Page:An Ainu-English-Japanese dictionary (including a grammar of the Ainu language).djvu/585

Rh after the Queen Elizabeth style: but for all that we are English to the backbone every one of us!

Another very interesting thing connected with these pit-dwellings is the fact that the Ainu have three native names for “roof,” two of which seem to imply by derivation that they rested on the ground over holes. The ordinary word now used is and this just means “house-top” and calls for no special remark. But the other two words are and, both of which mean “the shell over-head” or “the shell set on high” “high” being in contradistinction to “below”; “the place underneath.”  and  are both intransitive and adjectival particles,  is “above” as opposed to “below”;  is a verb meaning “set” or “placed,” while  really means “shell” or “outer covering.”

Referring again to the Ainu of the Kurile group, I was very much struck a short time since by reading what Mr. Romyn Hitchcock has said in his Paper entitled “The Ainu of Yezo, Japan,” which will be found in the Report of the National Museum for 1890—Smithsonian Institution, pages 429–502. On page 432 will be found this most astonishing remark: “The so called Kurile Ainu are wrongly named. This name is given to the pit-dwellers of Shikotan, who are quite distinct from the Ainu.” Well, I have myself spoken with Shikotan Ainu but the language was Ainu and Japanese and nothing else, unless it were perhaps a word or two of Russian thrown in. Moreover, I have this day (March 28th, 1904) been into the Government offices at Sapporo and reinvestigated the whole matter. The resuts are: 1st a reaffirmation of the fact that the Kurile islands were ceededceded [sic] to Japan by Russia in exchange for Saghalien in the 8th year of Meiji; 2nd that in the 17th and 18th years of Meiji the pit-dwellers of Shikotan were brought by the Japanese Authorities from the island of Shimushir in the Kurile group and settled there; 3rd that these pit-dwellers were Ainu and spoke the Ainu language; and 4thly that those who are left of them still have dwelling-pits for winter use. Mr. Hitchcock’s remark must therefore be dismissed as misleading because inexact.