For MKelkar, Kishore and all those other anti-linguists

from Roy Andrew Miller:
Languages and History
Japanese, Korean, and Altaic,
Acknowledgments

'This monograph is an expanded, revised, and reworked version of
lectures on the history of Japanese and Korean presented at the
Institutt for østeuropeiske og orientaliske studier, Universitetet i
Oslo between 25 April and 28 April 1994; those lectures in turn
elaborated upon and made extensive use of comparative materials
involving Japanese and Korean that had earlier been prepared for
lectures given at the Institutionen för orientaliska sprăk, Stockholms
Universitet between 28 April and 14 May 1992. The reader may perhaps
find interesting the following brief account of how these lectures and
the monograph that has resulted from them came to have their present
form and content; at the same time, this account may, it is hoped,
facilitate the reader's perusal of these pages.

On 15 December 1989 I terminated my employment at the University of
Washington in Seattle. During most of the ca. two decades that I
worked there, several circumstances had made it increasingly difficult
for me to conduct research on the history of Japanese and Korean. In
particular, studies that, like those which interested me, involved
issues of historical linguistics and philological investigation
confronted an increasingly hostile reception from both university
administration and colleagues, and the resulting atmosphere of
distrust and jealousy mitigated against the accomplishment of most
scientific work, my own included.

Under these circumstances, I considered myself particularly fortunate
when, following the conclusion of my employment at Seattle, I received
a number of invitations from colleagues in Europe to teach, lecture,
and conduct research at their universities. I was happy to find there,
as I had hoped, an intellectual atmosphere that was still receptive to
attempts toward clarifying, if not always solving, long-standing
problems in the history of a number of the languages of Greater Asia,
Japan and Korea included.

A generous and greatly appreciated study-grant (Forschungspreis) from
the Alexander-von-Humboldt-Stiftung made possible two extended periods
of residence in the Federal Republic of Germany in 1991 and 1992, and
these led in turn to a number of rewarding contacts with scholars
interested in these same fields, not only in Germany but elsewhere in
Europe as well, and particularly in Scandinavia. Some of these
scholarly associations made it possible to renew previous contacts
with older European colleagues interested in the history of Japanese,
Korean, and the Altaic languages; others, gratifyingly enough,
introduced me to several members of the newer generation of scholars
who will be continuing this work — if it is to be continued at all! —
into the next millennium. These scholarly contacts, both new and old,
led to welcome invitations to lecture at several German universities,
including those at Munich, Mainz, and Berlin, and eventually also to
invitations to present the somewhat more extended lecture-series,
first in Stockholm, then in Oslo, out of which this present monograph
has grown.

These lectures and other public presentations provided valuable
opportunities for learning more about the present state of
historical-linguistic studies in general, and especially those
involving the languages of Further Asia, as these presently obtain in
the university community of Western Europe, notably in the German
Federal Republic. And as these opportunities to learn multiplied, the
contrast between what I found to be the case in Western Europe and
what I had left behind in the United States became more and more
clear-cut, and by that same token, more and more instructive.
In the United States the virtually unchallenged ascendancy of the
Chomskyite linguistic paradigm has swept everything else before it.
'Linguistics' has come to mean nothing more than the superficial
scrutiny of certain, and frequently atypical, syntactic structures,
which are then 'studied' by comparing and contrasting the way in which
they actually appear in a given language ('surface structure') with
the way in which the investigator imagines they might ideally appear
if the language under investigation were really English ('deep
structure').

Nothing, of course, of genuine intellectual or epistemological value
about the history or the structure of any language can possibly be
learned from this reversion to the 'analysis by translation' approach
of pre-modern times — not to mention its blatant disregard of
phonology and morphology. Needless to add, not the least of the
problems of this approach is the way in which its exclusive emphasis
upon syntax vitiates one of the core-principles of the science of
historical linguistics. Syntax has for a century at least been
recognized to be the least informative level of historical-linguistic
investigation. It is to phonology and morphology that we must turn for
significant insights into the history of languages; and these the
Chomskyite paradigm has effectively ruled out of order.

