Ainu & Gilyak, Japanese & Korean

[Johanna Nichols]

Miguel Carrasquer Vidal <mcv at PI.NET> wrote:
>
>One thing that caught my attention in the linguistic database from
>Johanna Nichols' "Linguistic Diversity in Space and Time" was the
>typological near-identity of Gilyak and Ainu.  Of all the typological
>features listed, Ainu and Gilyak only differ in that Gilyak has
>numerical classifiers (26 of them).  Is there any other evidence for
>contacts between Gilyak and Ainu?
>
 
CAUTION -- That database should be used as a pointer to the descriptive
publications, not as a full typological description in itself.  If Gilyak
and Ainu exhibit typological near-identity, that just goes to show you how
impoverished a typological description is compared to the real thing,
because those two languages are very different.  (More generally, Gilyak is
very different from any other language on earth.)
 
Since the question of Japanese and Korean has come up on the list, I have a
question for Alexander Vovin and/or others who have worked on these
languages:  what, in a nutshell, is the evidence that Japanese and Korean
are related?  I've read as much of the relevant literature as I could find,
and the only support offered seems to be that if you assume they are
related you can find sound correspondences and apply the comparative
method.  But what is the evidence for assuming relatedness in the first
place?  Thanks for any help anyone can give me.
 
Johanna Nichols
Slavic Languages, UC Berkeley