Happy new year, everyone! Remember in that "Altaica" languagehat thread back in April when I mentioned that one of James Unger's students, Alex Ratte, was allegedly preparing some sock-offknocking new arguments for a genetic relationship between Japanese and Korean? It turns out that one Alexander T. Francis-Ratte posted several papers along these lines to academia.edu in 2015. Here are a few words about a couple.

"Importation or inheritance? Thoughts on the Japanese lexicon" is a short paper about the "bifurcation of Korean-Japanese lexical matches." The argument is that some "lexical matches" can be organized into regular groups that make them look like cognates, while others exhibit no such regularity and so look more like loanwords. This, AFR argues, is inconsistent with an Alexander Vovinesque hypothesis of "extensive borrowing," and in any case, how was this mass borrowing supposed to have taken place when, "as Unger (2009: 16) points out, there is 'no compelling historical evidence that Korean and Japanese stood on equal sociolinguistic footing for a sustained period of time'"?

I suppose the obvious weakness here is the lack of even a semi-objective heuristic for sorting words into "cognate" and "loanword" piles. It isn't obvious on the face of it why the non-corresponding segments in OJ poye "howls" 〜 MK pullu "calls out" are qualitatively less problematic than the ones in OJ kusiro "bracelet" 〜 MK kwusul "jewel," for example. I think that AFR's argument against mass borrowing on practical grounds is more convincing.

Much longer and meatier is "Morpho-lexical Evidence for Proto-Korean-Japanese". Here AFR makes two specific proposals:

a functional element *(w)o- that reveals striking correspondences in Japanese and Korean noun-modifying structures, and a verb *pә- that shows that identical verb-compounding structures exist in both languages.

This one really deserves a more expert treatment than I can offer, but I was not overwhelmed. It's strange, for example, that AFR argues for his "verb *pә-" without addressing Whitman and Frellesvig's more recent (2014) paper about /e/ 得 as OJ lower bigrade formant ("The Historical Source of the Bigrade Transitivity Alternations in Japanese"). This contains a more sophisticated analysis of /e/ than the simple "transitivity flipper," and offers some support for AFR's theory in analyzing bigrade intransitives as the result of "suppressing the nonagentive experiencer/goal in secondary predicate + -e-". Sounds very compatible with a hypothetical verb meaning "watch things (inexorably) happen."

On the other hand, F+W 2014 also observes that:

[c]omparative Ryūkyūan evidence indicates that this pattern may not be reconstructible to proto-Japanese. For example, while transitive yak- 'burn (tr.)' and tak- 'burn/cook (tr.)' have corresponding verbs in Yonaguni (Ikema 2003) and prewar Yaeyama (Miyara 1930), their bigrade intransitive counterparts appear to be unattested

... which would obviously be a problem for an argument based on reconstructing this pattern for proto-Korean-Japanese (let alone proto-Japanese!).

Anyway, these papers are definitely worth reading for those craving new linguistic arguments in the are-Japan-and-Korean-related wars. (Also of possible interest: Vovin's "Out of Southern China?", which proposes some "lexical parallels between Japonic and Tai-K(r)adai" and even a few between Old Japanese and the language of Chu 楚.)

I just realized that the Okinawa Prefectural Library has put all kinds of amazing material online in their "digital library of valuable materials" (貴重資料デジタル文庫). This is a big deal because it's difficult and/or expensive to buy even a basic modern printed edition of most of this stuff. You want to read the Chūzan seikan 中山世鑑? What force on earth will keep you from doing so? (Oh, right, capitalism.)

Or here's the Kokin Ryūka shū ("Collection of Ryūka old and new"), in glorious printlike hentaigana. Poem #1 is by Shō Kō 尚灝:

年やたちかわてはつはるのそらににわかつき出たるまつのみとり
Tushi ya tachikawati/ hatsiharu nu sura ni/ niwaka tsichiditaru/ matsi nu miduri
The New Year is here, and into the early spring sky thrusts the green of the pine

(Transcription based on and translation heavily indebted to Shimizu Akira's Ryūka Taisei 琉歌大成 (1994, Okinawa Times), p729.)

Find of the day: Fanny Hagin Mayer's translation of the Yanagita Kunio Guide to the Japanese Folk Tale.