Against this background of the reversion of linguistic studies in
America to a totally non-scientific paradigm, and moreover one without
any possible application to historical questions, it becomes easier to
understand, if not to condone, the concomitant rejection of any and
all problems in the historical linguistics of Japanese and Korean by
the Japanological and Koreanological academic programs in the American
universities. Students of these two languages there were (and are) in
abundance; but it was (and is) considered more than sufficient to
provide them with an elementary introduction to the rudiments of
reading and writing, in order to prepare them for their future »real
work« in history (so-called), the social sciences (sic!), and
especially in that St. Elmo's fire of contemporary Japanese and Korean
studies in America, economics. Little wonder then that a university
establishment so scientifically encumbered and thus self-blinded has
produced studies of, e.g., early Japanese literature that display
total ignorance, together with complacent disregard, of the elementary
facts of Japanese linguistic history; even less wonder that massive,
multi-volume sets of »Histories of Japan« are published that remain
totally silent upon all aspects of the history of that single most
significant element of human society and behavior, namely language.
My experience in teaching and lecturing in Europe after 1990 soon
showed me that the situation in Japanese and Korean studies here was
different. Instead of the studied hostility and antagonism that I was
accustomed to encounter in America, I met widespread and friendly
interest in these studies on all sides. Scholars and students
interested in Japanese and Korean studies were also interested in
learning what they could of the history of these languages; and most
importantly, in Europe, unlike America, philology had not become a
dirty word. Nor had the Chomskyite paradigm made any significant
inroads in Western Europe, apart from leaving a few traces in
departments of "American studies", which mercifully remained by and
large in safe isolation from the mainstream of the rest of the
university community.

The problem was, however, that while European students of Japanese and
Korean were obviously and sincerely interested in these questions,
neither they nor most of their teachers had any idea how to go about
studying them, to put the matter most bluntly. At first I found this
situation astonishing, and then increasingly puzzling as well. After
all, what we know of the science of historical linguistics is and long
has been principally the heritage of the German universities. The
comparative method of the Neogrammarians, the basis upon which all
historical linguistics rests, had its origin and saw its fullest
flowering in the German lands; how then to explain the virtually total
unfamiliarity with these principles on the part of almost all German
(and other West European) students today?
Slowly I began to realize that a terrible thing had happened in the
German universities, alongside which the triumph of the Chomskyite
paradigm in America almost paled in significance. The Neogrammarian
tradition and principles had, through no fault of their own, become
entangled and embroiled in the fatally evil racist myths of the Third
Reich; and too many young scholars and even younger students of
Japanese and Korean had attempted to 'wipe the slate clean' by
expunging all memory of the once-great German university traditions in
such studies.

As so often, it remained for a chance encounter and an offhand remark,
both quite trivial in themselves, to focus my perception of this
paramount point. In 1990 the Humboldt-Stiftung asked me to deliver the
annual Siemens lecture to an invited audience at the Nymphenburg in
Munich. To what I fear was the considerable disappointment of all
concerned, most of whom had come to the Nymphenburg expecting a
travelogue-account of colorful places in Japan and Korea illustrated
with slides, I spoke about the application of Neogrammarian
assumptions of regular sound-change in linguistic history to several
specific problems in Japanese and Korean etymology, and especially
about how this method clarified the otherwise perplexing relationship
between Old Japanese ko2si 'sacroiliac' and New Korean hŏli 'id.'. In
the course of my remarks, and while alluding to the early formative
period of the Neogrammarian tradition, I made specific reference to
the body of historical-phonological descriptive statements relevant to
the history of the Germanic languages commonly known as 'Grimm's Law'.
After the lecture, a German physicist somewhat younger than I, who had
been in the audience, took me aside and asked, 'Do you mean all that
stuff about Grimm's Law is really true?' When I showed by my
expression that his question puzzled me, he went on to explain, 'Of
course we learned about all that sound-law-business when I was a
student. But that was during the Third Reich, when most of what we
were taught was nonsense; and I've always assumed that Grimm's Law and
all that was Nazi nonsense as well.'

