Page:An Ainu-English-Japanese dictionary (including a grammar of the Ainu language).djvu/567

Rh (13) Japanese constantly use what (to adopt European terminology) may be called genitives instead of nominatives. Thus, Hito ga kuru, literally “The coming of the man,” for “The man comes.” This is foreign to Ainu habits of speech.

Passing on to further points of contrast between the two languages, we notice that:—

(14) Japanese and Ainu treat the idea of negation differently. Ainu uses an independent negative adverb or, which corresponds exactly to the English word “not.” It also possesses a few curious negative verbs, such as , “not to be;” , “not to know.” In Japanese, on the contrary, the idea of negation is invariably expressed by conjugational forms. Each verb and adjective has a negative “voice,” which goes through all the moods and tenses, just as Latin and Greek verbs have an infiected passive voice.

(15) The system of counting in the two languages is radically dissimilar. In discussing this point, we must of course set aside the Chinese system now current in Japan and which, owing to its superior simplicity, is beginning to make its way even into Ainu-land. The original Japanese system of counting consisted of independent words as far as the number ten. After ten, they said ten plus one, ten plus two, ten plus three, twenty plus one, thirty plus one, and so on up to hundreds, thousands, and myriads. In fact, the old Japanese numeration was not very unlike our own. The complicated nature of the Ainu method of counting will only be properly appreciated by those who will very carefully peruse Mr. Batchelor’s chapter on the subject. The salient points in it are the invariable prefixing of the smaller number to the larger, the mixture of a denary and a vigesimal system, the existence of a unit corresponding to our “score,” and the absence of any unit higher than the score. The idea of such units as “hundred” and “thousand” is foreign to the Ainu mind. They can say “five score” (100), and “ten taken away from six score” (110). But much higher than that, they cannot easily ascend. To take a concrete instance, if a man wishes to say that he is twenty-three years of age, he must express himself