The classification of the Japonic languages (Japanese and Ryukyuan) is unclear. The group is traditionally considered to consist of dialects of a single language isolate.
The possibility of a genetic relationship to the Goguryeo (Koguryŏ) language has the most currency. Goguryeo itself may be related to Korean, and a Korean-Japonic grouping is widely considered.
Independent of the question of the Korean-Japonic subgrouping, both the Japonic languages and Korean are sometimes included in the Altaic and hypothetical Eurasiatic proposals by proponents of these linguistic macrofamilies.
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The Japanese-Koguryoic proposal dates back to Shinmura Izuru's (1916) observation that the attested Goguryeo numerals, 3, 5, 7, and 10, were very similar to Japanese. The hypothesis proposes that Japanese is a relative of the extinct languages spoken by the Buyeo-Goguryeo cultures of Korea, southern Manchuria, and Liaodong. The best attested of these is the language of Goguryeo, with the more poorly-attested Buyeo languages of Baekje and Buyeo believed to also be related.
Supporters of this theory do not include modern Korean as part of that family because it is thought to have derived from the Silla language and it has been shown that the Korean and Buyeo-Goguryeo languages share only a few lexical items, which are typical cultural loanwords.
A monograph by Christopher Beckwith (2004) has established about 140 lexical items in the Goguryeo corpus. They mostly occur in place name collocations, many of which may include grammatical morphemes (including cognates of the Japanese genitive marker no and the Japanese adjective-attributive morpheme -sa) and a few of which may show syntactical relationships. He postulates that the majority of the identified Goguryeo corpus, including all the grammatical morphemes, is related to Japanese.
William George Aston suggested in 1879 in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society that Japanese is related to Korean. A relationship between Japanese and Korean was endorsed by the Japanese scholar Shōsaburō Kanazawa in 1910. Some other scholars took this position in the twentieth century (Poppe 1965:137). Substantial arguments in favor of a Japanese-Korean relationship were presented by Samuel Martin, a leading specialist in Japanese and Korean, in 1966 and in subsequent publications (e.g. Martin 1990). Other linguists advocating this position include John Whitman (1985) and Barbara E. Riley (2004), and Sergei Starostin with his lexicostatistical research The Altaic Problem and the Origins of the Japanese Language (Moscow, 1991). A Japanese-Korean connection does not necessarily exclude a Japanese-Koguryo or Altaic relationship.
The possible lexical relationship between Korean and Japanese can be briefly exemplified by such basic vocabulary items, see table below and Martin 1966.
| Comparison with Japanese | |||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Old Japanese | Japanese | meaning | Mid-Korean | Korean | meaning | ||||||||
| midu | mizu | water | myr | mul | water | ||||||||
| midu | mizu | water | mos | mot | pond | ||||||||
| ki, ku, ko | ki(te), ku(ru), ko(nai) | to come | ga- | ga- | to go | ||||||||
| kata- | kata- | to be hard | gut- | gut- | to be hard | ||||||||
| wi- | i- | to sit (Old Japanese) to be (in a certain place, said of an animate being) |
i- (after a consonant-final root) ~ zero (after a vowel-final root) | i- (after a consonant-final root) ~ zero (after a vowel-final root) | to be (copula) | ||||||||
| naɸ- | na- | to be not | ani | ani, an | not | ||||||||
| mïna | mina | all, everyone | man-hɔ- | manh- | to be many, to be much | ||||||||
| kasa | kasa | wide-brimmed hat, sombrero umbrella, parasol |
gat | gat | traditional Korean top hat | ||||||||
The same possible cognates are often observed in other members of the potential Altaic family, especially among the Tungusic languages. Compare, for instance, Nanai muke "water"; giagda- "to walk on foot"; anaa, anna "not" (from Starostin's database).
Next to similarities in basic vocabulary, the hypothesis is also based on typological and grammatical similarity.
Some critics of this hypothesis (such as Alexander Vovin) claim that there are difficulties in establishing exact phonological laws and that Japanese and Korean have few shared innovations. There are also drastic differences between the native Korean and Japanese number systems.
The idea of a Japanese-Korean relationship overlaps with the extended form of the Altaic hypothesis (see below), but not all scholars who argue for one also argue for the other. For example, Samuel Martin, who was a major advocate of a Japanese-Korean relationship, only provided cautious support to the inclusion of these languages in Altaic, and Talat Tekin, an Altaicist, includes Korean in Altaic but not Japanese (Georg et al. 1999:72, 74).
