Morphologic, Syntactic, and Phonologic Distance Between Japanese and Altaic, Dravidian, Austronesian, and Korean Languages

The present study measures the resemblances of Japanese with Altaic languages (Turkic; Tungstic; Mongolic; Nivkh); the Dravidian language Tamil; Austronesian languages (Western Malayo-Polynesian; Malayo-Sumbawan; Central Luzon; Central Malayo-Polynesian), and Korean, in an effort to pin down the genealogy of Japanese. Morphologic, syntactic, and phonologic distance are calculated using data from corpora. The chi-square homogeneity test and Euclidean distances are used for statistical analysis. The finding brings to light, morphologically, in the light of preferences of causative/inchoative verb alternation patterning and morphemes that convey the alternation, that Japanese and Korean are close for the most part. Syntactically, Altaics and Tamil convey case via suffixes; case in Austronesian languages is marked by prefixes. Japanese and Korean share a similarity in rendering case with particles. Phonologically, the Tamil and Austronesian languages share a resemblance in the harmony of vowel height. The Korean, Altaic languages, and Austronesian languages show similarities in the harmony of vowel backness. Japanese, the Altaic languages, and the Austronesian language Madurese display vowel-consonant harmony. Pulling these strands together, a conclusion is thus drawn that Japanese is most closely related to Korean.