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Ainu language. Ainu language

    Ainu language. Genealogical connections have not been established. In the 20th century out of use... Big Encyclopedic Dictionary

    Ainu language- (Ainu) one of the languages ​​of East Asia, the family ties of which are not clear. It was distributed over most of the Japanese Islands (Hokkaido Island and the eastern part of Honshu Island), in the southern part of Sakhalin Island, on the Kuril Islands, on... ... Linguistic encyclopedic dictionary

    Ainu language. Genealogical connections have not been established. In the 20th century went out of live use. * * * AINI LANGUAGE AINI LANGUAGE, the language of the Ainu. Genealogical connections have not been established. In the 20th century out of use... Encyclopedic Dictionary

    The Ainu language (See Ainu), spoken mainly on the island of Hokkaido (Japan). In the 18th and 19th centuries. dialects of A. i. were also on the Kuril Islands, Kamchatka and Sakhalin Island; now only a few speakers of A. i. have survived on Sakhalin... ... Great Soviet Encyclopedia

    An isolated language (language isolate) is a language that is not included in any known language family. Thus, in fact, each isolated language forms a separate family, consisting only of that language. The most famous examples include... ... Wikipedia

    - (language isolate) a language that is not included in any known language family. Thus, in fact, each isolated language forms a separate family, consisting only of that language. The most famous examples include Burushaski, Sumerian,... ... Wikipedia

    Self-name: (Japanese: 上古日本語 jo:ko nihongo?) ... Wikipedia

The Ainu are a mysterious tribe living in northern Japan. The appearance of the Ainu is quite unusual: they have Caucasian features - unusually thick hair, wide eyes, light skin. Their existence seems to deny the usual ideas about the patterns of cultural development of nations.

Now there is reason to believe that not only in Japan, but also on the territory of Russia there is a part of this ancient indigenous people. According to preliminary data from the latest population census, held in October 2010, there are more than 100 Ainu people in Russia. The fact itself is unusual, because until recently it was believed that the Ainu lived only in Japan.

The friendliness, affection and sociability of the Maukin Ainu aroused in me a strong desire to get to know this interesting tribe better...

Researcher of the peoples of the Pacific region B.O. Pilsudski in his report on the business trip of 1903 -1905.

Origin of the Ainu

Scientists are still arguing about the origin of the Ainu. Some researchers believe that these people are related to the Indo-Europeans. Others are of the opinion that they came from the south, that is, they have Austronesian roots. The Japanese themselves are confident that the Ainu are related to Paleo-Asian peoples and came to the Japanese Islands from Siberia. In addition, recently there have been suggestions that they are relatives of the Miao-Yao living in Southern China.

The Ainu appeared on the Japanese Islands about 13 thousand years ago. n. e. and created the Neolithic Jomon culture. It is not known for certain where the Ainu came from to the Japanese islands, but it is known that in the Jomon era, the Ainu inhabited all the Japanese islands - from Ryukyu to Hokkaido, as well as the southern half of Sakhalin, the Kuril Islands and the southern third of Kamchatka, as evidenced by the results of archaeological excavations.

These people are meek, modest, good-natured, trusting, sociable, polite, respecting property; when hunting, he is brave and even intelligent.

A.P. Chekhov

Language and Culture

According to the official version, the Ainu language was an unwritten language (literate Ainu used Japanese). At the same time, Pilsutsky wrote down the following Ainu symbols:

The Ainu language is also a mystery (it has Latin, Slavic, Anglo-Germanic and even Sanskrit roots). Ethnographers are also grappling with the question of where in these harsh lands people wearing swinging (southern) type of clothing came from. Their national everyday clothing is robe-dresses decorated with traditional ornaments; their festive clothes are white, the material is made from nettle fibers. Russian travelers were also amazed that in the summer the Ainu wore a loincloth.

Hunters and fishermen, the Ainu created an unusual and rich culture (Jomon), which is characteristic only of peoples with a very high level of development. For example, they have wooden products with extraordinary spiral patterns and carvings of amazing beauty and inventiveness. The ancient Ainu created extraordinary pottery without a potter's wheel, decorating it with intricate rope designs. This people also amazes with their talented folklore heritage: songs, dances and stories.

