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[Dorothy Disterheft]

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> From:   Alexander Vovin <vovin at hawaii.edu>
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> To:     Larry Trask <larryt at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK>
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> Subject: Re: isolates
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[in reply to L. Trask on Japanese and Korean]
 
> Well, I hope that the "Japanese-Korean in a nutshell" that I have started
> to post will further help to dissolve your doubts. As for S. Martin's
> cautious position, he is always cautious in his statements, but please
> read a little bit further into the article, and you will see that he
> treats two languages as cognate, that is he discusses parallels
between J and K as cognates, and not as chance resemblances, or a
result of borrowing. And after all, he has done more
work  demonstrating that Japanese and Korean are related than any other
> linguist, and I trust that it is presented evidence that counts more than
> a general statement.
>     Besides, if you start to treat every signle family in the world where
> a lot of work remains to be done (as is with case of Japanese and Korean,
> nobody denies that) and which is not yet done as elaborately as IE, you'll
> end up having thousands of isolates that "sprung from some different
sources"
> instead of having certain quite persuasive theories which need to be
> further elaborated. Nikolai Marr would be really proud of such a picture.
>    In sum, it is misleading to place Japanese and Korean in the same
> company as Burushaski and Nihali: we have no clue about the external
> relationships of the latter, but we do know quite a lot about Japanese and
> Korean so that to treat them as cognate, although keeping in mind that
> further considerable polishing needs to be done. Ainu will fall in the
> middle of the two, that does not make him a 'classical" isolate either.
>