Description - The Origins of the Ainu Language by Kirsten Refsing
Over the years, attempts have been made to connect the Ainu language to almost every existing language family in the world. The British missionary, John Batchelor, tried Hebrew and Basque, but remained convinced of an 'Aryan' affiliation. The famous Japanese scholar, Kindaichi Kyosuke looked towards both American Indian languages and the languages of Siberia, and the American linguist James Patrie tried to prove Altaic origins via Japanese and Korean. The Swedish linguist Olof Gjerdman wrote about similarities between Ainu and the Malayo-Polynesisan languages - but no conclusive evidence for any one theory was ever produced. Speculations about the racial and linguistic origins of the Ainu began in the latter half of the 19th century, and one of the more persistent notions was that the Ainu were a 'lost tribe' of Europoid origin. When Pierre Naert in 1958 published his dissertation La situation linguistique de l'Ainou I Ainou et indoeuropeen , he was thus merely trying to put scientific arguments behind what had so far been mostly vague assumptions.
Neart's thesis, however, was not well received by everyone, and it sparked off an acrimonious discussion among linguists, most of whom were Swedish or employed by Swedish universities at the time. For six years a large number of articles were published in a variety of linguistic periodicals, until apparently the discussion died out when Naert committed suicide in the 1960s. This five volume work will present not only Naert's initial thesis and the reviews it provoked, but also Naerts further arguments and articles written as criticism or support by scholars such Olof Gjerdman, Olivier Guy de Tailleur, Ivar Lindquist, A.J. van Windekens and others. Articles which original appeared in Swedish have been translated into English for the present series. The first volume begins with an introduction written by the editor.
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