Crlao

This is an early article that should be taken with a huge grain of salt. While I still believe that Japonic and  Austronesian are not genetically related, I no longer hold "Altaic" as a valid language family, either. My current thinking is that all parallels between Japonic and "Altaic" are either chance resemblances, or are due to the centuries of contact, mostly bbetween Japonic and Koreanic.

Although limited in number and thus far underused, Old Korean and Early Middle Korean data are valuable to comparative linguists. This article discusses several lexical items and grammatical morphemes from this body of data and demonstrates their signi®cance for comparative Koreo-Japonic and Altaic studies. The author proposes a number of etymologies for the ®rst time and, in several cases, re®nes etymologies suggested by others.

The goal of this article is to provide further and systematic evidence for an idea suggested only in passing that the Old Japanese vowel i 2 derives diachronically not only from * e y and *uy, as traditionally believed, but also from *oy. This solution proves to be a key to solving some puzzles in the phonological history of a number of common Old Japanese words.