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INTRODUCTION This book attempts to critically re-evaluate the relationship between Korean and Japonic.1 It is quite apparent that Korean and Japonic are very similar, often to the extent that a word-to-word translation is possible from one language to another. Such similarity is, however, purely typological and cannot be used as evidence for a common genetic origin. The theory that the two languages are genetically related was originally proposed in the eighteenth century by Fujii Teikan, a Japanese scholar. The following century saw very little scholarly activity on the matter, but the issue became a subject of scholarly works once again between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, starting with Aston’s pioneering study (1879), which was followed by Kanazawa (1910) and Ogura (1934). All these publications supported the idea that Korean and Japonic are genetically related, and it seems that the only person who held strong reservations was Hattori (1959). Despite the fact that there are many important publications on comparative Koreo-Japonic, starting from Martin’s seminal work (1966), with Whitman’s outstanding dissertation (1985) deserving a special mention, I feel that proof of a genetic relationship between Korean and Japonic is as lacking now as it was prior to 1966. In other words, although many publications by Martin, Ramsey, Whitman, Serafim, Frellesvig, King, Unger, and the present author have attempted to solve some particular problems or proposed new and interesting etymologies, no substantial progress has been made. Koreo-Japonic as a valid genetic family fails to convince general linguists. The majority of Western linguists who are engaged in the historical study of either Japanese or Korean, or both, accept the genetic relationship between these two languages, while most historical linguists in Korea and Japan are either skeptical or ambivalent. I believe that this situation calls for a re-evaluation of all the progress that has been made in reconstructing and comparing Proto-Korean and ProtoJaponic that has led to the Koreo-Japonic hypothesis. To proceed with this re-evaluation, I first need to define some fundamental notions, such as, what a proto-language is, and what part of the Korean or Japonic heritage is going to be treated as belonging to a respective proto-language. Defining a proto-language Sometimes one can observe a dangerous tendency in the field to treat data from existing old languages as if they represent the respective protolanguages . This is less of an issue on the Korean side, but on the Japanese side the Western Old Japanese of the Asuka-Nara periods sometimes 1 See below on terminological difference between ‘Japonic’ and ‘Japanese’. 4———Koreo-Japonica receives royal treatment, as though it stands in the same relationship to all other known varieties of Japonic as Latin to all Romance languages. In spite of the importance of Western Old Japanese to the history of Japonic, we should not forget that it represents a very old stage of just one variety of the family, namely Central Japanese, which is characterized by a certain set of innovations that did not happen elsewhere. In this study I advocate the position that a proto-language can be reconstructed only from a wide range of data, including philological data from old languages, data from modern languages and dialects, and internal reconstruction. Below I provide exact definitions of how Proto-Korean and Proto-Japonic are understood. There are also areas traditionally neglected in the reconstruction of Proto-Korean and Proto-Japonic. In Korean historical linguistics these include almost all pre-alphabetic sources on Early Middle and Old Korean, since they only occasionally find their way into the works on reconstruction. In Japonic historical linguistics the same fate is shared by the Eastern Old Japanese and the Old Ryukyuan languages. I try as much as space allows to address these data in this study. What can be called Proto-Korean? There is less internal diversification in Korean than in Japonic, although the Ceycwuto dialect on Ceycwuto island and the Yukcin dialect still spoken in Northern Hamkyeng, as well as by immigrant communities in China, Russia, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan, are very different from the rest of Korean and from each other. Korean is also less fortunate than Japanese in the respect that before 1443 (that is prior to the invention of the alphabetic Hankul script) it is attested much more scantily than Japanese, and even the attested data are often partially hidden under semantographic Chinese script. Finally, even bits of data that happen to be written phonetically...

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