Japanese linguistics major here to say, there’s another theory of interest to a lot of scholars. Some like to believe Japanese is related to Korean (and that Korean is related to Mongolian via the Altaic family) because the grammar structure is so gosh darn similar.

Problem is, both Korean and Japanese have been influenced by Chinese, so weeding those Chinese loan words out is problematic.

And then some of those scholars also suggest that, because of phonological and even lexical similarities to Polynesian languages, Proto-Japanese was some amalgamation of Korean grammar and Polynesian phonology. But said scholars don’t seem to have any good way of explaining how such a thing happened.

ha, I reminds me of this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00BP86cks4w

I was going to mention this idea, too. Kind of kooky, but it’s interesting. There’s a book about it called “The Biblical Hebrew Origin of the Japanese People” by Joseph Eidelburg.

Very cool!

Re: Korean/Polynesian. That actually sounds pretty plausible to me, especially when you consider the Japanese language’s uniquely low number of phonemes when compared to other East Asian languages (thinking Mandarin, Korean, Thai, Vietnamese and so on here; not Tagalog, Indonesian, etc.). If you compare the Japanese phonology with, say, Hawai’ian, Maori and so on, they all have five vowels or less, very few diphthongs afaik and a relatively low number of consonants. Unvoiced consonants are also dominant. I mean, Japanese even has similar consonants to a lot of Polynesian languages.
There is the issue of how, though, like you mentioned. I’m thinking migration, but that’s kind of my default.

I’d heard that the Korean origin thing wasn’t even controversial until the last couple of centuries.

I don’t get why this stuff has to be a point of contention for anyone – Japanese is a really interesting language. The proposition that the copula, agglutinations, and doubtless some words come from Korean meshes with what there is of historical record.

I agree (thus the “kooky” part), but it’s just kind of fun to think about. It’s more something to talk about with some friends over pizza and see what other connections you can come up with (or wherever the the topic goes). It’s fun a conversation topic in college when you have a group of students studying a variety of things, each throwing in their own ideas. It basically becomes the historical equivalent of a Rube Goldberg machine.

The problem is, it’s very hard to track the historical development of a language in the absence of a phonetic writing system, especially if few or none of the neighboring peoples with whom they had contact kept written records in a phonetic writing system either. By the time kana arrived in Japan, the language had already been very heavily influenced by contact (with Ainu, with Korean, with various Chinese languages, and probably with Austronesian languages as well) over the course of multiple centuries, perhaps even as much as a millennium, since arriving on the islands (and thus diverging from other languages in its family — which happens fairly rapidly in the absence of written language). There’s just not enough data on the intermediate forms.

The significance (if any) of grammatical similarities is largely impossible to determine after 500 years, if you don’t have written records of how it got there. We know English came from Old Germanic because we have Old English and Middle English texts to look at, not because the grammar of modern English bears any particularly strong resemblance to that of German (certainly no stronger than to Greek, which is more distantly related) — and writing was relatively commonplace in England, which tends to slow linguistic change down. If we didn’t have phonetically-written examples of intermediate languages to look at, I am not confident that we would ever have figured out the sound changes by which the words “hound” and “canine”, for example, are related. Japanese has diverged even more from whatever languages it was once related to, and we don’t have record of the intermediates.

Japanese is probably related to one of the major language families, but I doubt we’ll ever know which one.

Korea as an origin, or at least as a route to the Japanese archipelago seems reasonable. This is supported, perhaps, by the martriarchal nature of the Japanese creation myth, which seemingly coincides with the matriarchal culture extant on Cheju-do (Jeju Island) south of the Korean peninsula in the Korean Strait and in close proximity to Western Japan. The island would have been a convenient stepping-stone for a migrating people, not all of whom traveled on to Japan. A comparison of Japanese, Korean and Jeju linguistics would be interesting.

I think there are some similarities of the Japanese Language with a certain African country called Botswana. The names and sounds of vowels do really sound similar, e,g Setsuko, Masako, Inamoto, etc.

I forget to add, hungarian is such an odd language, either you speak it well or not at all. I speak it so I have infact picked up on the many curious roots archaic words, and so I think that people dont understanc hungarian much at all , least to make any ideological study effort or guess work. Again our language is inner north asian in origin and not related to any other aside from a few diminishing mongolian tribes todzy known as khanty and mansi both on verge of extinction. I suspect one day the connectiond will be more sustainable in comparison. Cheers again