Buyeo languages

The Buyeo or Fuyu languages (Buyeo or Puyŏ, (부여어족) in Korean, Fúyú (扶餘語系) in Chinese) are a hypothetical language family that attempts to relate certain ancient languages of the Korean Peninsula and southern Manchuria (specifically the Goguryeo language, and perhaps the language of Baekje as well) with the Japonic languages (Beckwith 2004); according to this scenario, the ancestors of the Yamato people would have settled Japan from the region of the state of Buyeo, which was ancestral to Goguryeo. Baekje was founded by Goguryeo princes, and also considered itself descended from Buyeo. Baekje subsequently had close relations with Yamato period Japan; Christopher Beckwith^[1] suggests that at that point the Japanese may have still recognized a relationship to Buyeo. The possibility of a relationship between the Japanese language and extinct languages of Goguryeo and Baekje was first noticed by two Japanese scholars in 1907. Beckwith reconstructs about 140 Goguryeo words, mostly from ancient place names. Many include grammatical morphemes which appear to be cognate with morphemes of similar function in Japanese, such as genitive -no and attributive -si.

See also

• List of Korea-related topics

References

• Christopher I. Beckwith, 2004. Koguryǒ: The Language of Japan's Continental Relatives, Brill, ISBN 90-04-13949-4.
  • 2006. "The Ethnolinguistic History of the Early Korean Peninsula Region: Japanese-Koguryoic and Other Languages in the Koguryo, Paekche, and Silla Kingdoms." Journal of Inner and East Asian Studies, 2006, Vol. 2-2: 34-64.
  • 2006. "Methodological Observations on Some Recent Studies of the Early Ethnolinguistic History of Korea and Vicinity." Altai Hakpo 2006, 16: 199-234.