Chapter 26Glossed texts
Fully glossed Sakhalin Ainu texts: a tuytah told by Asai Take, a letter by Sentoku Tarōji, and an extract from Piłsudski’s materials.
This chapter presents four short Sakhalin Ainu texts in full interlinear glossing. They were chosen to cover the main kinds of record on which this grammar rests: an oral folktale (tuytah ‘folktale’) told on the west coast in 1990 by the last native speaker, Asai Take; a private letter written on the east coast in 1906 by a literate native speaker, Sentoku Tarōji, in Cyrillic script; a dictated folktale (ucaskuma ‘tale, tradition’) taken down on the east coast in 1903 by Bronisław Piłsudski; and two conversational texts from the west-central coast, printed in 1875 in the appendix to Dobrotvorsky's dictionary — the oldest connected Sakhalin Ainu prose. Between them the texts span a hundred and fifteen years, both coasts, the spoken and the written language, and four genres with distinct grammatical profiles. Each text is given with a philological introduction stating what is known of its recording — medium, date, place, narrator, and the chain of transmission from field record to printed edition — followed by consecutive numbered examples (one sentence per example, nothing reordered) and a commentary that points from the text to the chapters where each phenomenon is treated.
The conventions are those of the rest of the grammar. The morphemic line is retranscribed into our romanisation (Chapter 3): the glottal-stop apostrophes of Murasaki's transcription are dropped, and the orthography of each older source — Sentoku's Cyrillic, Piłsudski's diacritics, Dobrotvorsky's Cyrillic as romanised by Sakaguchi — is interpreted as set out in the headnote to its text (§§26.2–26.4 below); where the original spelling is itself of interest it is shown as a separate line above the gloss. Glossing follows the conventions stated in Chapter 13 and the front matter: the indefinite set an-/-an/i- is INDEF, the reportative manu is REP, the quotative nah is QUOT, and the pervasive narrative particle taa is glossed EMPH. Translations are our own, made against the Japanese of Murasaki (2001), Tangiku & Ogihara (2001) and Sakaguchi (2021) and the English of Piłsudski (1912).
26.1 A tuytah of Asai Take: the imu woman
Asai Take (浅井タケ, died 1994), of Odasu on the west coast, was the last native speaker of Sakhalin Ainu (Dal Corso 2024: 58). Between 1984 and the early 1990s Murasaki Kyōko (村崎恭子) recorded from her, in tape-recorded sessions, several dozen tuytah, which Murasaki transcribed and published in full with Japanese translation, in revised edition, as Murasaki (2001). The publication chain is thus short and modern — speaker to tape to editor — and the transcript preserves the texture of live telling: hesitations, clipped variants, and interviewer turns. Murasaki's transcription is broad; its apostrophes mark the predictable glottal onset of vowel-initial words, and we drop them in retranscription, since the onset is not contrastive (Chapter 4, Chapter 3). The extract below is the opening of text 40, imuu monimahpo ‘The imu girl’, recorded on 7 April 1990. The thirteen sentences are consecutive and complete — this opening happens to be free of the Japanese asides and interviewer turns that intersperse many of the tales — and they carry the story to its first turning point: immediately after (13) the imu woman breaks into the nonsense verse (niiteh kaa cira rii too…) that is the set piece of the tale. imu is the dissociative startle behaviour, well known across Ainu communities, in which the affected person (usually a woman) echoes words or shouts formulaic verse when startled; here it is played for comedy.
‘Then: in a village, they say, a young man lived all alone.’
Murasaki 2001: text 40; West Sakhalin, Odasu (Asai Take)
yay-reske ‘raise oneself’ is the conventional opening formula for a protagonist who grew up, and lives, by himself.
‘Living by himself, he would gather firewood and burn it, catch fish and eat them; and as he was living so, one day he went up into the mountains to gather firewood.’
Murasaki 2001: text 40; West Sakhalin, Odasu (Asai Take)
kinta is kim ‘mountain’ + locative -ta with nasal assimilation; the koh … koh … nah kii chain is the stock habitual formula of the genre.