According to its proponents, Altaic is a language family consisting at a minimum of Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic. G.J. Ramstedt's Einführung in die altaische Sprachwissenschaft ('Introduction to Altaic Linguistics') in 1952–1957 included Korean in Altaic. Roy Andrew Miller's Japanese and the Other Altaic Languages, published in 1971, included Japanese in Altaic as well. The most important recent work in favor of this expanded Altaic family is An Etymological Dictionary of the Altaic Languages (3 volumes) by Sergei Starostin, Anna V. Dybo, and Oleg A. Mudrak (2003).
The Altaic family is by no means generally accepted, either in its core form of Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic or its expanded form of Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic, Korean, and Japanese. The best-known critiques are those of Gerard Clauson (1956) and Gerhard Doerfer (1963, 1988). Currently active critics include Stefan Georg and Alexander Vovin.
Evidence for this grouping mostly lies in claimed correspondences in vocabulary, as shown in the following table, although attempts have been made to reconstruct a number of suffixes.
| Japanese (pre-WWII orthog) |
Turkish | English gloss | notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| ta-ke 岳 | tepe/dağ | "mountain" | |
| i-, yo- | iyi | "good" | |
| ka-san 火山 | kazan | "volcano" | Turkish kazan alternatively means "cauldron". |
| mizu 水 | su | "water" | |
| yama 山 | yamaç | "mountain" | Turkish yamaç actually means "the hillside of the mountain". |
| ishi 石 | taş | "stone" | |
| yo 四 | dört | "four" | |
| kura 鞍 | kürtün | "saddle" | |
| yak- | ya(k)- | "to burn" | Turkish yak- is exclusively transitive ("to burn (it)", "to light (it) on fire"); intransitive counterpart is yan- |
| kir- | kır- | "to cut" | Turkish kır- actually means "to break; to split, to chop (wood); to fold; to destroy, to break (resistance, pride, desire, etc.); to reduce (price); to offend, to hurt": cf. Turkish kırma, the deverbal noun derived from the verb kır-: "a pleat, a fold; folding, collapsible; groats; hybrid, mongrel". Turkish kes- is more specifically "to cut". |
| inu 犬 | it | "dog" | cf. Manchu indahŭn, Nanai ida, Ainu seta, Chinese "zodiacal dog" 戌 *zyüt, Jeju "puppy" gaŋsæŋi |
| yaban 野蛮 | yaban | "savage" | Yabancı means "alien/foreigner" in Turkish. In Japanese Yaban-ji means "barbarian". |
| kuro 黒 | kara | "black" | cf. Ainu kur "shadow", *kur-ne > kunne "black; dark" |
| kura- | karar- | "to be dark" | cog. with preceding |
| e へ | -ye | "to" | In Turkish, "-ye" is an inflection particle at the end of the some words which add same meaning as does destination indicator e (*pe) in Japanese.(e.g. göl-e; mizuumi e) |
| sore それ | şu | "that" | |
| nani 何 | ne | "what" | cf. Ainu ne (interrogative stem) as in nep "what" and nen "who(m)," Mandarin Chinese nǎ "which," Korean nugu "who(m)" |
| Sore wa nan desu ka? それは何ですか？ |
Şu ne dir ki? | "What is that?" |
These examples come from Starostin's database, which contains a comprehensive list of comparisons and hypothetical Altaic etymologies.
Suggestions of connections to Japanese, Altaic and Dravidian were made by Hermann Jacobi in 1897 (Compositum und Nebensatz, pp. 106–131), who further noted structural similarities to Proto-Indo-European.[1]
Joseph Greenberg (2000–2002) argued for the inclusion of Japanese in his proposed Eurasiatic language family. In contrast to Sergei Starostin, he rejected the inclusion of Korean in Altaic. According to Greenberg, Japanese-Ryukyuan, Korean, and Ainu form a separate subgroup within Eurasiatic.
Like other language classifications of Greenberg's, the Eurasiatic family is often attacked on the ground that it is based on "mass lexical comparison"; however, this is a fictitious method. Greenberg's own terminology was originally "mass comparison", which he later changed to "multilateral comparison"; from his first use of it in the 1950s on, it always involved comparison of grammatical formatives as well as of lexical items, along with considerable attention to typologically probable paths of sound change (cf. Greenberg 2005).
In contrast to Greenberg, many historical linguists remain convinced that systematic phonological reconstruction is necessary to establish genetic relationship between languages, and consequently reject the Eurasiatic hypothesis.