Japanese and Korean

要旨

Abstract This chapter gives background information about the phonological, typological, and genealogical characteristics of Korean and Japanese. It compares a relatively complex inventory of Korean phonemes (e.g., a tripartite contrast of obstruents) with a relatively simple inventory of Japanese phonemes (e.g., a binary contrast in which obstruents contrast in voicing) and shows how they correspond to the systems of romanization used in examples. Korean and Japanese are head-final agglutinating languages just like Altaic languages and differ from head-initial isolating Chinese and agglutinating/polysynthetic Ainu. Of these neighboring languages, the two languages are particularly similar, exhibiting almost identical morpho-syntactic features. Such similarities may have resulted from areal factors (language contact) rather than genealogical. There have been debates between theories advocating and opposing their genetic affiliation. A proposal was also made to relate Japanese to the Koguryŏ language based on the record of old toponyms. Contact with Chinese resulted in influx of Sinic origin vocabulary in their lexicons.

主題