By J. Marshall Unger, Professor, Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures, The Ohio State University.

Because progress in establishing the proto-Korean-Japanese hypothesis has been slow, some skeptics have lately argued that it should be rejected. But if it is false, then all the lexical and grammatical similarities seen in the two languages must be due either to borrowing (copying presumably from Korean to Japanese) or to pure chance. In fact, there are ways to distinguish early K-J loanwords from proposed pKJ etymologies. Since there are relatively few early loans, and since mere coincidence is the default explanation for all unexpected data, this finding suggests that what is needed is a thorough rethinking of pKJ reconstructions and sound correspondences rather than a wholesale rejection of the pKJ hypothesis.