65. "If Anyone Sees You, Turn into a Frog"

There was a somewhat foolish novice at a certain temple. Once when he received a coin with a hole in it for going on an errand, he strung it onto a piece of straw and buried it in a corner of the yard. While he buried it, he said over and over, "If I dig you up, be a coin. If somebody else digs you up, turn into a frog." Whenever he received a coin after that for an errand, he always buried it with the same admonition. The old priest noticed this. He dug up all the coins one day and put a frog into the hole instead. When the boy came as usual to bury a coin, he discovered the coins were gone and a frog came jumping out. He cried, "Wait wait, I'm not somebody else! I'm me, I'm me! If you jump like that, the string will break." He ran after the frog as the old priest held his sides laughing.

The Hentaigana App has finally been released for iOS (it came out for Android a few weeks ago, but as is well known Apple outsources app review to starships traveling at relativistic speeds). This is apparently the first fruit of Uniqlo founder Yanai Tadashi's donation to UCLA to "globalize Japanese humanities".

What is the Hentaigana App? A flashcard program and quick reference for individual hentaigana. There are apparently plans to add multi-kana phrases at some point, but no kanji, so this isn't a complete "learn cursive Japanese writing" app. On the other hand, as a hentaigana-only app, it's much nicer than it had to be, with most of the visuals taken from Waseda's collection of scanned books. This doesn't make the app any more informative, say, than a hypothetical version with newly created vector-graphic characters and iOS 7-style flat color backgrounds. But it does make it more involving. Japanese calligraphers are fussy about paper for a reason, after all.

There's no getting around the need to drill hentaigana. This app lets you drill in idle moments waiting for the bus, rather than at a desk flipping back and forth between multiple reference works. And it's free. What more could you want?

Since like so many others worldwide I spent most of my free time over the past few days watching Hara Setsuko films, I'm just gonna link to a whole bunch of things I haven't read closely but which sound interesting. I hope that works for everyone.

1. "On the Tale of Genji: Narrative, Poetics, Historical Context." This is a special issue of Cipango, a "French Journal oF Japanese Studies"; it looks like all of their issues are online, in fact. For example, Michell Vieillard-Baron's "Male? Female? Gender confusion in classical poetry (waka)", which mentions in passing a book with the most East Asian Lit title of all time: "Notes on the Draft of the Collection of Gleanings (Shūishō chū 拾遺抄注, 1183)."

2. "Speech Report Construcions in Ainu" and "Reciprocals and sociatives in Ainu", two papers by or co-by Anna Bugaeva on, well, you can probably guess. (Pretty technical and probably not of great interest to non-linguists, but people working on Ainu deserve all the signal-boosting they can get.)

3. "Formal Monkey Linguistics", a brand-new paper with a dozen-odd authors. "We argue that rich data gathered in experimental primatology in the last 40 years can benefit from analytical methods used in contemporary linguistics. [... W]e hope that our methods could lay the groundwork for a formal monkey linguistics combining data from primatology with formal techniques from linguistics (from which it does not follow that the calls under study share non-trivial properties, let alone an evolutionary history, with human language)." The age of informal monkey linguistics, ladies and gentlemen, is hereby brought to a close. (Tentative theme for Hegelian synthesis: "Business Casual Monkey Linguistics.")

Here's one from the annals of self-deprecating quasi-pronouns, found in a 1690 letter from Matsuo Bashō to his student/disciple Kameda Shōshun 亀田小春:

何処持参之芳翰落手、御無事之旨珍重ニ存候。類火之難御のがれ候よし、是又御仕合難申盡候。残生いまだ漂泊やまず、湖水のほとりに夏をいとひ候 [...]

I received your letter from Kasho [another disciple] and am delighted to hear that you are well. The news that you escaped harm in the recent fire, too, is a happiness inexpressible in words. As for my aged self, I am taking refuge from the summer on the shores of the lake [...]

Zansei 残生: literally "remaining life," and apparently originally used that way, before its meaning expanded to also include "old person" ("life have-just-a-little-bit-left-of-er"?), which was then available to refer to the self.

(Letter to Shōshun found on pp116-117 of Bashō Zenshū vol. 8 (ed. Hagino Kiyoshi and Kon Eizō, Tokyo: Kadokawa Shoten, 1964)