Koguryo: The Language of Japan’s Continental Relatives: An Introduction to the Historical-Comparative Study of the Japanese-Koguryoic Languages … (Brill’s Japanese Studies Library, 21) 2nd Edition by Christopher Beckwith (PDF)

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This book describes the Koguryo language, which was once spoken in Manchuria and Korea, including Koguryo and Japanese ethnolinguistic history, Koguryo’s genetic relationship to Japanese, Koguryo phonology, and the Koguryo lexicon. It also analyzes the phonology of archaic Northeastern Chinese.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: About the Author Christopher I. Beckwith is Distinguished Professor of Central Eurasian studies at Indiana University, Bloomington, and the recipient of a MacArthur Award. He has published extensively on Central Eurasian history andlinguistics, including The Tibetan Empire in Central Asia: A History of the Struggle for GreatPower among Tibetans, Turks, Arabs, and Chinese during the Early MiddleAges (Princeton,1987/ revised ed. 1993), Medieval Tibeto-Burman Languages (Brill, 2002), Medieval Tibeto-Burman Languages II (Brill, 2005), Koguryo, Language of Japan’s Continental Relatives (Brill 2004/ 2nd ed. 2007), Phoronyms: Classifiers, Class Nouns, and the Pseudopartitive Construction (Peter Lang, 2007), Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present (Princeton, 2009), Warriors of the Cloisters: TheCentral Asian Origins of Science in the Medieval World (Princeton, 2012), and Greek Buddha: Pyrrho’s Encounter with Early Buddhism in Central Asia (Princeton, 2015).

