Re: Old Japanese

On Tue, 7 Nov 2000 20:48:14 -0800, Marcus Smith <smithma@...> wrote:

>> > 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.
There's a volume in Russian on this topic ("The Altaic Problem and Genesis
 of the Japanese Language"), now available online
( http://starling.rinet.ru/texts/texts.htm ).

Won't help you much unless you can read Russian, by some coincidence.
And the Proto-Altaic reconstruction presented there is now dated.

OTOH the updated COMPLETE etymological database for Altaic (By
Starostin-Dybo-Mudrak)is available on the same site:
http://starling.rinet.ru/intrtext.htm -> etymological databases ->
Altaic

A lot of Old Japanese material. Unfortunately, the table of sound
correspondencies between Japanese & Altaic is not available from the
site. Really a pity since there are peculiar things with the sound
evolution (like the famous b > w, d > y changes).


Basilius