20. The likelihood of morphological borrowing: The case of Korean and Japanese

要旨

This chapter describes the proto-Korean-Japanese (pKJ) hypothesis. The late Samuel E. Martin observed that it is often possible to translate long stretches of one language into the other, morpheme for morpheme, with the order intact. The primary goal of Alexander Vovin's recent study Koreo-Japonica is to refute as many etymologies of Martin and his student John Whitman in support of the pKJ hypothesis as possible. Vovin prefers to believe that most if not all the Japanese lexical items with Korean matches, including grammatical morphemes, were not inherited by the two witness languages from a common ancestor but were borrowed by Japanese from Korean in early historical times. The chapter focuses on the reasons Vovin gives to justify this conclusion, and identify their weaknesses. They illustrate the dangers of excessive reliance on notions of borrowing and linguistic convergence in general. Keywords:Alexander Vovin; linguistic convergence; morphological borrowing; proto-Korean-Japanese (pKJ) hypothesis

主題