John Batchelor · Yokohama, 1897 · 横浜 明治三十年
Chikoro Utarapa ne
Yesu Kiristo
Ashiri Aeuitaknup
The New Testament in Ainu — the largest single body of early written Ainu (about 273,000 words), digitised, re-transcribed into the modern orthography, and edited in the open.
29 books · 10,960 verses · 716 leaves scanned · 2 verses reviewed toward the modern-orthography edition
Why this text
Written four decades before it was printed, by Ainu writers whom Batchelor had taught to write their language in Roman letters, the 1897 New Testament preserves more connected Ainu prose than any other nineteenth-century source. Its spelling predates the phonemic analysis of Ainu — chikoro for ci=kor, moshiri for mosir — and this edition carries each verse across that gap: the letter-faithful 1897 text, a modern phonemic re-transcription, and the Japanese parallel, verse by verse, beside the original leaves.