Page:Things Japanese (1905).djvu/36

24 may serve as a specimen:—

"Formerly dogs could speak. Now they cannot. The reason is that a dog belonging to a certain man, a long time ago, inveigled his master into the forest under the pretext of showing him game, and there caused him to be devoured by a bear. Then the dog went home to his master's widow, and lied to her, saying: "My master has been killed by a bear. But when he was dying, he commanded me to tell you to marry me in his stead" The widow knew that the dog was lying. But he kept on urging her to marry him. So at last, in her grief and rage, she threw a handful of dust into his open mouth. This made him unable to speak any more, and therefore no dogs can speak even to this very day."

The Aino language is simple and harmonious. Its structure in great measure resembles that of Japanese; but there are some few fundamental divergences, such, for instance, as the possession of true personal pronouns and the formation of the passive voice by a prefix. The vocabulary, too, is quite distinct. The system of counting is extraordinarily cumbrous. Thus, if a man wants to say that he is thirty-nine years old, he must express himself thus: "I am nine, plus ten taken from two score." In Mr. Batchelor's translation of Matthew XII. 40, the phrase "forty days and forty nights" is thus rendered: tokap rere ko tu hoine rere ko, kunne rere ko tu hotne rere ko, that is, "day three days two score three days, black three days two score three days. Little wonder that the simpler Japanese numeration has come to supplant, in the mouths of many, this next to unmanageable system. In fact, the younger generation seems to be discarding the native language altogether in favour of Japanese. Hitherto the Aino have known nothing of the use of letters. Tales like the one we have quoted, and rude songs which are handed down orally from generation to generation, form their only literature.