Date: 14-Oct-2004 From: Anja van Hoek <Hoekbrill.nl> Subject: Koguryo: the Language of Japan's Continental Relatives: Beckwith
Title: Koguryo: The Language of Japan's Continental Relatives
Subtitle: An Introduction to the Historical-Comparative Study of the
Japanese-Koguryoic Languages, with a Preliminary Description of Archaic
Northeastern Middle Chinese
Series Title: Brill's Japanese Studies Library, 21
Author: Christopher I Beckwith, Indiana University
Hardback: ISBN: 9004139494 Pages: 274 Price: Europe EURO 82.-
Hardback: ISBN: 9004139494 Pages: 274 Price: U.S. $ 110.-
Abstract:
This is the first in-depth study of the extinct Koguryo language, which was
once spoken in Manchuria and northern Korea. It covers the ethnolinguistic
history of the Koguryo nation, philological treatment of the sources for
the language, Koguryo phonology, and a complete glossary of all Archaic
Koguryo and Old Koguryo words. Special attention has been given to the
theory and practice of lexically-based historical-comparative linguistics.
The genetic relationship of Koguryo to Japanese is shown to be secure,
unlike the non-relationship of either language to Korean or 'Altaic', and
much light is shed on the ethnolinguistic origins of Japanese. The special
phonological features of the underlying transcriptional language, the
archaic northeastern Middle Chinese dialect once spoken in Korea, are also
analyzed.
Christopher I. Beckwith, Ph.D. (1977) in Uralic and Altaic Studies, Indiana
University, is a Professor at Indiana University. He has published
extensively on Central Eurasian history and linguistics, including The
Tibetan Empire in Central Asia (Princeton, 1987, 1993) and Medieval
Tibeto-Burman Languages (Brill, 2002).
Linguistic Field(s):
Anthropological Linguistics
Historical Linguistics
Language Description
Subject Language(s): Japanese (Language Code: JPN)
Old Chinese (Language Code: OCH)
Koguryo (Language Code: ZKG)
linguistlist.org>