On the Historical Relationship of the Pitch Accent System of Hokkaido Ainu and the Vowel Length System of Sakhalin Ainu" --A Study toward the Solution of the Historico-Phonological Relationship of Hokkaido Ainu and Sakhalin Ainu-

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Having utilized all the materials, both speech and written, on Sakhalin Ainu, the pitch accent of a part of the speech material 'Karafuto Ainugo' was analyzed with the speech-analyzer software on the computer to see if there was any correlation between the pitch accent of a word and the vowel length of that word and it is found that there was no clear correlation between the two.The long vowel of a word in Sakhalin Ainu is correlated with the high pitch of that equivalent word in Hokkaido Ainu in the following specific phonetic environment& (1)the first mora of CVCV in Hokkaido Ainu has low pitch and the second mora has high pitch, and (2) the the first closed syllable like CVCCV(C) in Hokkaido Ainu has always high pitch. The other syllables do not normally have any correlations between the two. The only phonological feature in Proto-Ainu is vowel length but not pitch accent because we are systematically able to reconstruct Proto-forms only on the basis of vowel length, and logically explicate the phonological changes of the later forms in Sakhalin and Hokkaido Ainu, which supports Hattori's theory.