“On the Historical Relationship of the Pitch Accent System of Hokkaido Ainu and the Vowel Length System of Sakhalin Ainu (1) : A Preliminary Study toward the Historico-Phonological Relationship of Hokkaido Ainu and Sakhalin Ainu”

This study is a preliminary research on the historical relationship of the pitch accent system of Hokkaido Ainu and the vowel length system of Sakhalin Ainu. There are two opposing theories on the phonological features of Prote-Ainu, Hatteri Shiro\u27s Vowel Length Theory(1967) and Vovin\u27s Vewel Length and Pitch Accent Theory(l993): Hattori proposed that Proto-Ainu should have a phonological distinction between long and short vowels without pitch accent; on the other hand, Vovin proposed that Proto-Ainu had a phonological distinction not only between long and short vowels but alse between high and low pitch accents. This paper suggests that Proto-Ainu had both vowel length and pitch accent as the phonological features, which supports Vevin\u27s theory