Jared Diamond über die verflixt komplizierte (und auch höchst politische) Frage, woher die Japaner eigentlich kommen – der wiedergegebene Abschnitt vergleicht die japanische Sprache mit anderen ostasiatischen Sprachen:
Everyone agrees that Japanese does not bear a close relation to any other language in the world. Most scholars consider it to be an isolated member of Asia’s Altaic language family, which consists of Turkic, Mongolian, and Tungusic languages. Korean is also often considered to be an isolated member of this family, and within the family Japanese and Korean may be more closely related to each other than to other Altaic languages. However, the similarities between Japanese and Korean are confined to general grammatical features and about 15 percent of their basic vocabularies, rather than the detailed shared features of grammar and vocabulary that link, say, French to Spanish; they are more different from each other than Russian is from English.
Quelle: Japanese Roots