‘When he went up to gather firewood, an old woman was there gathering firewood, they say.’
Murasaki 2001: text 40; West Sakhalin, Odasu (Asai Take)
We segment makan-ihi as makan plus the possessive suffix -hi with epenthetic i, in its clause-nominalizing use: ‘(at) his going up’. The following neampe (ne-an-pe ‘thing which is’) supplies the temporal reading, a stock protasis of west-coast narrative; the second niina kusu an is the purposive read progressively, ‘was (there) in order to gather’ — i.e. ‘was gathering’.
‘That old woman said, they say:’
Murasaki 2001: text 40; West Sakhalin, Odasu (Asai Take)
neya ‘that’ tracks the woman just introduced in (3). yee manu opens the quotation, and (8) nah taa yee manu closes it: quoted speech in this corpus is regularly bracketed on both sides, the closing half carrying the quotative nah.
‘‘Say, young man, come down to my house! I live with a girl who has imu fits.’’
Murasaki 2001: text 40; West Sakhalin, Odasu (Asai Take)
an-cise-ta ‘at my house’ has the indefinite A-prefix as possessor index; sanu shows a paragogic vowel before the final particle waa. Inside quoted speech the old woman uses the conversational KU-series.
‘‘Living with the imu girl, whenever I gather firewood and come home, the moment I throw my load down she has a violent imu fit.’’
Murasaki 2001: text 40; West Sakhalin, Odasu (Asai Take)
V-an ohta, literally ‘at the being of having V-ed’, is a temporal nominalization ‘when (I) V’; niske-he ‘her/my load’ carries the possessive suffix.
‘‘It is most amusing, quite a spectacle.’’
Murasaki 2001: text 40; West Sakhalin, Odasu (Asai Take)
kiroro ~ kiororo ‘force, excitement’; kiroro-an, literally ‘there is excitement’, is ‘to be thrilling, fun’. The reportative manu intrudes into the quotation — the narrator’s voice surfacing inside the character’s, a regular trait of Asai Take’s quoted dialogue.
‘So she said, they say.’
Murasaki 2001: text 40; West Sakhalin, Odasu (Asai Take)
‘And then the young man took on his back the wood that the old woman had gathered, and went down to the old woman’s house, they say.’
Murasaki 2001: text 40; West Sakhalin, Odasu (Asai Take)
nii acahcipo niina ‘the wood the old woman had gathered’ is a gapped relative clause with no relativizer. The source prints achipo here for acahcipo, one of Asai Take’s frequent short forms.
‘That girl was at home all alone, they say.’
Murasaki 2001: text 40; West Sakhalin, Odasu (Asai Take)
an kusu an, literally ‘is so as to be’, is the durative periphrasis built on the purposive — the same construction as niina kusu an in (3); sinenehka ‘all alone’ picks up the yay-reske ‘raised himself’ of the opening, the tale’s two solitaries now in parallel.
‘And then he threw the wood down at the doorway of the house.’
Murasaki 2001: text 40; West Sakhalin, Odasu (Asai Take)
cise apa caa ‘the edge of the house door’ is a chain of bare juxtaposed nouns headed by the relational noun caa ‘edge, mouth’, with the allative ene; the bare ociwe here against ko-ociwe in (6) shows the applicative doing real work — the old woman’s ko-ociwe ‘throw down at (the house)’ indexes the goal that (12) spells out as a full postpositional phrase.
‘And then, from inside the house, came the voice of her imu fit, they say.’
Murasaki 2001: text 40; West Sakhalin, Odasu (Asai Take)
onnayke ‘inside’ is a relational noun taking the locative -ta; imuu hawe-he an ‘the voice of (her) imu was’ has hawe ‘voice’ in its literal, fully nominal use, with the possessive suffix — the same noun that, bleached, serves the hearsay evidential construction.