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐Although it is unadvisable to judge a book by its cover or price, let us look at the cover picture – a drawing of a mounted archer shooting backward – on the front cover of “Koguryo: The Language of Japan’s Continental Relatives” by Christopher I. Beckwith, a distinguished linguist of Eurasian languages. He rightfully identifies the bowman, from the wall painting of the famous Koguryo “Dance Tomb”, as a warrior hero and rice grain god worshipped at the kingdom’s harvest festival. Yet, in the eye of this reviewer, the picture looks more like a warlike entity, at a shoot-and-run moment, perhaps after his failed “clear and hold” operations.At any rate, it is now possible for general readers to read Beckwith’s book under a more critical light, thanks to the subsequent niche publication by his contenders and cohorts, such as J. Marshall Unger, the author of “The Role of Contact in the Origins of the Japanese and Korean Languages” (2009), and Alexander Vovin, who wrote “Koreo-Japonica: A Re-evaluation of a Common Genetic Origin” (2010). For me to read the works of these three linguists – all well-connected Japan hands – has yielded a review as follows:There was a heyday of Japanese ethnolinguistic theories in the `70s through the `80s, a time of Japan’s rise to an economic giant, when scholarly dinosaurs of historical-comparative linguistics, like Roy A. Miller and Shichiro Murayama, roamed over eastern Eurasia, seeking homelands for their Altaic or Austronesian protolanguages, while a century-old Korean-Japanese divergent (common ancestor) theories seemed like becoming a household notion. Then, in the `90s and the first decade of this century, Japan’s lost decade and rehab period, there were theoretical sophistication and diversification, followed by a sudden backlash, if not a complete throwback.Thanks to mixed language theorists who focused more on the process of language contact and language shift than on the direction of language borrowing, a younger generation of scholars now found renewed interests in dialects and substratum languages, including Ainu, Ryukyuan, Korean Three Kingdoms languages, and even Jomon language – a reflection of the larger trend of the time: multiculturalism and regionalism. Then, the 21st century opened with an undeclared war of cultures; there was a government-supported nativist backlash and renaissance that sought to revitalize the ever diminishing stature of things Japanese by recasting them in a global context, even making the best of foreign mercenary hands from academia and other media as well.It is in this context that leading scholars of historical-comparative linguistics, like Christopher Beckwith, Marshall Unger, and most recently, Alexander Vovin, came up with their volumes, in which they ventured to recast Japanese in a way or another detached from Korean, while other minor-league scholars, mostly Japanese cohorts, were and still are fooling themselves, above all, attempting at the reconstruction of Jomon language as Japanese ancestor, in addition to Susumu Ohno’s diehard Dravidian industry churning out more and more popular Tamil-Japanese lookalikes.As a result, the straightforward Korean-Japanese divergent theories are endangered, or perhaps on the verge of replacement by the opponent Korean-Japanese convergent (contact-induced resemblance) theories, as represented by Vovin’s relentless work and succinctly indicated in the work of Beckwith, who picked up Koguryoan as Japanese closest relative. Unger on the other hand still sees Korean-Japanese relationship, not at the level of esoteric protolanguages, but in archeological terms of pre- and para-languages; in his view, pre-Japanese and pre-Korean speakers inhabited the peninsula since the antiquity known as the Mumum era (1500-300 BC), an archeological prequel to Japan’s Yayoi period (300 BC-300 AD), both cultures known for their plain or simply decorated pottery.In his search of pre-Japanese, Unger ventures on the prehistoric Nusantao trade network, a Neolithic maritime culture complex of the Asia-Pacific region, to see the Nusantao lingua franca of an Austronesian macrophylum in contact with pre-Japanese in southern Korea, while Beckwith typologically attacks the old Japanese-Korean-Altaic connections as Altaization, a mere imagined relationship lacking any distinct phonology, morphology, and syntax, whereas Vovin single-mindedly dismisses almost entirely an old list of Japanese-Korean correspondences as a result of Koreanization, a case of areal convergence through contact, not a result of genetic relationship which is, in his view, too remote to fathom.In the end, focusing on the lower Yangtze region, Unger identifies the ancient Wu-Yue region, famous for its bronze metallurgy and sword-making, as the homeland of Japanese culture, from where rice and bronze, and possibly language, the Nusantao lingua franca, came over to southern Korea, the domicile of pre-Japanese speakers before their migration to northern Kyushu. Beckwith on the other hand finds a homeland for his Koguryoan-Japanese family at Liaoxi, the corridor area between North China and Northeast China, home to various nomadic tribes since ancient times, where before the 4th century BC, Beckwith postulates, the Proto-Japanese-Koguryoic languages were in contact with early Old Chinese, making the Japanese ancestor a language of heavy mono-syllabic pitch-accent, typologically closest to the Tibet-Burman languages. From there, he says, the warlike Puyo-Koguryoic people, now separated from the farmer-fisher Wa Japanese, moved by land to Korea, and the Wa (War?) Japanese moved by sea to southern Korea and later to northern Kyushu. In good contrast, Vovin seeks no homeland for his Koreo-Japonic languages; he is subscribed to nativist views of Japanese proper and Korean proper. Yet he speaks of Manchuria as a place “where the likely motherland of any supposed Koreo-Japonic language would be located.” For Vovin, Manchuria – an Altai heartland – is a ghostland of proto-Japonic-Korean languages.After all, these three scholars are anti-Altaicists, who attempt, each in his own way, to disconnect the old Altaicist Japanese-Korean-Altaic connections, as a result, contributing to generating a new momentum to seek a very old form of Japanese, one unaffected by the superficial intimacy of Korean-Japanese relationship. Yet this is a geomantic shift at best, where the old north-bound Japanese-Korean theory appears to be making way for the new but old south-bound search for Japanese homeland, along the Chinese coastline, as far down south as Indochina and beyond. And this shift in perspectives is a repeated pattern in the modern history of Japanese studies, not for good reason, but in sync with Japan’s geopolitical as well as academic interests in East Asia. This time, however, the difference is the involvement of foreign academics who cater to Japanese nativist interests in calling up tribal purity, while at the same time capitalizing on Asian connections, preferably Chinese connections, not Korean kin relations.Finally, the greatest difficulty facing all these scholars is methodological; their historical-comparative linguistics itself has a great difficulty, when it comes to handling linguistic prehistory. Yet still, they talk about homeland and family tree of languages, based on the esoteric internal reconstruction of protolanguages, aided by the over-sensitized precision tools for phonetic transcription and transliteration, which produce, if anything, circular theories about tribal languages – a very scientific process to the eyes of lay believers.In the face of this methodological problem, unfortunately, linguistic scholars divert instead of addressing the problem; they as always go out to attack their contenders, recently getting more and more help from other disciplines, such as archeology and genetics, while some others, mostly orthodox types, simply go away. Look! Beckwith, the most warlike of all, goes on a shooting spree, really; he willfully engages in the “weeding out” of all his enemies, including innocent folk etymologists and popular linguistics, and in the case of Unger, he goes interdisciplinary to flesh out his theory with nonlinguistic material, and, yes, Vovin, after abandoning all the business of homeland and family tree, retreats in the dark of his philological cave.Where is the adult? There must be some breakthrough out of this linguistic pathology. It is all up to the younger generation of linguistic minds who dare look into somewhere else, not tribal languages, but human languages, in an attempt to understand local specifics in the larger context of linguistic universals. Do not follow the old historical-comparative establishments like, among others, Christopher Beckwith, a Teddy Roosevelt of Eurasian linguistics. His pricey book may show you where the grant money is, but it does not tell you much about where the truth is. His Japanese-Koguryoic theory is a heap of hypotheses standing on an unsound ground – in resemblance to a military outpost established by bloody “clear and hold” operations. It remains to be seen how long Beckwith’s last stand stands at Liaoxi.

