First, is it generally accepted that the first Japanese migrated from the Korean peninsula? When I took a class in Japanese history, I remember the professor talking about DNA study being done that found most Japanese to be of Korean origin.
Second, what is the relationship between the Japanese and Korean languages? I speak neither, but I’ve spent considerable time around both. To me, they sound remarkably similar. Upon mentioning that to someone once (a westerner who’s married to a Korean woman and speaks fluent Japanese, Mandarin and Taiwanese), I was told that they are largely mutually intelligible, or, at least, that they are very close. This has been denied by all of my Japanese and Korean friends.
Third, I was told that it was actually the Japanese who enforced widespread use of the hangul writing system. As the claim goes, before the Japanese annexed Korea, hangul was only for less educated, while well-educated people used Chinese characters. The Japanese did away with this, saying that all documents had to be written in hangul. This was brought up for the sake of irony when I mentioned (after a trip to Korea) my interest in hangul. The person I was speaking to mentioned that it was funny that Koreans take so much pride in their written language, seeing as it was the Japanese who made them use it.
By everyone outside of Japan, perhaps but not by the Japanese. Japanese keep insisting that they are unique and no one else is like them. They myth is that Japanese sprung up from the ocean, and most want to continue believing that.
There’s strong evidence, for example, that the imperial family is directly from Korea, but such evidence isn’t discussed in public, and any ancient tomb falls under the Imperial Household agency, which doesn’t allow independent investigation.
No one talks about DNA in Japan. If you have any questions, please refer to the previous sentence.
They have similar grammar and many of the words are similar. They are much closer to each other than either of the languages are to Chinese. However, they aren’t mutually intelligible. (This is from a Western man, married to a Taiwanese and fluent in Japanese, and with Taiwanese, Chinese, Korean and Japanese friends.)
I’ll let someone else discuss this.
You might be interested in this article in Discover Magazine by Jared Diamond.
How many of those similar words are actual native cognates as opposed to examples where both languages have borrowed from Chinese (or some other language)?
There are similarities between Korean and Japanese, but I think a lot of it is the Chinese influence on both of them. Many Koreans believe that their culture and language is closely related to Mongolian, and are unhappy to hear about affinities to the Japanese.
It’s my understanding that Hangeul was championed by Korean nationalists as part of the resistance to Japanese rule. The Japanese outlawed the Korean language and forced them to adopt Japanese names, language and writing. The uniquely Korean writing system allowed the nationalists to push back.
Under the old Korean dynasty, the Confucian elite had strong disincentives to use Hangeul. Their power was based on the examination system which required extensive knowledge of Chinese ideograms and literature. Replacing that with an easy-to-learn alphabet would seem to erode their legitimacy to rule.
The majority view held by linguists is that Korean and Japanese are not related to each other, although both have been heavily influenced by Chinese and each other. A few Japanese people have told me that even they can mistake Korean at a distance for indistinct Japanese, because of the similarity of many of the sounds. I imagine that akin to an English speaker hearing Dutch spoken from across a noisy room (although, of course, Dutch and English share a fairly recent common ancestor). Ethnologue gives only the Ryukyuan group of minor languages (all from Japan) as cognates for Japanese, meaning that there aren’t even any known extinct related languages. The same site categorizes Korean as a language isolate.
I’ve read about several suspected origins for the Japanese migration to the island, one of which is through Korea. Whether they came through Korea or China, however, it is likely long enough ago that modern cultures can’t really take any credit for being the “origins” of the Japanese people, any more than modern Egyptians can take credit for the pyramids. As TokyoPlayer mentions though, it’s unlikely that any Japanese but scholars are going to entertain thoughts of Chinese or Korean origins for their people.
Great link, garygnu.
Diamond suggests that the Japanese language is a descendant of a Korean dialect with influence from an aboriginal Ainu-like dialect. The Korean dialect was subsequently replaced in Korea by the dialect of the faction that unified Korea. So the divergence point between the modern Korean and Japanese languages is much farther back in time than the influx of people from the Korean peninsula to the Japanese islands.
Seems plausible.
Wikipedia has an article that describes some of the theories around the origins of the Japanese language. Diamond is describing what is there called the “Extinct Korean-peninsular languages hypothesis”.