The extract is a compact display of the grammar of west-coast narrative. Nearly every narrative sentence closes with the reportative manu, the genre signature of the tuytah (Chapter 16), while quoted dialogue inside the tale switches to the unmarked conversational register: the old woman refers to herself with the KU-series (ku-an, ku-niina, ku-hosipi), and narrative third persons are zero-marked throughout (Chapter 13). The habitual chain niina koh kuruu, ceh-kii koh ee with iterative koh, and the progressive an kusu an of (11), belong to Chapter 15; the clause-linkers teh, ike, neeteh, neyke and the temporal nominalizations makan-ihi neampe and V-an ohta to Chapter 23 and Chapter 20. Possessive morphology is dense even in this short stretch (imi-yehe, niske-he, hawe-he; Chapter 7), and the valency machinery of Chapter 14 appears in yay-reske, causative mii-re ‘dress someone’, and applicative e-imuu ‘have an imu fit at (something)’. The assimilation in kinta is treated in Chapter 5.
26.2 A letter of Sentoku Tarōji (1906)
Sentoku Tarōji (千徳太郎治, 1872–1929), of Otasan on the east coast, was Piłsudski's interpreter and collaborator and later the author of a Japanese-language account of his people (Sentoku 1929). In 1906, after Piłsudski had left Sakhalin, Sentoku wrote him three letters in Ainu from Naybuci, using the Russian Cyrillic alphabet — the most substantial body of Ainu prose written by a native speaker in Cyrillic script (Chapter 3). They were deciphered and published, with Latin transliteration and Japanese translation, by Tangiku Itsuji (丹菊逸治) and Ogihara Shinko (荻原眞子) (Tangiku & Ogihara 2001). We gloss the opening of the first letter, dated 4 June 1906. The manuscript is written in narrow physical lines that cut across words and sentences; we have rejoined them, resolving the hyphenations, and we give the Cyrillic original for the first six sentences. One opaque clause in the long final period is omitted at a clause boundary, marked by an ellipsis; nothing else is left out, and no word is altered. The transliteration follows Tangiku and Ogihara, including their clitic notation an=, ci=, e=.
The script sets the limits of the evidence. Russian Cyrillic registers the consonant skeleton of Ainu well, but it has no device for vowel length, and unstressed vowels waver in Sentoku's spelling: цкін for cikin, кестоно for kestoono, пріка for pirka. Quantity and some vowel qualities are therefore restored editorially, while everything carried by consonants — above all the person clitics — can be read directly off the page. Forms whose vowels matter are flagged in the notes.
итуяськара нисьпа
‘Beloved master,’
Tangiku & Ogihara 2001: Letter 1; East Sakhalin, Otasan (Sentoku Tarōji)
We take ituyaskara to contain tuyaskarap ‘to hold dear, pity’ with the indefinite object prefix i-, ‘one whom we hold dear’; the closing formula of the letter has reciprocal u- instead: nispa utuyas(kara) ‘master with whom we hold each other dear’.
сонко аноманде цкін нукараконде ва,
‘We send word; when it reaches you, please read it.’
Tangiku & Ogihara 2001: Letter 1; East Sakhalin, Otasan (Sentoku Tarōji)
omante is oman-te ‘cause to go’; konte ‘give’ adds a benefactive-imperative nuance to nukara, softened by final wa.
тани нучя исан ренкайне нуца канбіка ане сирун кусу канби пон чіцяі ани канби аноманде,
‘Now that the Russians are gone, we are short even of Russian paper, so we send our letter on a little scrap of paper.’
Tangiku & Ogihara 2001: Letter 1; East Sakhalin, Otasan (Sentoku Tarōji)
We analyse an=esirun as applicative e- on sirun ‘be poor, wretched’ (cf. sirun kur ‘poor man’), ‘to be badly off for’; cicay ‘scrap’ is obscure — Tangiku and Ogihara render pon cicay as ‘a small scrap’.
анкоро нисьпа темана ан окай экиххетанея?
