Book Review: Alexander VOVIN and OSADA Toshiki (eds.): Nihongo keitôron no genzai.Perspectives on the Origins of the Japanese Language

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In the 'Introduction' to his Korean-English Dictionary J. C. Gale fondly recalled "intimate friends with the remembrance of whom you associate the charms and absurdities of the Far East" (1911, p. v).Those of us who (like the present reviewer) are old enough to be survivors of front-line action in the Nihongo no keitron wars of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s will find in this hefty new addition to the academic literature concerning the possible genetic connection (or, connections?) of Japanese with other languages in the world, past or present, much that will immediately bring back memories of intimate friends, and much also with which to remind us, in Gale's felicitous phrase, of the "charms and absurdities" of the academic communities, both East and West, that were similarly involved.It was, as scholarship goes, not the best of times; but for all that it was not the worst of times either: it was a time when one waited for the new issue of Gengo Seikatsu or Gekkan Gengo or Dolmen to arrive, to learn who in Japan had now proposed what foreign language as the latest if highly unlikely genetic "near relative" to Japanese; and there were the letters, many letters, from such indefatigable observers of (and participants in) the scene as Murayama Shichir (1908Shichir ( -1995) ) (incidentally, one of the four scholars to whom this volume is dedicated) -all good friends who could always be relied upon to keep one informed about who was now up to what.Sometime before the end of the last century, all that changed.The Nihongo no keitron bmu, like so many trendy 'booms' in Japanese society and academia, sank into oblivion almost as suddenly as it had arisen.Like the 'boom' itself, the underlying causes for its sudden eclipse mostly remain to be identified and analyzed.That work, if and when it is ever undertaken, will properly fall more nearly into the purview of the sociologist than that of the historical linguist; the phenomena at issue had a great deal more to do with the nature and structure of Japanese society than they did with linguistics.Nevertheless, many of us who still remain interested in these questions have

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