Dwellings

The legends of the Ainu people testify to countless treasures, castles and fortresses. However, travelers from Europe found representatives of this tribe living in dugouts and huts, where the floor was 30-50 cm below ground level.

All or almost all of them have the shape of a circle or rectangle. The location of the pillars that supported the roof indicates that it was conical, if the base of the building was a circle, or pyramidal, when the base was a quadrangle. During the excavations, no materials were found that could cover the roof, so we can only assume that branches or reeds were used for this purpose. The hearth, as a rule, was located in the house itself (only in the early period it was outside) - near the wall or in the middle. The smoke came out through smoke holes, which were made on two opposite sides of the roof.

Beliefs

In general, the Ainu can be called animists. They spiritualized almost all phenomena of the natural order, nature as a whole, personified them, endowing each of the fictional supernatural creatures with the same traits that they themselves possessed. The world created by the religious imagination of the Ainu was complex, vast and poetic. This is the world of celestials, mountain dwellers, cultural heroes, numerous masters of the landscape. The Ainu are still very religious. The traditions of animism still dominate among them, and the Ainu pantheon consists mainly of: “kamui” - the spirits of various animals, among which the bear and killer whale occupy a special place. Ioina, culture hero, creator and teacher of the Ainu.

The Ainu fed the sacrificial bear cub at the breast of a female nurse!

Unlike Japanese mythology, Ainu mythology has one supreme deity. The supreme god is called Pase kamuy (“creator and ruler of the sky”) or Kotan kara kamuy, Mosiri kara kamuy, Kando kara kamuy (“divine creator of worlds and lands and ruler of the sky”). He is considered the creator of the world and the gods; through the medium of good gods, his assistants, he takes care of people and helps them.

Ordinary deities (yayan kamuy - “near and distant deities”) embody individual elements and elements of the universe; they are equal and independent of each other, although they form a certain functional hierarchy of good and evil deities (see Ainu Pantheon). Good deities are predominantly of heavenly origin.

Evil deities are usually of earthly origin. The functions of the latter are clearly defined: they personify the dangers that await a person in the mountains (this is the main habitat of evil deities), and control atmospheric phenomena. Evil deities, unlike good ones, take on a certain visible appearance. Sometimes they attack good gods. For example, there is a myth about how some evil deity wanted to swallow the Sun, but Pase Kamuy saved the sun by sending a crow, which flew into the mouth of the evil god. It was believed that evil deities arose from the hoes with which Pase Kamuy created the world and then abandoned it. The evil deities are headed by the goddess of swamps and bogs Nitatunarabe. Most of the other evil deities are her descendants, and they go by the common name Toyekunra. Evil deities are more numerous than good ones, and myths about them are more widespread.

Good and evil deities do not exhaust the Ainu pantheon. Trees were considered deities, and the most ancient ones, with the help of which fire and the first man were created. Some of them (for example, alder, elm), unlike willow, seemed harmful. Tsorpok-kuru (“creatures living below”) were also represented as special deities. In myths they have the image of dwarfs and live in dugouts. It was believed that the Tsorpok-Kuru lived on earth even before the appearance of the first Ainu; it was from them that the Ainu women borrowed the custom of tattooing their faces.

The so-called “inau” served as an integral attribute of ritual actions. This name refers to a variety of objects. Sometimes it is a small stick, usually a willow one, sometimes a long pole topped with a plume of curly shavings. Sometimes it’s just weaving from shavings. Scientists consider “inau” as intermediaries that help a person communicate with the gods. Inau was placed in shellfish shells for the spirit of the road before any journey. Over time, places for inau began to appear along the roads and in especially “spiritualized” places.

A little history

The Ainu came to the Japanese islands, as well as to the Kuril Islands and Sakhalin about 15 thousand years ago. Whether anyone lived there before them is a mystery hidden in the darkness of millennia. In one source I came across that they were the first people to settle Japan, and in another - that archaeological artifacts indicate that the Japanese islands have been inhabited by people over the past 100 thousand years (it is not a fact that the human species has existed for that long). This is such a paradox. Well, be that as it may, 15 thousand years is the age of the oldest Ainu remains found in Japan. For many millennia, they lived in harmony with nature in small, distributed groups and obtained their food by hunting, fishing and gathering. At least, no archaeological finds have been made to suspect the ancient Ainu of creating a highly developed civilization. There are no ancient ruins a la Mohenjo-Daro, no examples of writing, no signs of agriculture. Only ceramics, weapons, and so on, all kinds of small household items. Well, as usual. But then, Ainu ceramics are the oldest ceramics found in the world! And, by the way, they have the most reduced dentition of all the peoples now living on Earth - this means that they chew thermally processed food longer than anyone else.


