About the edition

The 1897 text

Chikoro Utarapa ne Yesu Kiristo Ashiri Aeuitaknup — “the New Testament of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ” — was printed in Yokohama in 1897 by the Yokohama Bunsha for the Bible Societies' Committee for Japan. Its title page says “translated out of the Greek” by the Rev. John Batchelor. The present dataset contains 275,510 whitespace-delimited Ainu source tokens across the New Testament, Psalms, and Jonah. The New Testament facsimile is the Internet Archive item ainu_nt (716 scan images). The base electronic text comes from the British & Foreign Bible Society's 2018 digital edition, with textual verification against the printed pages.

The printed editions

Batchelor's scriptures appeared in nine printings between 1886 and 1898. Dates, imprints and extents follow Darlow and Moule, whose catalogue collates the British and Foreign Bible Society's own holdings; the 1897 New Testament is their no. 1528. This edition sets only the 1897 New Testament, with the separately issued Psalms and Jonah.

1. 1886 Matthew 1–9 28 pp. Tokyo · B.F.B.S.
2. 1889 Matthew 110 pp. Tokyo · B.F.B.S.
3. Jonah set here 7 pp. Tokyo · B.F.B.S.
4. 1891 Mark, Luke, John 348 pp. London · B.F.B.S. Facsimile · HathiTrust
5. 1893 Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians 63 pp. Yokohama · Bible Societies' Committee
6. 1894 James, Peter, John, Jude 83 pp. Yokohama · Bible Societies' Committee
7. 1896 Psalms set here 228 pp. Yokohama · Bible Societies' Committee
8. 1897 New Testament set here 706 pp. Yokohama · Yokohama Bunsha Facsimile · Internet Archive
9. 1898 Genesis 1–3 — published privately

Orthography

Batchelor's spelling belongs to a Hepburn-derived romanization tradition developed before Ainu phonology had been adequately analysed. Its letter sequences ch and sh respectively represent the affricate phoneme now written c and phonetic realizations of /s/, including palatalization near /i/, that phonemic spelling does not distinguish. In tambe, phonemic /n/ is realized at the labial place of the following /p/, while the stop's voicing is non-contrastive; the historical spelling records both phonetic effects where the normalized form writes tanpe. In koro, a brief non-phonemic vocalic offglide following coda /r/ was interpreted as a full vowel. In kamui and hau, the vowel letters i and u represent coda approximants now written y and w. These spellings are all the result of an immature analysis of Ainu phonology. The modern layer is this edition's phonemic re-transcription, broadly following current Hokkaido Ainu dictionary and teaching practice. It preserves the wording, lexical choices, and morphosyntax. Spelling and editorial boundary marking change, and the source line remains available beside it.

Equals signs and spaces in the normalized layer record editorial analyses of person marking and word or morpheme boundaries. The source line preserves the printed typography and every printed form. Biblical names retain their lexical identity and may receive normalized transcription. Uncertain decisions receive review flags. The converter's reported 87.9% token accuracy comes from an out-of-domain benchmark on 50 expert-respelled sentences by 阪口諒 and 渡邊香織 (2019). Its evaluation scope is limited to that test set. Katakana is generated with ainconv. The gloss switch displays Leipzig-style interlinear analysis. Hover lexicon cards remain available independently.

Linguistic basis and conversion specification: Historical Orthographies and the Batchelor Tradition · conversion specification and benchmark

Method & provenance

Every verse aligns the diplomatic 1897 source layer, Westcott and Hort's Greek text (1881), a machine-generated normalized transcription with recorded rules and confidence, a modern Japanese Bible parallel, the English Revised Version (1885), and the original page image. Scan-image positions were estimated by matching page-heading OCR with verse text in print order. Review decisions are stored as an append-only history. The source layer remains intact, and the reading text shows the latest accepted state.

The English layer comes from the eBible.org Revised Version. Greek lexical and morphological lookup data come from Clear Bible's MACULA Greek (CC BY 4.0) and are matched to the Westcott–Hort surface form. They provide lexical reading aids. Token-by-token syntactic alignment falls outside this layer's scope. eBible.org · MACULA Greek

Downloads & source

The 1897 Ainu text is in the public domain. The modern-orthography layer, apparatus, and page data added by this edition are released under CC BY 4.0. The Japanese parallel is shown on-site for study only; its rights belong to its publisher, so it is excluded from downloads. Scans are courtesy of the Internet Archive.

Wikidata

The 1897 edition and the translation as a whole each carry a Wikidata item.

• Q140568806 the 1897 New Testament
• Q4903138 Bible translations into Ainu

How to cite

The 1897 text is in the public domain. The transcription, glosses, translations and alignment are licensed CC BY 4.0: reuse them freely, naming this edition. Cite the printed book directly where the reading is what matters, and this edition where its editorial layers are.

This edition

Ainu Bible Digital Edition. bible.aynu.org. CC BY 4.0.

The 1897 text

Batchelor, John, tr. Chikoro utarapa ne Yesu Kiristo ashiri aeuitaknup oma kambi = The New Testament of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ in Ainu. Yokohama: printed for the Bible Societies’ Committee for Japan by the Yokohama Bunsha, 1897. Darlow & Moule 1528.