This page contains links to free Ainu language resources currently available on the net. At the moment these resources are rather scarce and are often in Japanese.

In the past, the books of John Batchelor (a scholar of Ainu working around the start of the 20th century) were available online from Google but unfortunately this seems to no longer be the case.

Word lists / Dictionaries

The Saman Ainu Dictionary(浦河アイヌ語辞典)

This large word list (in Japanese) is broken up by topic rather than alphabetically, which can make finding words a challenge. It's intended for use in education.

The purpose of this page is to provide a very simple guide to some of the grammar and constructions found in Japanese haiku, for those who can maybe bluff their way in modern Japanese on a good day but don't have the inclination to become poetry experts.

Unfortunately almost all Japanese poetry is either genuinely written in old Japanese, or looks as if it were. This guide therefore might be useful for answering questions such as:

• When it says 「歌ふ」is that the same as 「歌う」 and do I pronounce the 'h'?
• When it says 「ありけり」, is that part of the verb 'aru' or what?

Unicode in Japan

Guide to a technical and psychological struggle

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This is not a final version and probably contains numerous stylistic and factual disasters. Please correct my faults!

Purpose of this Document

The purpose of this document is to provide background information for the discussion of Unicode in the context of Japanese information processing. Because this has become an emotional subject for some people, misinformation has become common and it's hard to avoid heated debates on topics like 'Why Unicode can never ever work' or 'Why Unicode is the answer to all life's problems'. Hopefully this guide can help distinguish fact from dogma -- and it could also provide useful ammunition, whatever side you want to argue on.

This page is designed as a guide for those who are not experts in internationalization in general nor Unicode in particular, but want to use correct terminology and be persuasive when discussing character sets and the like. The purpose of this page is to equip the reader to cut through the fear, doubt, and inaccuracy which often springs up when internationalization rears its head. This page does not contain an actual description of the various relevant standards.

Briefest possible guide to Unicode: NEVER CONFUSE A CHARACTER SET WITH AN ENCODING SYSTEM!! Obey this simple rule and people will be very very grateful.

Introduction

The purpose of this list is this: given the name of a character set, find out a little bit about it.
For each character set, the following information is stored:

• The 'main' name of the character set. Where possible, this is the name of the standard it is defined in.
• Other names, nicknames, and aliases by which the set is known.
• Whether the 'character set' is actually a character set or an encoding system, or both. In some cases the entry is for a family of character sets.