Re: Verbs as Adjectives - Reply and Thanks. :)

Chris Bates wrote:
> BTW, I know its widely held that Japanese is an isolate, but what's the
> minority view?
Views would be more accurate.  :-)  According to the Languages of Japan,
the major theories relating Japanese to other languages can be
classified thusly:

1.  Theories connecting Japanese with the languages of North Asia
  a.  Theories placing Japanese with the Altaic* or Ural-Altaic
      languages
  b.  Theories connecting Japanese with Korean.  The majority of
      scholars upholding this theory also regard Korean as a branch of
      the Altaic language family.  They try at least to find
      relationships between Korean and Japanese on the one hand, and
      between Korean and the Altaic languages on the other
2.  Theories relating Japanese with the languages of South Asia
  a.  The Malayo-Polynesian or Austro-Asiatic theory
  b.  The Tibeto-Burmese (sic) Theory
3.  Theories connecting Japanese with the Indo-European languages
4.  Other theories.  In the past various unacceptable theories have
    connected Japanese with Persian, Greek, Basque, and Sumerian, but
    these theories have been quickly forgotten.
5.  A hypothesis that considers Japanese to consist of an Austronesian
    substratum and an Altaic superstratum
6.  A hypothesis that views Japanese as an Austronesian-Altaic hybrid
    or mixed languages.  [i.e., something like a creole in origin]

He goes on to mention that 3 and 4 have been least successful

> From the little grammar and vocab I've read about, it
> "feels" like an austronesian language like Javanese, Tagalog, Indonesian
> etc with a lot of borrowings from Sino-Tibetan languages *shrugs*.
Borrowings from Chinese, definitely correct.  Chinese occupies a
position in Japanese (and many other East Asian languages) roughly
similar to Greek and Latin in English.  Austronesian, as mentioned
above, is believed by many to be at least a substrate in Japanese.

*Of course, it should be added that the Altaic family is itself in
dispute by some linguists.