The Ainu language through time (with corrections) (original) (raw)

José Andrés Alonso de la Fuente 5 The Ainu language through time 1 Introduction When it comes to the research of the past stages of language isolates, several methodological considerations need to be addressed. As is only natural, the traditional comparative method cannot be applied. In such cases, we are left with three potential tools. The first two are internal reconstruction and the analysis of potential contact-induced changes. For Ainu, the first can be applied to the wealth of data provided by the many documented lects from Hokkaidō, Sakhalin, and the Kuriles, while the second should be concerned with the influence which the neighbouring languages, chiefly Japanese and Ghilyak on Sakhalin Island, have exerted on Ainu. The most powerful tool is, by far, internal reconstruction, which in the particular case of language isolates seeks to account for all dialectal differences (whatever the ways in which they manifest synchronically, see, e.g., Nakagawa 1996). I know of no better description of internal reconstruction than that of Austerlitz (1986: 183), who profited from it in his work with Ghilyak (another language isolate from Northeast Asia): Internal reconstruction is at its best and therefore at its most useful when applied to isolateslanguages without congeners (related languages). The reason for this is obvious: there is no temptation and (leaving aside dialects for the moment) there is no mechanism for introducing the comparative method into reconstruction simply because, in the case of isolates, comparative evidence is not available. Internal reconstruction should therefore be ideally viewed as a tool primarily for recapturing the past history of isolates or of stages of languages which cannot be recaptured by means of the comparative procedure. 1 This chapter is a heavily modified version of the second chapter and fragments of the third chapter of my PhD thesis (Alonso de la Fuente 2012). I would like to express my acknowledgement to Anna Bugaeva, Juha Janhunen, and Alexander Vovin for the many conversations over the years on many issues of Ainu philology and linguistics.