However, around 3000 B.C. Ainu ceramics became much more whimsical and much more aesthetically pleasing than before. Have there been any changes in pottery for internal social reasons or the cultural influence of immigrants from the mainland? Or maybe it was the settlers who made it, and the Ainu only bought it? Oh yes! About immigrants. It was at this time that the Japanese islands were overwhelmed by a second wave of immigration (or intervention?), from somewhere in the southwest, that is, from southeast Asia. The aliens, apparently, were Australoids by race and rice farmers by way of life. It is no longer possible to determine how peacefully the newcomers got along with the locals.

Finally, 1,000 BC. e. The third wave of migrants arrived on the Japanese islands from Central Asia - people of the Yayoi culture, it is they who are mainly the ancestors of modern Japanese. Actually, the migration flow was divided - part of the Yayoi people turned to the Japanese islands, and part moved further to the Korean peninsula (in the future I will simply call the Yayoi who settled in Japan the Japanese). By race they were, naturally, Mongoloids, and by lifestyle, again, they were rice farmers. Initially, the Japanese occupied only the southern part of the islands and their advance to the north was long and difficult - the Ainu were by no means going to give up their positions without a fight. Until the 20th century, the Japanese practically did not meddle in Hokkaido, the northernmost of the three largest Japanese islands. And even in the first half of the 20th century, the Ainu were by no means a disappearing ethnic group. It was only during the Second World War that the Japanese managed to almost completely destroy them. The cleared territories were naturally settled by the Japanese and the few surviving Ainu were assimilated. At present, purebred Ainu, in fact, do not exist; out of several tens of thousands of citizens with Ainu origin, only a couple of hundred can speak the language of their ancestors. But the Ainu did not disappear without a trace. They left their contribution to both Japanese culture and the Japanese gene pool. Many Japanese beliefs, myths, ideas about the world, customs - festive and everyday, religious and everyday -, medieval Japanese military art, the bushido code and even the word “bushido” itself, almost all geographical names in Japan are actually of Ainu origin. In addition, almost all Japanese, more or less, have an admixture of Ainu genes...

But... to be absolutely precise, the statement that the Japanese destroyed the Ainu is not entirely true. The dividing line ran somewhat differently... It was not the Japanese who were the Ainu, but the state who were the “savages.”

Firstly, government officials in ancient, medieval and modern Japan, having spread their influence to new territories, did not at all seek to physically destroy the Ainu - no, they simply did the same thing that government officials do in any country in the world - they tried to build a “civilized” society and adapt the local population to work “for their uncle” - for themselves, that is. The Ainu resisted such “cultivation” in every possible way.

Secondly, the state was originally more Ainu than Japanese. Back in the first millennium BC. e. Chinese chronicles mention a certain state of Ya-ma-ta-i, which in the Ainu language means “land divided by the sea.” The references are few and vague, but the meaning of the name and the very fact that the name has any meaning at all in the Ainu language, with a fairly high probability indicates a geographical location... And by the way, the very word “Ya-ma-ta- and" doesn't remind you of anything? For example, "Yamato"? But this was BEFORE the arrival of the Japanese! Medieval Japan, it seems, can be considered the direct descendant of the pre-Japanese Ya-ma-ta-i; during the Middle Ages, most of the “Japanese” aristocrats, starting with the emperor, were still Ainu. And even today, the descendants of the ancient nobility show a much greater admixture of Ainu genes than is found on average - in some cases over 50%! How did it happen that the Ainu ruled the Japanese and destroyed their brothers? Well, obviously, the peace-loving settled Japanese farmers turned out to be much more convenient for the state than the freedom-loving “savages” Ainu. In addition, immigrants are always more vulnerable and, therefore, more dependent on the state than the local population - they are easier to manipulate.

Anthropology and genetics

There are exactly three hypotheses about the origin of the Ainu:
1) The Ainu descended from the ancient population of Siberia, which did not yet possess the characteristics of modern races, and thus they themselves, in fact, are a separate race.

