Talk:kamuy kar put ya mosir

RFV discussion: August 2020–March 2022
Seeking verification. I cannot confirm that this exists as Ainu, and even assuming validity, the spelling is off.


 * Provenance:
 * Granted, Ainu is an WT:LDL. However, I cannot find this term in Ainu-language materials.  It appears in the Japanese Wikipedia article about Karafuto (i.e. the island of Sakhalin) in the section about the name, at 樺太:

「からふと」の名は、一説にはアイヌ語でこの島を「カムイ・カラ・プト・ヤ・モシリ 」(kamuy kar put ya mosir) と呼んだ事に由来すると言う. これはアイヌ語で「神が河口に造った島」を意味し、... The name Karafuto, in one theory, may have derived from the island being called 「カムイ・カラ・プト・ヤ・モシリ 」(kamuy kar put ya mosir) in Ainu. In Ainu, this means "island made by the gods at the river mouth", ...


 * Meanwhile, Ainu-language materials apparently call Sakhalin by the name / :


 * Ainu Museum dictionary search for : https://ainugo.ainu-museum.or.jp/dic?word=%E6%A8%BA%E5%A4%AA
 * Ainu Museum dictionary search for : https://ainugo.ainu-museum.or.jp/dic?word=%E3%82%B5%E3%83%8F%E3%83%AA%E3%83%B3
 * Ainu Museum dictionary search for Karapto: https://ainugo.ainu-museum.or.jp/dic?word=Karapto


 * Googling seems to find mentions on Japanese-language sites, but not Ainu-language sites:


 * Spelling:
 * Assuming the gloss in the JA WP article is correct, a few of the words are misspelled.
 * as in our entry is spelled with a small (-y).  This is used academically to show that the -muy on the end is the one-mora diphthong  and not the two-mora dipthong .  However, outside of academia, this notation seems less common, with  with a regular-sized  instead: the Ainu Times has zero instances of カムィ, but plenty of カムイ.  Likewise, the intermediate Chitose-dialect materials list カムイ but not カムィ (page 91 in the PDF), the Bihoro materials too (also page 91), and the Karafuto-dialect word list (page 4).
 * with the small is listed instead as  in the Karafuto-dialect word list (page 4).  Looking at other dialectal materials, I can't find any geographically close dialects for comparison; however, the presence of the second  in the borrowed Japanese term Karafuto suggests that the source Ainu dialect was either Karafuto or something close by, with  instead of the  found further south.
 * with the final small does not conform to Ainu katakana orthography, where coda consonants are (usually) spelled with the miniature kana from the same vowel series as the preceding voiced vowel.  Thus, we'd expect this term to be spelled  instead with a final small  -- which is indeed how we find this spelled in the Ainu Museum dictionary.

