Probably further search would reveal the existence of more such plural forms.[1] Indeed, the Saghalien dialect, if we are to trust Dobrotvorsky as quoted in Pfizmaier’s “Erörterungen und Aufklärungen über Aino,” retains fragments of a plural formation in a few of its substantives as well. Thus kema, “foot;” kemaki, “feet;” ima, “tooth;” imaki “teeth.” Be this as it may, not only has Japanese no plural forms, whether inflectional or agglutinative, but the whole idea of grammatical number is as foreign to it as is that of person.
Thus far we have noted phenomena that occur in Ainu, and are absent from Japanese. We now turn to such as are found in Japanese, but not in Ainu, and observe that:—
(9) Japanese conjugates its verbs by means of agglutinated suffixes, which in certain moods and tenses, combine so intimately with the root as to be indistinguishable from what are termed inflections in the Aryan tongues. Thus, from the root ot and the stem otos, “to drop,” we have such conjugational forms as otosu the present, otose the imperative, otoshi the “indefinite form” (a sort of gerund or participle), where no analysis has hitherto succeeded in discovering the origin of the final vowels. In Ainu there is nothing of this kind. Save in the rare cases mentioned under heading 8, the whole conjugation is managed by auxiliaries. The original verb never varies, excepting when r changes to n according to a general phonetic rule which affects all classes of words indiscriminately.
(10). A grammatical device, on which much of Japanese construction hinges, is the three-fold division (in the classical form of the language there is a fourth) of verbal adjective forms into what are termed “attributive,” “conclusive,” and “indefinite.”
- ↑ Mr. Batchelor adds to the list sing. raige, plur. ronnu, “to kill.” But the present writer ventures to think that the difference is rather one of signification than of mere number, raige meaning “to kill,” and ronnu “massacre.”
[To this I must reply that I still have no reason to doubt that ronnu is really what I have represented it to be. To “massacre” would be ushtekka. Anyhow, to be understood both the Ainu and I are obliged to use ronnu as if it were the plural of raige; I know of no other word to take its place.]
