Page:An Ainu-English-Japanese dictionary (including a grammar of the Ainu language).djvu/581

Rh far as physical aspect is concerned, allowing of course for that admixture which has been going on from time immemorial through marriage and concubinage. The Ainu have never indeed regarded the Japanese as of the same stock as themselves. Indeed, they know them as Samorun-guru, i.e. "Siamese" only. With how much truth, who will now tell us? It is also interesting to remark in this connection that the Ainu distinguish themselves from the Mongolian and Malay type of the human race by calling the latter Oyashikpuikotcha utara, “persons having a different class of eye-socket.” In speaking of men of their own race and cast of feature they say Shineshikpuikotcha utara, “people of the same eye-socket.” And just as the ancient Hebrew would say, “thou art bone of my bone,” and the Arab “thou art eye of my eye” when they wanted to say “you are the same as I am,” so an Ainu says to-day “you are of the same eye-socket as I," when he desires to say, “you and I are of the same family” or “descent.”

But does the close resemblance between some of the words found in ancient Japanese and Ainu vocabulary tend to unify or in any way prove the two races to have been originally one? The reply is “yes” and “no.” In the sense now generally meant by races being one, the verdict must, I think, be “no,” certainly. If, however, we go back far enough,—if, for example, we travel back to the time of the confusion of tongues,—to the time when people were fewer and the continents as now found not existing—we may reply, “yes.” Let us take an example by way of illustrating what is here meant. Ford, in his Handbook for travellers in Spain, tells us that there is a decided element of Sanscrit in Basque, but Max Müller says that Basque is not an Aryan language. So also, then, the few words advanced above, though originally of a common stock language, prove very little as to Ainu and pure Japanese being one as a whole. But there is this to be remembered, Japanese as now known is of Turanian descent, i.e. taking Chinese as the centre of the Turanian stock of language. But the old Japanese words given above as related to Ainu, have not yet been proved to be connected with Chinese