Basic Okinawan From Conversation To Grammar
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Basic Okinawan
Author: Rumiko Shinzato
language: en
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
Release Date: 2024-05-31
Basic Okinawan is a groundbreaking work that will help students develop conversational skills and build a solid foundational understanding of the language’s grammar and vocabulary. The lessons are geared for students learning in the classroom or on their own and do not assume knowledge of Japanese. The ten learner-centered units in Part I systematically and incrementally introduce grammar and vocabulary through the story of Niko, an American exchange student in Okinawa. Each unit offers authentic dialogues focused around cultural themes, followed by concise grammar and vocabulary explanations, ample exercises, and situation-based applications. Lessons conclude with cultural notes that advance the unit’s themes, linking language learning with a wide range of disciplines such as history, geography, literature, religion, and popular culture. Woven throughout the story are humorous and thoughtful anecdotes that will inspire students to explore Okinawan language and culture further. Part II’s eight sections explain the grammar introduced in Part I—for example, parts of speech and sentence types—arranged by topic. This topical organization allows students to review grammar points from a fresh perspective that both augments and reinforces what was learned in Part I. In addition to the Appendix, which contains comprehensive vocabulary and construction lists with cross-references to sections in Part I, students should consult the companion dictionary and grammar, Mitsugu Sakihara’s Okinawan-English Word Book. A references section lists resources for further reading and study. Basic Okinawan presents a natural yet structured approach to the language that will engage students and connect them with Okinawan culture. An answer key to the exercises and audio files for lesson dialogues are available online at https://go.hawaii.edu/7Xn.
Okinawan-English Wordbook
Author: Mitsugu Sakihara
language: en
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
Release Date: 2006-06-30
The Okinawan-English Wordbook, written by the late Mitsugu Sakihara, historian and native speaker of the Naha dialect of Okinawa, is an all-new concise dictionary of the modern Okinawan language with definitions and explanations in English. The first substantive Okinawan-English lexicon in more than a century, it represents a much-needed addition to the library of reference materials on the language. The Wordbook opens to lay user and linguist alike an area heretofore accessible almost exclusively in Japanese works and adds to the general body of scholarship on various Ryukyuan languages and dialects by providing a succinct but comprehensive picture of modern colloquial Okinawan. The current work comprises nearly 10,000 entries, many with encyclopedic discussion, drawn from a wide variety of sources in addition to the author’s native knowledge and from numerous areas of interest, with emphasis on the cultural traditions of Okinawa. Entries reflect both contemporary Naha usage and archaisms and areal variants when these are of cultural, historical, or linguistic interest. Thus, in addition to being a comprehensive portrait of the modern Okinawan language, the Wordbook serves as an implicit introduction to the rich field of Japanese dialect studies. Prefatory material discusses the phonology of Okinawan and the romanization scheme employed in the book, with particular attention to phonological features of the language likely to be unfamiliar to native English speakers and those acquainted only with Japanese. A general introduction to the conjugation of verbs and adjectives in Okinawan is made as well.
Women of the Sacred Groves
Author: Susan Sered
language: en
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Release Date: 1999-03-04
Okinawa is the only contemporary society in which women lead the official, mainstream, publicly funded religion. Priestesses are the acknowledged religious leaders within the home, clan, and village--and, until annexation by Japan approximately one hundred years ago, within the Ryukyuan Kingdom. This fieldwork-based study provides a gender-sensitive look at a remarkable religious tradition. Susan Sered spent a year living in Henza, an Okinawan fishing village, joining priestesses as they conducted rituals in the sacred groves located deep in the jungle-covered mountains surrounding the village. Her observations focus upon the meaning of being a priestess and the interplay between women's religious preeminence and other aspects of the society. Sered shows that the villages social ethos is characterized by easy-going interpersonal relations, an absence of firm rules and hierarchies, and a belief that the village and its inhabitants are naturally healthy. Particularly interesting is her discovery that gender is a minimal category here: villagers do not adapt any sort of ideology that proclaims that men and women are inherently different from one another. Villagers do explain that because farmland is scarce in Okinawa, men have been compelled to go to the dangerous ocean and to foreign countries to seek their livelihoods. Women, in contrast, have remained present in their healthy and pleasant village, working on their farms and engaging in constant rounds of intra- and interfamilial socializing. Priestesses, who do not exert power in the sense that religious leaders in many other societies do, can be seen as the epitome of presence. By praying and eating at myriad rituals, priestesses make immediate and tangible the benevolent presence of kami-sama (divinity). Through in-depth examination of this unique and little-studied society, Sered offers a glimpse of a religious paradigm radically different from the male-dominated religious ideologies found in many other cultures.