‘Our master, how are you faring?’ (lit. ‘the living that you lead — of what sort is it?’)
Tangiku & Ogihara 2001: Letter 1; East Sakhalin, Otasan (Sentoku Tarōji)
temana an okay e=kihi is literally ‘the how-being living that you do’, with okay nominalized; hetane (he-ta-ne) is a fused interrogative tag stacked with ya.
анокай айну утара рамака пріка поно поно цеп укойки анехці.
‘We Ainu are well as ever; we catch a little fish and eat it.’
Tangiku & Ogihara 2001: Letter 1; East Sakhalin, Otasan (Sentoku Tarōji)
The spelling is at its loosest here: ramma ka ‘always too’ is written solid as рамака with the geminate simplified, and ponno ponno ‘a little’ as поно поно; the transliteration restores both, after Tangiku and Ogihara. an=e-hci ‘we eat’ carries the plural -hci agreeing with the plural eaters.
кестоно нисьпа оровано камбі цока цнукара сонно ияі райкере
‘The other day we read the letter from you, master; thank you truly.’
Tangiku & Ogihara 2001: Letter 1; East Sakhalin, Otasan (Sentoku Tarōji)
kestoono is elsewhere ‘every day’ (kesto-no); Tangiku and Ogihara take it here as ‘the other day’, which the context requires. iyayraykere ‘thank you’ is historically i-yay-rayke-re ‘you nearly make me kill myself’.
‘We wanted to send a reply at once, but since in the words of your letter you said that you would soon be going back to your own village, …’
Tangiku & Ogihara 2001: Letter 1; East Sakhalin, Otasan (Sentoku Tarōji)
hospi = hosipi ‘return’; iani is the letters’ spelling of the 2SG pronoun eani. The omitted continuation — ‘although we sent a letter, the master would already have gone, so we did not send it’ — contains the unclear word pokari and the analytic negative hanne.
‘… but when we asked later at the Japanese near you and heard that you were still there, we joyfully wrote a letter at once and dispatched it to you, master.’
Tangiku & Ogihara 2001: Letter 1; East Sakhalin, Otasan (Sentoku Tarōji)
kirora an turano is literally ‘together with there being joy’; isora ci=kara ‘we made a sending’ is Tangiku and Ogihara’s conjectured reading, supported by e=isira ‘you sent’ in the second letter. The reportative manuy marks the news as hearsay.
The letter shows the written vernacular of an east-coast speaker with no model to imitate, and its grammar is continuous with the spoken corpus. First-person reference alternates between the AN-series (an=omante, an=e-hci, the address form an=koro nispa ‘our master’) and the CI-series (cokay ~ coka, ci=nukara, ci=nu), each clause keeping to one series as the personal agreement rule requires; the KU-series never appears in the letters (Chapter 13). Clauses are chained with renkayne ‘because’ and conditional ciki(n) (Chapter 23); existential negation is isan (Chapter 18, Chapter 17); and reported information is marked with manuy, the letters' form of the reportative (Chapter 16). The Cyrillic spelling is itself linguistic evidence: нисьпа with palatalized сь for the [ɕ]-coloured sibilant, and канби beside kanpi showing the intervocalic voicing of plosives that Piłsudski also recorded on the east coast (Chapter 4; (Dal Corso 2024: 61)).
26.3 From Piłsudski’s Materials: the woman of Paratunnay
Piłsudski's Materials for the Study of the Ainu Language and Folklore (Piłsudski 1912) contains twenty-seven ucaskuma dictated by east-coast speakers in 1903–04, the only substantial record of the eastern dialects (Dal Corso 2024: 54–58). The medium is dictation: the texts were taken down in handwriting, sentence by sentence, at a pace the speaker had to hold to — a circumstance with grammatical consequences taken up at the end of this section (Dal Corso 2024: 59). The collection was published in Cracow in 1912 and is most accessible today in the annotated reprint in Piłsudski's collected works (Piłsudski 1998). The first two texts carry Piłsudski's own word-for-word English translation beside the Ainu. Our extract is the opening of text 2 (lines 1–34, p. 45), dictated in January 1903 by Sisratoka, aged 28, of Tarayka on the Bay of Patience. Sisratoka is no anonymous informant: three years later Sentoku's second letter reports the death of his wife and his move within Tarayka (Tangiku & Ogihara 2001: Letter 2) — the two texts of this chapter document one small community. The passage itself, a sober account of the depopulation of the village of Paratunnay, is as much historical as literary testimony (Chapter 1).