⭐Japanese cousin and Chinese culture. Nothing relate to Korean.

⭐Interpretation of the ancient Chinese scriptures to modern languages had been tarnished by the Chinese Imperial court, and Confucian culture. Later historian used, and moved on to the next steps without any critical thinking. Western scholars accepted only one sided story. With this premises, Mosol starts to explore many issues around the Eastern End of the Great wall under the title “Ancient History of the Manchuria”.After Emperor Wu of Han invaded Manchuria 108 BC, lots of people left south western Manchuria to the north and the south; Korean peninsula and Japanese archipelagos. As the result, they all spoke very similar Tungusic language as stated in the scripture; `’`­Cê*säo’s “¯. ¾ê*säoŠØ”¯. `’l`Z–*véPC¾ê*säo*véPA<å--í"¯.In this example the phrase *säo had been misinterpreted as "not the same". But in fact, this phrase came from /referring the *säo "Vs , which had been in the south western mountainous region of Manchuria. Thus "`'`­Cê*säo's "¯. ¾ê*säoŠØ"¯" means (The Japanese)"culture, language is same /similar to the China('s , which is referring the North Eastern part of China proper; around the eastern end of the Great Wall. Language was also same in the Korean peninsula as well.I recommend these two books to the other to get the whole/better picture about the root of modern language in the Korean Peninsula and Japanese islands. ⭐Beckwith makes very interesting connections in relating history to the languages. However, although he is correct that many Koguryo families(royal families) were taken to Tang China as exiles after the Silla-Tang conquest and subsequent unification of Korea,the vast majority of Koguryo families (I wish I can cite you the numbers) moved to the Korean peninsula proper while others were able to stay behind above the Yalu and form the neo-Koguryo ruling state called Palhae. You also have to remember, Silla had a tenuous hold on the peninsula full of non-Silla peoples (Paekche and Koguryo). And it was a Koguryo descendant Won Kon who through a Coup Detat established the Koryo dynasty. Why would he name the new state Koryo if he didn't have the power backing of others who claimed Koguryo descent? This is why I disagree with Beckwith's assertion that Korea has very little genetic Korguryo blood. This leads to my second point, genetics and language is not always the same thing; take a look how Spanish and English speakers today have little to do with the languages' place of origin.

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