Well, this, to one degree or another, is definitely true, since 15 thousand years of isolation is a serious period of time, quite enough to stand out as a very isolated group, and whether such a group can be considered a race is a purely terminological question. But this does not prevent us from raising the question of the kinship of the Ainu with other races.

2) Ainu are Caucasians. A feature of Russian national fishing anthropology is the obsessive desire to prove precisely this hypothesis. The reason for this is obvious and comical at the same time. For some reason, Russian jingoistic patriots think that if they manage to find (or falsify) evidence that the Ainu belong to the Caucasian race, this will give them grounds to lay claim, if not to the Japanese islands, then certainly to the Kuril Islands and Sakhalin. Japanese anthropology, on the contrary, is distinguished by its desire to refute this hypothesis. Apparently, jingoistic patriots are the same everywhere... This hypothesis is usually argued by the fact that the Ainu have fair skin, wavy hair and abundant facial and body hair. But this is all very frivolous. The intensity of pigmentation is merely an environmental adaptation and does not reflect real kinship; wavy hair is not an exclusive feature of the Caucasian race; it is also characteristic of Australoids; The degree of hair growth is a very unstable parameter; even within the same race, it can vary greatly. In fact, there is no reliable anthropological evidence of the relationship (or lack of relationship) of the Ainu with the Caucasian race.

3) Ainu are Australoids. The Ainu have an admixture of Australoid genes - this is a fact, and it can be seen in their facial features. One can say even more precisely: they are in some way related to the Miao, Yao, etc. peoples. (Miao and Yao live in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and Thailand, and are of Australoid origin). But is this proof of the common origin of the Ainu and the Australoid race, or was the admixture simply introduced by those same settlers from Southeast Asia? Most likely the second one.

There is something else interesting. One recent study found some genetic kinship between the Ainu and... Indians. The question is whether this is speculation, because purebred Ainu simply no longer exist - they all have an admixture of Japanese blood. Well, the fact that the Japanese are related to the Indians is clear to a raccoon; accordingly, these admixed Mongoloid genes could be common between the Ainu and Indians.

Language

So what language do the Ainu speak? Imagine, in Ainu. And what language family does it belong to, and what other languages ​​is it related to? And he doesn’t belong to anyone - he is the only one and unique. And this, in fact, is absolutely not surprising - 15 thousand years of isolation is no joke! By comparison, the Indo-European languages ​​split about 6,000 years ago. Just. However, linguists around the world do not give up trying to prove the relationship of the Ainu language with some other language - starting, of course, with Japanese and ending with... whatever. For example, a feature of the Russian national hunt of linguistics is the obsessive desire to fit the Ainu language into a hypothetical Nostratic linguistic macrofamily (the reason here is the same as for attempts to prove the Caucasian origin of the Ainu), the existence of which in itself is extremely doubtful.

Meanwhile, the Japanese language itself is very special. It bears little resemblance to any other languages ​​in the world. The reason for this is that it originates simultaneously from two ancestral languages, and the grammatical structures of both, of course, were greatly distorted during the merger. One ancestral language is obviously the ancient language spoken by the people of the Yayoi culture: Japanese shows some similarities with Korean, and both are distantly related to the Altaic language family. The second ancestral language is related to the Austro-Asiatic language family, or more precisely to the Miao-Yao language group. Where does this Austroasiatic root come from? There is only one explanation: the second wave of migrants spoke this language. It turns out that by the time the Yayoi arrived on the islands, they still retained their national identity and language, and, moreover, were strong enough to have managed to make such a contribution. It’s just not clear where they went after that. No, they did not assimilate. Because the Japanese do not have any significant admixture of Australoid genes. Or themselves by the first millennium BC. e. no longer existed, but there were Ainu who spoke their language?

