Contact between genealogically related languages

要旨

Although the reconstruction of Proto-Japano-Koreanic is still a work in progress, it is already sufficiently robust to establish a genetic relationship between Korean and Japanese. Furthermore, against the background of the cognates that have been reconstructed so far, the roughly three dozen clearly identifiable borrowings from Old Korean into Old Japanese amount to only about six percent of all matches. Claims that all structural similarities between Korean and Japanese are due to ancient borrowings must therefore be rejected. To answer the question of whether Proto-Japano-Koreanic is better regarded as a first-order daughter of Transeurasian or as a branch of Macro-Tungusic, it would be better to compare reconstructed Proto-Japano-Koreanic forms “by hand” separately with forms in Proto-Tungusic, Proto-Mongolic, and Proto-Turkic than to rely on statistical analyses of so-called core vocabulary.

主題