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The Genealogy of the Japanese Language Tamil and Japanese 1) 3 2 言語 研 究 (Gengo Kenkyu) 95 (1989), 32～63 The Genealogy of the Japanese Language Tamil and Japanese 1) Susumu OHNO Introduction In search of languages genetically related to Japanese, linguists over the last one hundred years have compared Japanese with almost every other language in the world-not only those of neigh- boring peoples such as Ainu, Korean, and Indonesian, but even Greek; yet none of these efforts have succeeded in establishing any kind of kinship. It was more than ten years ago that interest in the Dravidian languages of South India began to spread among some Japanese researchers. Similarities between Japanese and Dravidian had been first pointed out in the mid-nineteenth century. In his major work, A Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian or South-Indian Family of Languages, the English missionary R. Caldwell, cites resem- blances and discusses the connection between the two languages. The Japanese-Dravidian connection was studied in Japan for the first time by Susumu Shiba, who approached the subject from the point of view of religion. His findings were presented in "Kodai ni okeru Nihonjin no shiko" (Ways of Thinking of Ancient Japa- nese), which appeared in 1970 in the journal Jinbun ronso (No. 18, Kyoto Women's University), and in a later study, "Dravida-go to Nihongo" (Dravidian Languages and Japanese), published in the same journal (No.22-23, 1973-74). 1) Expanded version of the public lecture delivered at the 96th General Meeting of the Linguistic Society of Japan, on June 4, 1988, at Gakushuin University, Tokyo. The Genealogy of the Japanese Language 33 Comparative linguist Akira Fujiwara began publishing the re- sults of his research on Dravidian in 1974. In 1981 he put out a book entitled Nihongo wa doko kara kita ka (Whence the Japanese Language ? Tokyo : Kodansha). His extensive comparisons of lexical items, comparing a number of words, including some parti- cles and auxiliaries, were impressive. However, because he took on the Dravidian family as a whole, his methodology was rather clumsy, and he failed to sufficiently demonstrate a kinship with Japanese. Another problem was that he did not take ancient Dravidian languages into consideration. Prof. Minoru Go, who has been engaged mainly in research on Japanese genealogy, with a focus on Altaic for several decades, has also kept an eye trained on Dravidian, although he has not published anything on this subject. I got my start in this direction when he suggested that I study Telugu, one of the Dravidian languages. I became the fourth Japanese to undertake the gene- alogical study of Dravidian and Japanese. Earlier, I had done comparative research on Korean, Ainu and other languages, and published Nihongo no kigen (The Origins of the Japanese Language) (Tokyo : Iwanami, 1957). This experi- ence led me to decide to confine my research only to one branch of Dravidian, at first Telugu, and then to Tamil, especially classical Tamil. I chose Tamil for the following reasons: First, it is a language spoken by a large group of over 48 million. Second, it is a very old language; 2, 500 Cankam verses, written in ancient Tamil between 200 B. C. and 200 A. D., are preserved. Third, a detailed grammar of ancient Tamil survives, the Tolkappiyam, written around the third century B. C. (Among other Dravidian languages, literature in the Kannada language can be traced back only as far as 1100 A. D., and that of Telugu, to 1200 A.D.). Fourth, while dictionaries in other Dravidian languages are 34 Susumu OHNO small and simple, there is a large Tamil lexicon. Published in 1936, the Tamil Lexicon consists of seven volumes compiled over a period of twenty years by a special committee at the University of Madras. It contains 104,000 word entries, giving ancient usages, indicating dialects, and detailed definitions. An additional reference I have used is A Dravidian Etymological Dictionary, edited by T. Burrow and M. B. Emeneau, which came out in 1960. A revised and enlarged edition appeared in 1984 (hereafter abbreviated DEDR). These are the tools that make possible the accurate comparison of Tamil and Japanese as far as the meaning of words and gram- matical features are concerned. The geographic neighbors of Japa- nese suffer from a dearth of documentary sources going back to earliest times. The oldest extant documents in Korean were pro- duced in the fifteenth century, and those in Mongolian in the thirteenth century. The Ainu language does not have a writing system. This paucity of