"All human culture, all the achievements of art,
science and technology that we are witnessing today,
- the fruits of the creativity of the Aryans...
He [the Aryan] is the Prometheus of humanity,
from whose bright brow at all times
sparks of genius flew, igniting the fire of knowledge,
illuminating the darkness of gloomy ignorance,
what allowed a person to rise above others
creatures of the Earth."
A. Hitler

I’m moving on to the most difficult topic, in which everything is mixed up, discredited and deliberately confused - the spread of the descendants of settlers from Mars across Eurasia (and beyond).
While preparing this article in the institute, I found about 10 definitions of who the Aryans are, the Aryans, their relationship with the Slavs, etc. Each author has his own view on the question. But no one takes it broadly and deeply into millennia. The most profound thing is the self-name of the historical peoples of Ancient Iran and Ancient India, but this is only the 2nd millennium BC. Moreover, in the legends of the Iranian-Indian Aryans there are indications that they came from the north, i.e. The geography and time period are expanding.
Whenever possible, I will refer to external data and the y-chromosome R1a1, but as observations show, this is only “approximate” data. Over the millennia, the Martians (Aryans) mixed their blood with many peoples on the territory of Eurasia, and the y-chromosome R1a1 (which for some reason is considered a marker of true Aryans) appeared only 4,000 years ago (though I already saw that 10,000 years ago, but that’s still has not yet beaten 40,000 years ago, when the first Cro-Magnon man, also known as a Martian migrant, appeared).
The most faithful remain the legends of peoples and their symbols.
I’ll start with the most “lost” people - the Ainu.



Ainy ( アイヌ Ainu, lit.: “man”, “real person”) - the people, the oldest population of the Japanese islands. The Ainu once also lived on the territory of Russia in the lower reaches of the Amur River, in the south of the Kamchatka Peninsula, Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands. Currently, the Ainu remain mainly only in Japan. According to official figures, their number in Japan is 25,000, but according to unofficial statistics, it can reach up to 200,000 people. In Russia, according to the results of the 2010 census, 109 Ainu were recorded, of which 94 people were in the Kamchatka Territory.


A group of Ainu, photo from 1904.

The origin of the Ainu remains unclear at this time. Europeans who encountered the Ainu in the 17th century were amazed by their appearance. Unlike the usual appearance of people of the Mongoloid race with yellow skin, a Mongolian fold of the eyelid, sparse facial hair, the Ainu had unusually thick hair covering their heads, wore huge beards and mustaches (holding them with special chopsticks while eating), their facial features were similar to European ones. Despite living in a temperate climate, in the summer the Ainu wore only loincloths, like the inhabitants of equatorial countries. There are many hypotheses about the origin of the Ainu, which can generally be divided into three groups:

  • The Ainu are related to the Indo-Europeans of the Caucasian race - this theory was adhered to by J. Batchelor and S. Murayama.
  • The Ainu are related to the Austronesians and came to the Japanese Islands from the south - this theory was put forward by L. Ya. Sternberg and it dominated Soviet ethnography. (This theory has not currently been confirmed, if only because the Ainu culture in Japan is much older than the Austronesian culture in Indonesia).
  • The Ainu are related to Paleo-Asian peoples and came to the Japanese Islands from the north/from Siberia—this point of view is held mainly by Japanese anthropologists.

So far, it is known for certain that, according to basic anthropological indicators, the Ainu are very different from the Japanese, Koreans, Nivkhs, Itelmens, Polynesians, Indonesians, aborigines of Australia, the Far East and the Pacific Ocean, and are close only to the people of the Jomon era, who are the direct ancestors of the historical Ainu . In principle, there is no big mistake in equating the people of the Jomon era with the Ainu.

The Ainu appeared on the Japanese Islands about 13 thousand years ago. n. e. and created the Neolithic Jomon culture. It is not known for certain where the Ainu came to the Japanese islands, but it is known that in the Jomon era the Ainu inhabited all the Japanese islands - from Ryukyu to Hokkaido, as well as the southern half of Sakhalin, the Kuril Islands and the southern third of Kamchatka - as evidenced by the results of archaeological excavations and toponymic data , for example: Tsushima— Tuima— “distant”, Fuji — Huqi- "grandmother" - kamui of the hearth, Tsukuba— tu ku pa- “head of two bows” / “two-bow mountain”, Yamatai mdash; I'm mom and- “a place where the sea cuts the land” (It is very possible that the legendary state of Yamatai, which is mentioned in Chinese chronicles, was an ancient Ainu state.) Also, a lot of information about place names of Ainu origin in Honshu can be found in the institute.

Historians have discovered that The Ainu created extraordinary ceramics without a potter's wheel, decorating it with intricate rope patterns.

Here is another link to those who decorated pots with a pattern by wrapping a rope around it, although in this article they are called “laces.”