Each example shows Piłsudski's transcription (accents and all) above our retranscription. The interpretation of his orthography follows Dal Corso (2024: 59–66): x is the debuccalized coda plosive, our h; ś and ć are the palatal allophone of /s/ and the affricate /c/; j is /y/; and the voiced letters b d g note the intervocalic voicing of /p t k/, which is not phonemic and is undone in retranscription (Chapter 4). His acute accents we reproduce in the transcription line but do not interpret: they are left out of the retranscription.
Parátunnaj oxta etókota ájnu poróno án.
‘In Paratunnay there were formerly many people.’
Piłsudski 1912: text 2, ll. 1–3; East Sakhalin, Tarayka (Sisratoka)
The opening line shows the orthographic system at a glance: oxta with x for the debuccalized coda (our ohta), j for /y/ in Parátunnaj, and the accents we leave uninterpreted. porono an ‘were many’ has the quantifier verb-adjacent, the existential construction of quantified NPs.
Emújke rajaxći.
‘They all died.’
Piłsudski 1912: text 2, l. 4; East Sakhalin, Tarayka (Sisratoka)
The plural suffix -(a)hci, spelt -axći, shows the [x] realization of the debuccalized plosive before c.
Okáketa śine máxneku, ré Inanupírika, śiránkuri utara tura pate omĕka.
‘Afterwards one woman, Inanupirika by name, was left with only her kinsfolk.’
Piłsudski 1912: text 2, ll. 5–10; East Sakhalin, Tarayka (Sisratoka)
omeka ‘to remain, be left over’ recurs in Sentoku’s first letter (nuca ponno omeka ‘a few Russians remain’); re ‘name’ stands in apposition.
Śine ćiśe pate ájnu páxteno án.
‘There were people enough only for a single house.’
Piłsudski 1912: text 2, ll. 11–13; East Sakhalin, Tarayka (Sisratoka)
pahteno ‘just enough, in proportion’ is recorded with the same sense in the modern Sakhalin teaching wordlists.
Néte Tarájkaun niśpa Inanupírika sám rusúi.
‘Then a rich man of Tarayka wished to marry Inanupirika.’
Piłsudski 1912: text 2, ll. 14–16; East Sakhalin, Tarayka (Sisratoka)
un is the attributive ‘belonging to (a place)’, as in tan cise un monimahpo ‘the girl of this house’.
Sám rusúike, Inanupírika etúnne.
‘Though he wished to marry her, Inanupirika would not have him.’
Piłsudski 1912: text 2, ll. 17–18; East Sakhalin, Tarayka (Sisratoka)
Piłsudski writes rusúike as one word: the linker -ike fuses with rusuy, whose final glide is absorbed — we segment rusuy-ike on the strength of the bare rusúi of (26). The tail-head repetition sam rusuy … sam rusuy-ike is a discourse pattern of dictated narrative, the speaker re-anchoring each sentence in the last.
Tarájkaun niśpa kotánu oxta xośíbi hemaka.
‘The rich man of Tarayka went back to his village.’
Piłsudski 1912: text 2, ll. 19–21; Dal Corso 2024: 66; East Sakhalin, Tarayka (Sisratoka)
kotan-u ‘his village’ shows the possessive suffix with elided h (kotan-[h]u), a regular east-coast alternation.
Inanupírika tani utárhi ájnu énko śuj ráj.
‘Now, of Inanupirika’s people, half again died.’
