskiej Akademii Nauk w Krakowie, vol 46. Are all of these errors? Mauss cites him with the plural in 1954 (The gift: forms and functions of exchange in archaic societies), and still uses the plural when citing him in 2010 (Soziologie und Anthropologie 2). In The East vol 19, speak of the value of his recordings for "comparative studies of the Sakhalin and the Hokkaido Ainu languages". Pilsudski was one of the few to document something other than Hokkaido.

Sidney Cheung, Japanese Anthropology and Depictions of the Ainu, "it prohibited the use of the Ainu languages and Ainu folk customs"

Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney (1968) A northwest coast Sakhalin Ainu world view: "Perhaps, then, the place names in Hokkaido reflect a time when the Sakhalin Ainu and the Hokkaido Ainu languages were not yet differentiated." Another rare case of s.t. other than Hokkaido.

Northwest anthropological research notes 2004:38-39, p 179, "Their work is very valuable and appreciated today because linguists studying the Ainu languages have been working hard to preserve and revitalize a variety of Ainu dialects"

— kwami (talk) 21:51, 13 January 2011 (UTC)

I would say citations of Piłsudski's 1912 Materials for the study of the Ainu language and folklore (or the recent University of Michigan reprint) as Materials for the study of the Ainu languages in the plural is indeed an error. The de Gruyter collected works of Piłsudski are also only in the singular. Piłsudski himself never says--anywhere I can find, at least--that there is more than one Ainu language.

Also, the citation from page 2 of the first volume of Piłsudski's collected works is not Piłsudski himself, but a quote from Majewicz (1997) on the project to restore wax cylinder recordings of Ainu made by Piłsudski. --Limetom 02:51, 9 April 2011 (UTC)

I realize the above debate is 4 years old, but…

I think the argument comes down to this: kwami thinks Ainu is a family of languages, like Japanese; Limetom thinks Ainu is a single language, like Japanese. While kwami refers to Japonic, he's really arguing that Japanese itself, Japonic minus the Ryukyuans, is a family. For example: "The problem with Japanese sources is that many of them treat Japanese as a language isolate, or at most split off Luchuan."

Well, western sources often agree that Japanese is a single language, split off (within the Japonic family) from the Ryukyuan languages. Sure, some sources instead split off Hachijō as a separate language, or even subfamily, instead of treating it as a top-level or eastern dialect, and some people even split off Satsugū. But most treat it all as one language. And English Wikipedia agrees.

So, if Ainu is like Japanese (including Kagoshimaben and Hachijōjima, but not including the Ryukyuan languages), then it's a single language according to the way Wikipedia orders things.

Personally, I strongly disagree with Limetom that this is a "serious error", because I think the whole distinction between a language isolate (or single-language branch in a family) and a language family (or subfamily) is meaningless, and it gets even sillier when you start arguing about languages that clearly had multiple branches in the past but only have one surviving language. Whether, say, Ainu and Emishi are related, that's interesting; whether Ainu was 1 language or 3 a century ago (when it's clearly 1 now, and presumably a lot more than 3 more than a century ago) is hard to get excited about. But if you're going to argue about it, I think Limetom's argument wins. --50.0.128.185 (talk) 02:47, 19 April 2016 (UTC)