ABSTRACT
Until recently, and in particular until the long-awaited publication of Starostin, Dybo and Mundrak’s Etymological Dictionary of the Altaic Languages (2003; hereafter EDAL), any survey of the existing literature concerned with the historical-linguistic comparison of Japanese and Korean must necessarily have come to the conclusion that, whatever the nature, if any, of a historical connection, if any, between these two languages might have been, that connection nevertheless has remained, for some reason or another, beyond the grasp of the traditional comparative method of the neo-grammarians. Now with the three volumes of the EDAL at last in hand, we have available a full-scale exhibition of the linguistic evidence relating both these languages to an original Altaic linguistic unity. The EDAL’s clarification of the Japanese and Korean members of this linguistic stock may well, in the long run, prove to be one of the major contributions of that publication to the historical-linguistic literature.
