<言語資料>ミャンマーの「姥捨山」 : ジンポー語による民話テキスト

Abstract

本言語資料では、日本昔話「姥捨山」と類似するジンポ一語によるカチン民話の本文2編を語釈および翻訳とともに提示する。「姥捨山」は、我が国の各地に古くから伝わる昔話・伝説である。柳田國男は日本に流布するこの昔話を「畚型」、「難題型」、「福運型」、「枝折型」の4つの型に分類し、前二者は外来のもの、後二者は我が国在来のものと推定する。筆者および協力者が蒐集したカチン民話は「畚型」と「枝折型」に相当する。この事実はこの昔話の起源と伝播に関する従来の説に新しい視点を与えるものである。

This paper offers two fully-analyzed folktale texts in Jinghpaw, a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in northern Myanmar and adjacent areas of China and India. The present folktales are selected from 1, 805 Jinghpaw narrative recordings (ca. 157 hours in total) with 1, 552 transcriptions (as of December 22, 2018) archived at PARADISEC. They were collected in Myanmar by the author and local collaborators between 2009 and 2017 with the help of 196 native narrators. The present texts are of significance in that their story lines are similar to those of the popular Japanese traditional folktale "Ubasuteyama." Since Kunio Yanagita 1945 [1970], it has often been recognized that the folktale has four versions, known as the "basket-type, " "difficulty-type, " "fortune-type, " and "broken branch-type." The former two are considered to be of foreign origin and the latter two of Japanese origin. The folktales we collected in Myanmar correspond to the "basket-type" and the "broken branch-type." This fact may suggest a new interpretation of the diffusion of the story.