PARALLELS BETWEEN KOREAN, NANAI AND JAPANESE LANGUAGES ON LEXICAL AND MORPHOLOGICAL LEVELS = PARALLELS BETWEEN KOREAN, NANAI AND JAPANESE LANGUAGES ON LEXICAL AND MORPHOLOGICAL LEVELS

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Korean and Japanese languages only hypothetically belong to the Altaic language family. The Nanai language is one of the Tunguso-Manchurian languages, which in their turn are viewed by majority of scholars as Altaic ones.
From the very time when the languages were classified into language families there exists a hot debate in linguistics about Korean language origin and the nearest relatives. We assert that it is important to start with thorough comparison of Korean and Japanese with the Tunguso-Manchurian language group in order to prove the origin of the two mentioned languages. The comparison of Korean language with the Japanese one may undoubtedly reveal plenty of common traits. However such common features can not be perfectly used as a convincing argument of two language’s interconnection. On the other hand, if data of some third language of doubtless Altaic origin appears to support coincidences between Korean and Japanese, we shall get more reasons to render such coincidences not only as contacts, but obviously as the lexical layer of common Altaic origin.
The proposed preliminary investigation of three languages has shown that they have 35 lexical coincidences (including lexemes that belong to the same semantic field in all contrasted languages within M.Swadesh`s list). This analysis is only the first step, and therefore the further investigation of three language material seems to be very promising.