アヨロ あよろ Ayoro
Shiraoi, Iburi region, Hokkaidō
Ainu spellings: Ay-or
The article places Ayoro beside Uyoro as one of the two names of Shiraoi called hard to explain. Both end in or, and the author reads both as landform names.
Location
42.4666, 141.1863 · Coordinates: OpenStreetMap Nominatim, 2026-09-10, on アヨロ川. Open in OpenStreetMap
Referents
- river The Ayoro River and the Pon-Ayoro River. On the Imai map the name belongs to the cliff ground by the Pon-Ayoro, away from the present Ayoro River
- settlement Ayoro, where the terrace by the coast is called kamuy-mintar 'the garden where the gods play' and the cave Ahunrupar lies beside the cape
Analyses
ay-or-o-kotan
アヨロコタン ‘village where there are arrows’ received readingProponent: 定説
The parts are dictionary words; the article reports the reading without an account of what the arrows refer to.
ay-or
アヨロ ‘place of the cliff’ proposed- ay ‘cliff’
- or ‘place of’
Proponent: zenibako_trek（小樽銭函地名歴史研究会） (zenibako_trek (Otaru Zenibako Place-Name and History Society))
The author reaches the reading through the Aikappu names found in several places, taken as aykap 'cannot' and explained as cliffs an arrow cannot reach. He holds that a verb alone hardly becomes a place name and reads Aikappu as an older ay-ka-o-p 'place on top of the cliff', which puts an element ay 'cliff' in the same position as in Ayoro. The named ground is the wall of cliff that rises there.
or 'place of' is a dictionary word; the element ay in the sense 'cliff' comes from the author's re-analysis of the Aikappu names and no dictionary in the article supports it.
Attestations
- アイロウ map Edo period 秦蝦夷島図zenibako_trek…
- アイロ map 19th century 間宮河川図zenibako_trek…