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From: deb5@midway.uchicago.edu (Daniel von Brighoff)
Subject: Re: DID COLUMBUS. . .(Who are the Ainu?)
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Date: Thu, 27 Feb 1997 20:47:52 GMT
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	The article is crap, pure and simple.  I was only skimming until I
got to the linguistic data, but the first red light was in the religion
section where it says something like "the Ainu call *their God* "kamuy"
while the Japanese call *their God* Kamisama". [my emphasis]  Horsepuckey.
Anyone who knows more than a tiny bit about Shinto knows that "kami" is
not an equivalent to English "god" and, certainly, not to the Christian
god.  This is like saying "The Americans call their kami 'saints'".  In
fact, it's less accurate than that.

	(It's quite likely that there's a linguistic connexion between
"kamuy" and "kami", but the above is not the way to go about making this
point.)

	The etymologies are entirely unconvincing.  The first two I
noticed were for "Fuji-san" and "Hokkaido", both of which are composed,
wholly or in part, of vocabulary borrowed from Chinese.  [san "mountain"
(Mand. 'shan'), hoku "north" ('bei'; cf. Sino-Korean 'puk''), kai "sea"
('hai'), do "island" ('dao').]  I believe in freedom of information and I
like to encourage any interest in foreign languages that's out there, but,
I swear, they should start requiring licenses for access to Basque
dictionaries.
-- 
	 Daniel "Da" von Brighoff    /\          Dilettanten
	(deb5@midway.uchicago.edu)  /__\         erhebt Euch
				   /____\      gegen die Kunst!
