a question

[Laura Miller]

Actually, one term for the US in Japanese is beikoku, bei meaning "rice" and not the same as mei "beautiful." The "koku" part for "country" is the Japanese pronunciation of the borrowed Chinese term. (The other way to refer to the US is amerika written in one of the syllabic scripts.) Many Japanese words are based on Japanese readings of borrowed Chinese character compounds, so this is hardly surprising.
	I'm out of touch with historical linguistics these days, but I recall that the classification of Japanese as Altaic is not controversial because of the data (see anything by Roy Andrew Miller),  or because Altaic is some hazy category, but because of Japanese resistence to the idea. I had a Japanese language professor years ago who had once worked on a Mongolian dictionary, and he was always pointing out cognates.

>>> P L Patrick <patrickp at essex.ac.uk> 10/09/01 10:24AM >>>
sorry for using 'cognate' loosely! I was in a hurry, as indicated.

Without finding etymological dictionaries for Korean and Japanese
handy, I would still be willing to bet my lunch money that both of them
borrowed from the Chinese MEI -- note that the compounding strategy is
identical in all 3 languages, though of course in 'native Japanese' it
ought not to be. If so, the point is actually stronger...
	Not only would it be a borrowing, but it is more than "simply
borrow[ing] a writing system and some lexicon". Many languages do this
much without showing the extensive overlap, including structural
features, that written Japanese has with its Chinese source.
	And I thought the point about Altaic languages is that nobody
really KNOWs what if anything they are related to... (that is, under a
definition of "relation" which ignores all considerations of language
contact, like much of traditional historical linguistics).

Prof. Peter L. Patrick
Dept. of Language & Linguistics
University of Essex
Wivenhoe Park
COLCHESTER CO4 3SQ
U.K.

Tel: (from within UK) 01206.87.2088
    (from outside UK) +44.1206.87.2088
Fax: (as above)           1206.87.2198
Email: patrickp at essex.ac.uk
Web: http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/~patrickp