About the edition

The 1897 text

Chikoro Utarapa ne Yesu Kiristo Ashiri Aeuitaknup — "the New Testament of Our Lord Jesus Christ" — was printed at Yokohama in 1897 for the Bible Societies' committee for Japan. The Ainu text had been written some forty years earlier by Ainu writers whom John Batchelor taught to write their language in Roman letters; it remains the largest connected body of nineteenth-century written Ainu (about 273,000 words, with Psalms and Jonah issued separately). The scan shown throughout this site is the Internet Archive copy (ainu_nt, 716 leaves); the verse text derives from the British & Foreign Bible Society's letter-faithful 2018 digitisation.

Orthography

Batchelor's romanization predates the phonemic analysis of Ainu: Hepburn digraphs (ch, sh), allophonic voicing written by ear (tambe for tanpe), Japanese-influenced echo vowels (koro for kor), glides written as vowels (kamui for kamuy), and person affixes fused or set off as separate words. The modern layer re-spells each verse into the phonemic Latin orthography used by present-day dictionaries — it re-spells and never translates: Batchelor's lexicon and grammar are preserved as printed.

Editorial conventions: person clitics are marked fully (a=eci=oteknure); biblical names keep their printed form (Dabid, Gariraya); undecidable echo vowels are bracketed (or(o)wano); nominalizers are spaced (hetuku p, itak hi). The machine conversion scores 87.9% token accuracy against the published expert respellings of 阪口諒・渡邊香織 (2019, 千葉大学ユーラシア言語文化論集 21); the review workbench exists to close the remaining gap verse by verse. A hand-curated conversion of John 3:16 with full gloss (note.com) serves as the model for verse-level presentation: old text → modern → katakana → gloss → translation, all of which this site now renders (the カナ layer via ainconv, the gloss on hover).

Method & provenance

Every verse carries four aligned layers: the letter-faithful 1897 text; the machine re-transcription with per-token provenance (each conversion records its rule and confidence, reviewable in the workbench); the Japanese parallel; and the scan leaf, located by aligning the page OCR against the verse text (dynamic programming over the print order — leaves for every New Testament chapter). Review decisions are stored as an append-only audit log; the reading text always shows the latest accepted state, never overwriting the original.

Downloads & source

The Ainu text is in the public domain. Japanese parallel text is shown for study; its rights belong to its publisher. Scans courtesy of the Internet Archive.