Forum - View topicAnswerman - Who Are The Ainu People?
|
Goto page Previous 1, 2, 3 Note: this is the discussion thread for this article |
| Author | Message | ||
|---|---|---|---|
CrowLia
 Posts: 5504 Location: Mexico |
|
||
The problem is, there is no script. Ainu language is exclusively oral, in and of itself it has no graphic representation. Ainu history until the early 20th century only existed through oral transmission and the highly biased texts written by the Japanese. However, a series of efforts have been carried to preserve the language and traditions, and through the 20th century, a number of ainu collaborated with researchers to have written records of their language and also audio recordings so the intonation of it isn't lost |
|||
|
|||
Levitz9
 Posts: 1022 Location: Puerto Rico |
|
||
|
Nakoruru from Samurai Shodown introduced me to the Ainu people. (In retrospect, I wonder how authentic the name "Nakoruru" would be for an Ainu woman? Probably as much as Galford for an American lol)
I remember playing Okami back when it came out and feeling so proud of myself for recognizing the Oina people as being a fictionalized version of the Ainu. Though knowing the attempts at just wiping them out from history makes me understand just why they were called "Oina" and not "Ainu"...and it don't feel good to know that. |
|||
|
|||
|
Yu Ominae
Posts: 71 |
|
||
|
The Ainu has a Sakhalin branch in Russia. From the research I did before, it's considered extinct since the last known speaker died in '94.
|
|||
|
|||
|
nargun
Posts: 924 |
|
||
Eh, no. Ainu has two orthographies that I know about [one katakana, the other roman]; there might be a cyrilic version too but I don't know. There's about a half-dozen unicode code-points allocated to ainu syllable-final consonants in the katakana pages, for example. Writing systems aren't that hard to create; for most languages a bilingual amateur can run usable systems up in a couple of months, and it's even been done a couple of times by monolingual people exposed just to the idea of writing. The only studied languages that don't have accepted writing systems are the sign ones like ASL and auslan, and there's been a lot of work on those too. |
|||
|
|||
|
shosakukan
Posts: 292 |
|
||
Sentoku Tarōji wrote the Ainu language in the Cyrillic alphabet. Sentoku was a (half-)Ainu who was a teacher and learnt Russian. I have read a scholarly article written by Professor Ogihara Shinko about Sentoku Tarōji. Sentoku was a friend of anthropologist Bronisław Piotr Piłsudski, and Sentoku wrote letters in the Ainu language in the Cyrillic alphabet and sent the letters to Piłsudski. Piłsudski conducted research on Ainu and also recorded words spoken by Ainu people with a wax-cylinder recording machine. |
|||
|
|||
Joe Carpenter
 Posts: 503 |
|
||
|
My introduction to the Ainu people was that one episode of Samurai Champloo.
I love learning lesser known things about Japanese history and culture. |
|||
|
|||
|
TdFern 87
Posts: 247 |
|
||
|
I feel bad that the Ainu never been exactly compensated. I mean shouldn't there be a like a Ainu Bureau in Japan similar to the US Bureau of Indian Affairs, where the Government makes a effort to establish a connection with the Ainu tribes and promote some Ainu self determination?
|
|||
|
|||
 |
All times are GMT - 5 Hours |
|
|
|
Powered by phpBB © 2001, 2005 phpBB Group