Piłsudski 1912: text 2, ll. 22–25; East Sakhalin, Tarayka (Sisratoka)
śuj for suy ‘again’ shows both palatal ś and j for /y/ in one syllable, undone in retranscription. utar-hi aynu enko ‘half of her people’ is a partitive of bare juxtaposition; bare ray here against ray-ahci in (23), with plural subjects both times, shows the -(a)hci plural as optional rather than obligatory agreement.
Nax án ani, táta ohórono Parátunnaj-ta án kojákuś.
‘This being so, it was impossible to stay long there in Paratunnay.’
Piłsudski 1912: text 2, ll. 25–29; East Sakhalin, Tarayka (Sisratoka)
nah an ani ‘by its being so’ presses the instrumental ani (cf. cicay ani ‘with a scrap’ in §26.2) into causal service; the next sentence varies the same formula as nah an renkayne — the two causal postpositions interchangeable in the fixed connective.
Nax án rénkajne, hejáo japaxći, utárhi tura iśínne japaxći, Moriruesán japaxći.
‘And so they took to the sea: with all her people together they went off by boat, and made land at Moriruesan.’
Piłsudski 1912: text 2, ll. 30–34; East Sakhalin, Tarayka (Sisratoka)
Piłsudski renders japaxći as ‘sailed’; we take the verb to be yapa ‘to move by boat, put in to shore’ (cf. Hokkaidō yan/yap ‘come ashore’), and heyao to contain the deictic he- ‘headed towards’ with ya ‘shore’.
The dictated ucaskuma differs sharply in texture from Asai Take's tuytah. There is no reportative framing: where the west-coast oral tale stamps nearly every sentence with manu, Sisratoka's narration runs in plain zero-marked third-person clauses, the evidential burden carried by the genre itself (Chapter 16) — a difference of elicitation as much as of dialect, since dictation suppresses the performative particles of live telling (Dal Corso 2024: 59). Aspect is articulated by the perfective auxiliary hemaka ‘finish’ (28) (Chapter 15); modality and negation by koyakus ‘be unable’ (30) and the volitional negative verb etunne ‘refuse, not want’ (27) (Chapter 17). The possessive forms kotan-u and utar-hi, with the h of the suffix elided, illustrate the morphophonology of the belonging form (Chapter 7, Chapter 5), and plural -(a)hci on ray-ahci and yapa-hci tracks the plural subjects that the zero third person leaves unexpressed (Chapter 8, Chapter 13). For the dialect position of Tarayka within East Sakhalin, and for the other tales of the collection, see Chapter 2.
26.4 The Dobrotvorsky dialogues (1875)
The Ainu–Russian dictionary of Mikhail Dobrotvorsky (Dobrotvorsky 1875), published at Kazan in 1875, carries in its appendix two short connected texts — the oldest connected prose in Sakhalin Ainu, predating Piłsudski's fieldwork by a generation. The first is a scene of confession told by a man named Ciwokanke; the second a dialogue of request and marriage. Both come from the Kusunnay area of the west-central coast. They were re-edited, with romanisation, Japanese translation, and philological commentary, by Sakaguchi Ryō (Sakaguchi 2021), whose reading we follow throughout; the accented romanisation shown with the examples is his. We give four sentences from the first text and two from the second.
As with Sentoku's letters (§26.2), the Cyrillic record is strong exactly where the grammatical interest lies. Dobrotvorsky's transcription registers syllable-final consonants faithfully, but it ignores vowel length and wavers between и and е and between о and у, so that contrasts hinging on vowel quality or quantity cannot always be recovered from the spelling. The person markers — an=, -an, in=, i=, e= — live on consonants, and these the texts attest beyond doubt: for the morphology they are cited for here, the dialogues are more reliable witnesses than their age and script would suggest (Sakaguchi 2021).
Tan kotàn ohtà utása-an kusú áriki-an.
‘I have come in order to visit this village.’
