Formation of the Japanese language in connection with Austronesian languages

要旨

Abstract It is generally believed that Japanese is an isolated language, forming a single family together with the languages of the Ryukyu Islands. Although Japanese shares many typological features with the so-called Altaic languages, the lack of clear phonological correspondences is a serious problem for the Japanese-Altaic hypothesis. Austronesian elements in Japanese have been underestimated until now, because they have been thought to be lexical in character: that is, old borrowings. I argue that Japanese is a mixed language formed through the pidginization of northern, possibly Tungusic, languages with some form of Austronesian. The language family in the southern areas that is linked to the Ryukyu-Japanese Archipelago is called Austronesian. Van H. Labberton and J. Whymant in the 1920s and some other scholars first noticed the location of Austronesian speakers relative to the Archipelago, and postulated the importance of Austronesian in the formation of the Japanese language. However, tentative comparison among vocabularies yields semantically improbable examples (Table 23.1), even after attention is paid to phonological correspondences.

主題