documents recording the ancient forms of the languages in the vicinity of Japan has been a major stum- bling block in the study of the genealogy of Japanese. Tamil is extremely important in that its very old forms are known to us. I traveled to South India in 1980 to continue my research, receiving invaluable aid from Ms. Rama Lakshmi and Ms. V.N. Balambal. On New Year's Day the following year, I showed Prof. Jaroslav Vacek of Charles University in Prague a list of the word correspondences I had collected for Tamil and Japanese. He kindly took time out of his busy schedule to check over the list with great care. For one year beginning in the fall of the same year, I studied the reading of classical Tamil at the University of Madras under Prof. Pon Kothandaraman. During the winter break I visited the Tirch district, his home village, and was able to observe the old Tamil New Year's celebrations. In March 1983, Prof. Arunsalam Sanmugadas, linguist at the University of Jaffna in Sri Lanka, and his wife Manonmani, came The Genealogy of the Japanese Language 35 to Japan on a Japan Foundation grant, one of their purposes being to assist me in my research. They had grown interested in the Tamil-Japanese connection after hearing a lecture I gave at the 5th International Conference/Seminar on Tamil Studies held at Madurai in the Tamil state of India in 1981. As guest researchers here at Gakushuin University, Mr. and Mrs. Sanmugadas studied classical Japanese literature and are now working on a translation of the Man'yOsha into Tamil. They have meanwhile continued to give me invaluable assistance in my study of the Tamil language. They themselves are Tamils, and have taught me much not only about their language but about Tamil customs as well. The Phonetic Systems of Japanese and Tamil a) Vowels The oldest writings preserved in Japan, which go back to the eighth century, tell us that (1) ancient Japanese had eight vowels, that (2) there was no distinction between long and short vowels, that (3) diphthongs were strictly avoided, (4) all syllables ended in a vowel, and that (5) the eight vowels were divided into two groups. Group A: a, i, u, o Group B: e, e, s, o The vowels in group A were found in 85 percent of all vowel usage, and those in group B in only 15 percent. Word roots and the initial parts of words used group A vowels, rarely those of group B. The same vowel in group A could be repeated with a consonant in between to form a word, such as kata (hard), kimi (millet), koto (matter), and turu (crane). But this was never the case for the vowels in group B. The vowels in group B are believed to have resulted from the 36 Susumu OHNO merging of two vowels, as follows: ia>e, ai>e, ui>i, oi>i, ua>o From all these, it can be hypothesized that the vowel system prior to the eighth century was made up of four vowels, or those in group A. I compare these four with Tamil vowels. The old Tamil vowels were: a, a i, i; u, u; e, e; and o, o. By comparing these with Japanese vowels, I ascertained the following correspondences. Japanese Tamil a a, a, o, o i i, i, e, e u, u u o u, u b) Consonants Neither Japanese nor Tamil have (1) clusters of consonants coming at the beginning of words, (2) double consonants in the middle of words, (although they occur rarely in Tamil words). Japanese has no cerebrals. Japanese consonants at head of word k-, s-, t-, n-, F-, m-, y-, w- consonants mid-word -k- , -s-, -t-, -n-, -F-, -m-, -y-, -w-, -r-, -ng-, -nz-, -nd-, -nb- Tamil consonants at head of word k-, c-, t-, n-' n-, p-, m-, y-, v- consonants mid-word -k- , -c-, -t-, -n-, -p-, -m-, -y-, -v-, -t- , -n-, -r-, -1-, -r-, -1-, -r-, -nt- , -nt-, -mp- -nc, The Genealogy of the Japanese Language 37 Consonant correspondences are as follows: word-initial word-medial Jap./Tam. Jap./Tam. Jap./Tam. (1) k-: k- (1) -k-: -k-, -kk- (2) -ng-: -nk- (3) s-: c- (3) -s-: -c-, -cc- (4) -nz-: -nc- (5) t-: t- (5) -t-: -t-, -tt- (6) -nd-:-nt- (7) -t-: -t-, -tt- (8) -nd-: -nt- (9) n-: n-, n- (9) -n-: -n-, -nn- (10) -n-: -n- -nn- (11) F-: p- (11) -F-: -p-, -pp- (12)-mb-: -mp- (13) F-: v- (13) -F-: -v- (14) -mb-: -v-, -vv- (15) m-: m- (15) -m-: -m-, -mm-•@ (16) y-: y- (16) -y-: -y-, -yy- (17) -r-: -r- (22) w-: p- (18) -r-: -1- (23) w-: v- (23) -w-: -v- (19) -r-: -r- (24) -s-: -t-, -tt- (20) -r-: -1- (25) s-: t- (25) -s-: -t-, -tt- (21) -r-: -r- (26) s-: zero (27) zero: c (28) ya: a, a, e, e Note: zero signifies no corresponding consonant. Word Comparison In comparing Japanese and Tamil words according to the rules of sound correspondence, comparison is confined to word roots or stems.
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