The State of the Art of the Genetic Relationship of Japonic (II)

What is it about?

This article is a continuation of the first part published in JEAL 2/1. It explores several proposals of genealogical relationship that link Japanese to other linguistic families. In linguistics, genetic (or genealogical) relationship is the relationship between languages that are members of the same language family. So called "long-range comparisons" (also called distant genetic relationships) are those proposed language families where we deal with results with lower steadiness in the statistical context and where disagreement persists among linguists. This article analyses some speculative long-range comparisons, as well as other short-range attempts to link Japanese to other languages such as Ainu and Korean.

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Photo by eggbank on Unsplash

Photo by eggbank on Unsplash

Why is it important?

This article shows how not to use certain quantitative approaches to prove language relationship. Although it is not denied that they may have some utility, some authors have misinterpreted the power and scope of these new computational methods, while in most unfortunate cases they have reduced these new techniques to a veritable parody of themselves. On the other hand, this article also discusses some limits of short-range comparisons, including the Koreo-Japonic relationship. It is demonstrated how, more often than not, the evidence in support of these short-range proposals has a too weak argumentative force for related languages given by the absence of stable cognates (related words, that is words having the same linguistic derivation) in basic vocabulary, or the absence of a sufficiently high number of morphological connections, or the absence of "aberrant features".

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