Page:An Ainu-English-Japanese dictionary (including a grammar of the Ainu language).djvu/18

Rh chawan, "tea-cup"! But perhaps one of the most beautiful disguises appears in the word Итчири, "Верста"! But this when turned into honest Roman letters, is just ichi-ri, Japanese (イチリ) ichi ri "one ri," pure and simple.

(2.) Then, again, the Russian alphabet has been employed in writing Ainu; yet, whatever may be said for the beauties and perfection of this method when writing Russian, it is quite certain that it is not adapted for Ainu; the ordinary Roman, as pronounced on the continent of Europe, is much better. Russian is distinctly a gutteral language, which the Ainu is not; the latter language resting more (so to speak) on the vowels than on the consonants. Thus, for example, Dobrotvorsky represents plain ho by го, га, or хо, and ха. There is also a difficulty in the hard mute ъ. Nor is this all. There is also a great difficulty in the uses of щ (shtch) and such like consonants. To cut the matter short, it is the Author’s opinion, gained by practice, that the Russian way of writing is quite misleading when applied to the Ainu language.

But Dobrotvorsky’s work is interesting in quite another way, inasmuch as it connects Yezo Ainu with that formerly spoken in Saghalien and about the peninsula of Kamtchatka. Let us take one interesting example only by way of illustration of this. At Usu, in Southern Yezo, the present Author often heard the native name of a certain fish which he could not define in English. But Dobrotvorsky gives the very same word as used in the north, and which further study proves to be the dolphin. In like manner the work gives Варантука which we are told is "a kind of fish." At Usu, again, the same word is used, and there, warantuka