| Buyeo | |
|---|---|
| Puyo, Fuyu | |
| Geographic distribution: |
Korea, Japan, Southern Manchuria |
| Linguistic classification: | possibly Altaic (disputed) |
| Subdivisions: | |
Buyeo or Fuyu languages (부여 in Korean, Fúyú (扶餘) in Chinese) are a hypothetical language family that consists of ancient languages of the northern Korean Peninsula and southern Manchuria and possibly Japan. According to Chinese records, the languages of Buyeo, Goguryeo, Dongye, Okjeo, Baekje—and possibly Gojoseon—were similar. Ye-Maek may have been ancestral.
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The relationships of the poorly attested Buyeo dialects are disputed.
The Korean state of Baekje was founded by Goguryeo princes, and considered itself descended from Buyeo.[1][2][3] Baekje subsequently had close relations with Yamato period Japan; Christopher Beckwith suggests that at that point the Japanese may have still recognized a relationship to Buyeo. Beckwith reconstructs about 140 Goguryeo words, mostly from ancient place names, including Gaya.[4] Many include grammatical morphemes which appear to be cognate with morphemes of similar function in Japanese, such as genitive -no and attributive -si.
A number of linguists such as Kim Banghan, Vovin, and Unger classify Goguryeo as Old Korean. They note that the Japanese-like toponyms are mostly found in the central part of Korean peninsula, and theorize that they don’t reflect the Goguryeo language but rather the pre-Goguryeo population of the central and southern part of Korean peninsula. Since a number of Japanese-like toponyms found in the historical homeland of Silla[5] were also distributed in southern part of Korean peninsula, these linguists propose that there was once a Japonic language spoken in Korean peninsula, perhaps Gaya, which forms a substratum of the Silla language; Unger suggests that the ancestors of the Yayoi people would have settled Japan from the central or southern part of Korea. None of the Japanese cognates have been found in the historical homeland of Buyeo and Goguryeo in the northern part of Korean peninsula or south-western Manchuria. Koreanic toponyms, on the other hand, are distributed across the entire territory of the Three Kingdoms, from Manchuria to the southern Korean peninsula.
Though Shoku Nihongi, an ancient Japanese record, implies the close relationship between the Balhae language, the descendant of the Goguryeo language, and Silla language: a student sent from Silla to Japan for an interpreter training of Japanese language, assisted a diplomatic envoy from Balhae in communicating during the Japanese court audience.
According to Chinese records, the Buyeo languages appear to have been quite distinct from ancient Tungusic languages like Mohe,[6][7] though they may have been similar to Xianbei.[8]
Some of the grammatical case endings are similar between the Buyeo languages and Japanese and Korean.
| Grammatical particle / suffix | |||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Case | Goguryeo | Old Japanese | Silla | Middle Korean | |||||||||
| nominative | -i | -i¹ | – | -i | |||||||||
| genitive | -nə | -nə (modern -no) |
– | -nʲ -n ~ -nɔn ~ -nïn4 |
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| genitive | si | -si² -tu³ |
-s -ʌi -i |
-s -ɔy ~ -ïy |
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| locative | nʌrʌ | -nite | – | nʌr | |||||||||
Notes:
The genitive has possible wider Altaic extensions, with Jurchen–Manchu -ŋgV, Middle Mongolian -iyn/-y/-n, and Turkish -nIn.
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