Abstract
The Japanese language has been considered to be related not only to the more than ten neighboring languages, but also to such remote languages as Basque, Greek and lrish. But the evidence does not stand up. The only obvious sister language is Luchuan. This can be demonstrated by sound-laws (i. e. rules of phonemic and accentual correspondence), lexical identity (basic vocabulary including pronominal and numeral morphemes), correspondence in declension (suffixal morphemes) and conjugation, and the identity of word-order. The next possible sister language to Japanese is, in my opinion, Korean. Although the demonstration of their affinity is more difficult and not yet complete, it seems to me that "the groping for the ground of comparative study" for our language must be turned towards Korean.
