Japan Society for the Promotion of Science:Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research
Date (from‐to) : 2003 -2006
Author : NAKAGAWA Hiroshi, SASAKI Toshikazu, TANGIKU Itsuji
This research project tries to explore the situation and history of the language contacts of the northern peoples to Japan focusing on the Sakhalin Ainu, by seeing the distribution of the names of mingu and mingu itself. We think it is important that to consider the problems of language contact, we need not only to analyze language data but also to compare them to the historical relations drawn through the non-linguistic data such as material or cultural ones. Therefore, we investigated simultaneously the names, the form, the use, and the making process of the mingu, and from them we analyzed the mutual relation of a language side and a substance side together.
As the result we made the databases of the mingu names as fundamental data. Since the field survey was already in the difficult situation about the Sakhalin Ainu, Tamura and Nakagawa made the database based on the materials of literature ("Result Report" 2.1). As results on field surveys, Tangiku made the database of Nivkh mingu vocabulary(2.2) and Nagasaki made the Yukagir one(2.3). On the other languages the vocabularies we could collect are still not enough to be constructed as proper databases, but as field reports, Li wrote about Hezhen instruments for tanning(3.3) and Taguchi wrote about Miao instruments for cooking (3.5).
As analyses about language contacts, Nakagawa wrote a paper on the correlation of Japanese, Ainu(Hokkaido, Sakhalin and Kuril), Nivkh, and Tungusic languages around Ainu mingu name pasuy (3.1). Also Nakagawa analyzed the Li report above mentioned and wrote a paper (3.4), in which Nakagawa considered the reason why Ainu including Sakhalin has been hardly affected by the influence from the Heilungchiang coast peoples including Hezhen on the tanning instruments and their names, while it had reached to Sakhalin. In the Tangiku's paper (3.2), based on the database of 2.2, the mingu names of Nivkh are comprehensively examined, and the relation between them and those of surrounding languages is also analyzed in detail.