| Summary: | application/pdf From the viewpoints of cultural anthropology and experimental phonetics, this paper dealt with a mysterious and little known game called rekukkara or rekuhkara performed by Sakhalin Ainus. This game is conducted by a pair of women, facing each other in a mouth-to-mouth distance, in the following way. One partner sends her guttural voice sounds into the mouth cavity of the other through a tube made of their hands. The guttural voice being applied into the receiver’s mouth can be modulated by the volume alteration of the mouth cavity. Similar games are recognized only among Chukchas and Canadian Inuits. In the framework of ‘speech synthesis by vocal tract simulation’, we proved that rekukkara is a kind of speech synthesis game. The key secret is for the voice receiver to hold her glottis shut and conduct some pantomimed articulation while the sender is sending her guttural voice into her mouth cavity. We argued that the game might be originated in the speaking jews-harp cultures and black-smith shamanism, one or both of which we can recognize among Ket, Sayan-Altaic, Tuvan, Buryat, Yakut, and Tungusic players of orally resonating instruments. We also pointed out that there is a correlation found between the bellows blowing air into the furnace at a black-smith’s work place and the guttural voice flowing into the mouth cavity of the game player. In the period of Mongolic domination, ancestors of the Sakhalin Ainu, who happened to move from the island to the Coast districts of now Russia, might have acquired from Tungusic players how to make orally applied noises transform into speech sounds. We also discussed the etymological question of a metallic jews-harp called kobuz, whose etymology is still unknown. Based on Tang dynasty 唐代 phonological reading of the eight names 渾不似,胡不兒,火不思,虎拍子, 琥珀 思,虎撥思,胡撥四,呉撥四cited in an Edo.period archive Geiennisshou .苑日 渉, we attested that the word 胡不兒belongs to Bulghar Turkic while the other seven variants to General Turkic. The phonological notation for 胡 不兒 is ...
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