, you've both edited the entries -- do either of you have any Ainu-language materials that include this name? If so, can you find any further information about whether anyone still uses this name? ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │Tala við mig 19:14, 27 August 2020 (UTC)
 * You could probably move that to / and keep "カムィ カㇻ プㇳ ヤ モシㇼ" as an etymology. The spelling's fine, though. Alves9 (talk) 19:43, 27 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Keeping カムィ カㇻ プㇳ ヤ モシㇼ as an etymology for /  is an idea, but if we cannot confirm that this was actually used in Ainu, it might be only a folk etymology invented by Japanese speakers.  In addition, the required shifts within Ainu are a bit odd -- why would kara put become karapto?  Ainu has coda consonants, so the appearance of this final -o is unexpected and not explained by Ainu phonological patterns.  This seems more like either 1) the etymology described in Japanese-language materials is incorrect, and the modern Ainu  derives from something else entirely, or 2) the etymology described in Japanese-language materials is correct, and the modern Ainu  may be a reborrowing from the Japanese.  Either way, we need more detail.
 * Regarding the spelling, we seek to record what's actually in use. If there are multiple forms with differences in usage frequency, we lemmatize (create the main entry) at the most common form.
 * I have only seen small-ィ in academic writings, while big-イ  is used in teaching materials and the Ainu Times, the only publication I know of in the Ainu language.
 * → We should lemmatize at the spelling and clarify that  is an alternative form used in academia.
 * Southern is unlikely to be the source etymon for this compound term, while Sakhalin Ainu  fits both the phonology and the geography, and is much more likely to be the source term.
 * → We should create an entry at for the Sakhalin Ainu variant of this term.
 * I cannot find in any of the Ainu materials I currently have access to, only.
 * → We should lemmatize at, and only create any entry at if we can confirm that this spelling has actually been used by Ainu speakers / writers.
 * (For that matter, we never really discussed Ainu lemma forms -- should we lemmatize at the katakana spellings, or the romanized spellings? Duplicating content in both places is bad practice.  However, that's a matter for another thread.)
 * ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │Tala við mig 22:15, 27 August 2020 (UTC)
 * I'm not sure why you assume "Karapto" is a native word. It's only logical to think of it as a reborrowing from Japanese 樺太 which in it itself probably came from a corruption of "カムィ カㇻ プ[ㇳ/ッ] ヤ モシㇼ". It's the same processes with Sapporo: Ainu "sat poro pet", corrupted to Japanese "Sapporobetsu", then corrupted again to "Sapporo", and then finally reborrowed into Ainu as "Sapporo".
 * I will mention for correction's sake that Ainu has a tendency to delete syllable-final vowels, especially before consonants. There's nothing strange about "kamuy-kara-putu-ya-mosiri" becoming "kamuy-kar-put-ya-mosir", especially when thinking about toponyms. Alves9 (talk) 22:53, 27 August 2020 (UTC)
 * I confess I find your reply confusing and off-topic. I will respond to each point separately in an attempt at clarity.
 * "I'm not sure why you assume "Karapto" is a native word." → I don't make any such assumption. I'm confused that you think I did?  Logically, the Ainu term must be either native or borrowed.  I present both hypotheses.
 * "It's only logical to think of it as a reborrowing from Japanese" → Why? It might be a native term.  It might be a borrowed term, not necessarily even from Japanese --  and  are also spoken on Sakhalin.
 * "Ainu has a tendency to delete syllable-final vowels" → This is largely irrelevant to anything I've mentioned above. If anything, the opposite is more the problem -- unlike Japanese, Ainu has no tendency to insert filler vowels, so there is no clear mechanism within Ainu for  to become.
 * Even as a reborrowing, the phonology is problematic. Ainu has no  phoneme, but it does have initial, and Sakhalin Ainu even has coda , so Japanese Karafuto would likely have been borrowed as Karahuto or Karahto.  However, I find no evidence for either form in Ainu.
 * "There's nothing strange about "kamuy-kara-putu-ya-mosiri" becoming "kamuy-kar-put-ya-mosir"" → That was never in question. We still have zero Ainu-language evidence that either version even existed.  All we have is Japanese-language sources supposing that this might have existed.
 * Additionally, we have no modern reference listing any term putu. Batchelor has that as his version of modern, shown in the right-hand column of page 358 here, but it is hard to tell if that was the actual realization of this term, or if that's an artifact of interpreting the Ainu of the time through the lens of Japanese orthography and phonology.  That said, the Ainu Museum dictionary lists this term as , and the other modern materials I have to hand don't include this term at all.
 * Getting back to the main point of this thread, it sounds like we don't yet have any Ainu-language evidence for the existence of / .  I'll see what additional information I can find online, and hopefully  will reply with further details.  ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │Tala við mig 00:33, 28 August 2020 (UTC)
 * A bit of philological research will reveal that 樺太 was originally pronounced からぷと. If we assume that the Ainu term was reborrowed relatively recently into Japanese colonisation, there's no need to justify a "Karahto" (also because a "ht" cluster is illegal).
 * Overall it seems to me you need to research more about this rather than pretend you know more than scholars who fluently read and speak Ainu (scholars whose material you haven't even read!) Alves9 (talk) 01:14, 28 August 2020 (UTC)
 * The Sakhalin dialect of Ainu allows clusters.  https://www.ff-ainu.or.jp/teach/files/karahuto_tango.pdf
 * Per the JA WP article section at ja:w:樺太, the Japanese term for the island first appears in 1646 as, followed in 1669 by Karafuto.
 * Per the Nipponica encyclopedia section on the history of Sakhalin (in Japanese), the island was first definitively visited by a Japanese person in 1635, when the island was called various things including Karafuto and Kita Ezo-chi ("North Ainu-land").
 * At no point in the sources I have access to is the Japanese term ever recorded as Karaputo. With an appearance date of the 1630s-1640s, this term is far too young to undergo the  →  lenition we see in the shift from Old Japanese to Early Middle Japanese.
 * I have made no argument against any purported "scholars who fluently read and speak Ainu". Part of the problem here is that we have nothing from any such scholar, unless you claim yourself to be one.  So far, you've made various contentions, but with no backing evidence.  I have only your say-so that you've done any research at all.  If you have other sources that state differently than what I've outlined here, please provide links.  I would welcome the opportunity to learn more.  ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │Tala við mig 07:58, 28 August 2020 (UTC)
 * I have made no argument against any purported "scholars who fluently read and speak Ainu". Part of the problem here is that we have nothing from any such scholar, unless you claim yourself to be one.  So far, you've made various contentions, but with no backing evidence.  I have only your say-so that you've done any research at all.  If you have other sources that state differently than what I've outlined here, please provide links.  I would welcome the opportunity to learn more.  ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │Tala við mig 07:58, 28 August 2020 (UTC)


 * Does anyone have any verification of this term's existence in Ainu? Pinging, anyone else?  Searching at  nets me only 10 hits, all of which seem to show only Wiktionary echoes.  ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │Tala við mig 22:27, 9 August 2021 (UTC)


 * To be fair, most people wouldn't put in the effort to type in Unicode-approved small kana. —Fish bowl (talk) 23:21, 13 March 2022 (UTC)


 * Found a mention in Google Books of the theory, possibly mangled by OCR but still recognizable, in 西鶴定嘉, 北方領土地名考 (1978): —Fish bowl (talk) 23:19, 13 March 2022 (UTC)


 * RFV failed. —Fish bowl (talk) 23:19, 13 March 2022 (UTC)