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Re: Old Japanese

From:Jeff Jones <jeffsjones@...>
Date:Thursday, November 9, 2000, 15:30
On Tue, 7 Nov 2000 20:48:14 -0800, Marcus Smith <smithma@...> wrote:

>Eric Christopherson wrote: > >> > Shibatani is indeed the author of _The Languages of Japan_ which is an >> > excellent introduction to Japanese and Ainu. Another good source for >> > historical Japanese is a book by Martin, called (I believe) _Japan and >> > other Altaic Languages_. >> >> Interesting! Does it actually compare it side-by-side with Altaic >> languages? AFAIK the Japanese-Altaic connection is conjecture at best, >> but it'd still be neat to see the justification for the conjecture. > >It is the source for the Japanese-Altaic hypothesis. The data is not very >convincing though. >
I read it quite a few years ago. IIRC, the proposed sound changes were all reasonable, but there weren't enough examples of each to show regular correspondences. Jeff