O is for Okinawan

[muckefuck]

This week's entry is dedicated to aadroma. Not just because he's perhaps the only other human I know who can fully share my glee about the topic, but also because he's very much in my thoughts right now.

Okinawan-English dictionary Sakihara, Mitsugi. (Honolulu : University of Hawai'i Press, 2006)

This is a book that I've been waiting my whole life for someone to publish without really expecting they ever would. I first got interested in finding materials on the native language of the Ryukyus back in college. At the time, I was interested in fleshing out an Orient-inspired role-playing setting that had, essentially, two Japans in it and I thought it would only be logical to make the common language of one of them Okinawan.

That's when I ran up against the same wall I'd hit trying to find material on other minor languages of East Asia: A lack of sources in English. Just as everything on Manchu was in Chinese or Russian (neither of which I really read), most everything on Ainu and Okinawan was in Japanese, which--as I've pointed out many times--I've never had much interest in learning to read. So so much for that clever idea!

How things have changed! I pounced on this lovely little volume the moment I found it--I think it may have been at the downtown Borders, of all unlikely places. The meat of it is an Okinawan-English that runs to 225 pages, but there's also an extensive English-Okinawan glossary that doesn't feel as tacked on as many of these do. My only real complaint is the introduction, which includes some notes on the grammar, but nothing approaching a full grammatical sketch, or even a complete set of morphological tables. (Guess now I'll simply have to wait patiently for UH to publish an English-language Okinawan grammar!)

But far be it from me to bitch that the magical carp I caught has scales of silver rather than pure gold. This is still a book I'd never thought I'd see. I figured at best I might get some basic glossary awkwardly translated from the Japanese, but this work contains such juicy entries as:

min·nu-ku An inedible food offering used to lure malevolent spirits away from stealing edible food offered to ancestral spirits.

There you go: in-between "tinnitus" and "sash-cloth", a window onto traditional Ryukyuan culture. It's almost enough to make me want to revive that old fantasy setting just to Okinawaise everything.

Comments

[nornore.livejournal.com]

So there are two "japanese"? I thought Ainu (what's left of them) were rather in the North, and isn't Okinawa rather in the south?

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Any genetic relationship between the Ainu language and Japanese is in the very distant past and is not considered proven. The relationship between Okinawan and Japanese, on the other hand, is both close and indisputed. Many linguists lump them together as the "Japonic languages" ("Японо-рюкюские языки").

[tisoi.livejournal.com]

Ah, someone had mentioned this and I forgot all about it. Thanks for bringing it back to my attention.

I became interested in Okinawan when I came across a guy selling Okinawan books on eBay. The one he sold me was a picture book geared towards Japanese speakers called. I think there were too. I also bought a primer on Amazon.Co.Jp. I was supposed to buy one that teaches Okinawan via manga (kinda like the now-defunct 漫画人), but that never panned out.

Now if only someone would publish stuff in English about 제주말.