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O is for Okinawan
This week's entry is dedicated to ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
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.
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:
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.