Sakaguchi 2021: 49; West Sakhalin, Kusunnay (Ciwokanke)
The INDEF-series -an stands on both verbs, exactly as in Sentoku’s letters thirty years later; the purposive kusu links them. ariki is the plural stem of ‘come’: the indefinite person selects plural stems even under singular reference.
Tan kotán ta eh renkáyne, an-è-núkara.
‘Thanks to your coming to this village, I have been able to see you.’
Sakaguchi 2021: 49; West Sakhalin, Kusunnay (Ciwokanke)
an=e= stacks the INDEF agent on the second-person object, the transitive ‘I…you’ frame; renkayne ‘thanks to, because of’ is the same connective that runs through Sentoku’s letters and Sisratoka’s narrative above.
Tamà in-konte. Rékoro yay’iráykire-an.
‘You gave me a bead. I am very grateful.’
Sakaguchi 2021: 49; West Sakhalin, Kusunnay (Ciwokanke)
The diagnostic line: in= ‘me’, the first-person object prefix of the east-coast paradigms, inside an otherwise INDEF-marked passage. yay-irayki-re-an ‘I cause myself to be thankful’ stacks reflexive, causative, and the INDEF -an; Rékoro for reekoro shows the script’s blindness to vowel length.
Pírikano omán ciki pírika.
‘It would be good if you went carefully.’
Sakaguchi 2021: 49; West Sakhalin, Kusunnay (Ciwokanke)
A parting formula: pirika adverbialized with -no in the protasis and predicative in the apodosis, hinged on the conditional ciki — the same ciki(n) as in Sentoku’s opening request (15).
Anokay an-renkayne, i-koyki ánpe ka hánne.
‘In accordance with my wish, I was not hit.’
Sakaguchi 2021: 50; West Sakhalin, Kusunnay
The second text uses i= ‘me’ — the INDEF-series object, doubled by the free pronoun anokay — where the first text had in= (34); Sakaguchi notes that the dictionary itself records the parallel kuani … in-koyki, a minimal pair between the two object prefixes. The negation is the analytic hanne over the nominalized anpe ka ‘even the fact of…’.
‘Since we are close kin, it would be fine even if you did not say much to me.’
Sakaguchi 2021: 52; West Sakhalin, Kusunnay
sine utahta ne kusu is a fixed idiom that Dobrotvorsky himself enters in the dictionary as sne utahta ne kusu ‘because we are relatives’: utah is the concept form of utar(a) ‘people, kin’, so the literal sense is ‘being one set of kinfolk’ (Sakaguchi 2021, n. 43). The function of the frozen final -ta is unclear — plausibly the locative -ta in a lexicalized idiom — hence the ? in its gloss. The parenthesized i= on the morpheme line, and its (INDEF.O=) in the gloss, mark the editor’s restoration of an unwritten indefinite-object clitic. The negator here is ham, beside hanne in (36); the close nankoro pe ne ‘it will probably be (that…)’ is the epistemic formula.
Short as they are, the dialogues anchor the time-depth of everything else in this chapter. Their chief witness is the person system (Chapter 13): the INDEF-series runs throughout — -an on intransitives (32), the stacked an=e= ‘I…you’ frame (33) — and beside it stands in= ‘me’ (34), the object prefix elsewhere characteristic of the east coast (Satō 1985), so that this west-central material patterns with the East rather than with the north-west (Chapter 2). The negative system is already the analytic one: hanne (36) and ham (37) negate in 1875 exactly as in the twentieth-century corpus, a fixed point for the history traced in Chapter 17. The politeness formulae run on the clause-linking inventory — purposive and causal kusu, conditional ciki, concessive yahka (Chapter 23) — and the epistemic close nankoro pe ne stacks the modal nankoro on the nominalizer pe and the copula ne (Chapter 15, Chapter 20, Chapter 18). Genre matters here too: where the folktales above are narrative, these are face-to-face exchanges, and their grammar is correspondingly that of address — second persons, softened requests, and not a single manu.