With this chance remark, much that had until then puzzled me began to
fall into order. Nature is not all that abhors a vacuum; so does
learning. I had long wondered how, from the late 1960s on, a handful
of trivial publications had succeeded in sweeping away most confidence
on the part of the European academic community in the large corpus of
serious historical-linguistic work that had until then been
accomplished in tracing the history of the Altaic language family
(i.e., Turkic, Mongolian, and Tungus), little of it, to be sure, the
work of German scholars, but mostly published in German. The almost
total collapse of West European confidence in the work of such Altaic
pioneers as G. J. Ramstedt and N. N. Poppe had serious implications
for the history of Japanese and Korean, if only because for over a
century it had been abundantly clear that the single most fruitful
avenue available for establishing the basic historical facts of these
languages lie along the path of the recovery ('reconstruction') of the
Altaic proto-language. A proto-language, which by definition is always
'lost', can only be recovered by the comparative method of the
Neogrammarians. But, as my friend at the Nymphenburg so clearly
indicated, a whole generation of Germans now believed — mistakenly but
none the less firmly — that the comparative method of the
Neogrammarians somehow had something to do with the Third Reich 'and
all that Nazi nonsense'. And at the same time, one increasingly
strident voice after another was raised in Western Europe, then echoed
elsewhere in the world, alleging that the history of Japanese and
Korean must be pursued, if at all, in total isolation from what they
came to disparage as the 'Altaic hypothesis', because there never had
been any Altaic proto-language. Quod erat demonstrandum ...

As I came to understand the situation better, I could not but recall
how Hannah Arendt had described the broader horizon of Western
Europe's intellectual circumstances as she found them shortly after
1945: she wrote of the "pillars of the best known truths" as lying
shattered, in such a way that the first task of any survivor was to
ask how this happened and what can now be done ('On Humanity in Dark
Times: Thoughts about Lessing'). The totally irrelevant linkage in the
minds of many between the Neogrammarian principles that make possible
historical linguistic investigation and the totalitarian essence of
the Third Reich has all but brought down the "pillars of the
best-known truths". In the past several decades in particular it has
further led in turn to the cynical disparagement of a considerable
body of painstaking study that, until the debacle of 1945, had already
gone far toward clarifying the historical connections between
Japanese, Korean, and the Altaic languages of the Asian mainland.
All this is by way of explaining why, in my lectures in Stockholm and
Oslo, and now in the expanded and revised version in which my remarks
appear in the present monograph, I have thought it necessary to devote
considerable attention first to familiarizing the auditor or reader
with the elementary principles of historical linguistics, and then,
only after these principles have been sketched, turned to the task of
exhibiting the relevant linguistic data from the languages being
studied. The "pillars of the best-known truths" must be set up again;
not until this has been done is there any point in talking or writing
about phonology and morphology or any other facet of a language that
impinges upon its history.

For American audiences I believe the task is all but hopeless: there
one searches in vain even for fragments of the pillars substantial
enough to be recognized. The result is that, for students and scholars
in American Japanese and Korean studies, the languages that they study
and use in their research simply have no history: Old Japanese poetic
texts of the 8th century are read, and misunderstood, as if they were
specimens of the modern patois of Tokyo. This paradox apparently
neither causes concern nor gives rise to alarm on the part of the
splendidly oxymoronic 'social scientists' who are in charge over
there. But confronted with its results, the philologically-oriented
linguist frequently does not know whether to laugh or to cry.

In Western Europe, the task, for the moment at least, is far easier.
Here enough memory persists of the "pillars of the best-known truths"
of historical linguistics to make it possible to engage an audience —
or in the present case, a reader — in a serious discussion of
linguistic evidence, with a view toward the ultimate clarification of
the history of a given language or languages. That is what I have
tried to do here, with particular reference to Japanese and Korean.
And it is still, one can at least hope, not too late to rescue Altaic
comparative and historical linguistics in Europe from the premature
grave to which a handful of strident iconoclasts have so steadfastly
striven to consign it.'


Torsten