This episode is a bit different.  Whereas we've been looking primarily at the archaeological and historical evidence, this episode we look at the linguistic evidence--language--and what it tells us. 

For more go to: https://sengokudaimyo.com/podcast/episode-9

Rough Transcript

(Auto-transcription courtesy of listener, Zach)

Welcome to Sengoku Daimyo's Chronicles of Japan. My name is Joshua, and this is episode 9, The Language of Wa. Now in the last few episodes we've talked about the arrival of rice and agriculture in general to the archipelago. We discussed how that led to the formation of the Yayoi culture, which remained distinct from the Jomon people still covering most of the archipelago. We also talked about the material culture that the Yayoi brought with them, not just different pottery styles, but metal technology, bronze and iron. There's one more thing that they brought, one of the key things that likely set this new culture apart from the original Jomon, and that was its language, which evidence suggests was likely an early Japonic language, an ancestor of modern Japanese. Now the story of the Japanese language and where it comes from is still something of a mystery, though one that various historical linguists have been working on, so I feel confident that I can at least give you a glimpse into some of the thoughts and theories that are out there, as well as help put to rest a few of the more commonly held theories that were once in vogue but have proven problematic over time. But before we get into that, I guess I should ask the most basic question of all. Why do we care? How does this help us tell the story? Well for one thing, language is how we communicate. It isn't just how we communicate, it actively shapes how we think about and perceive the world, and when we get into the historical period, that history will largely be written in Japanese. Language is often central to identity, you know, those things that let people know who they are, what they belong to. It's shaped by their environment and what is around them, and it in turn reinforces and influences how people think about themselves and others. For example, in English, we tend to think in terms of egocentric directions, that is directions centered on the subject or object of our conversation. So forward, backward, up, down, left, and right. We also have words for cardinal directions like north, south, east, and west, but we tend to use these when thinking in larger terms. For local directions, we usually say something like "go down the street and take a left." In Tlingit, they have words that have evolved specifically for where the language evolved. Words for instance, specifically indicating whether you are going towards the shore or away from it. "Ik" and "yik." Which is understandable as much of Tlingit Ani, the Tlingit homeland, is along the coast of the Pacific Northwest in the Alaskan panhandle. And these would be handy directions, regardless of whether you are actually going north, south, east, or west. So you might tell someone to "go shoreward" or "go inland" and there is even a variant for if you are on the water, vice on the land. Meanwhile in the language of the Guugu Yimithirr of Northeast Australia, they tend to use the cardinal directions, north, south, east, and west, rather than egocentric directions like left, right, forward, and backward, even when talking about something that is close at hand. Rather than saying "give me that book that is on your left," they would likely say something like "give me the book that is northeast of you." As a consequence, its speakers are constantly keeping track of where they are and have developed a remarkable ability to tell directions. In Japanese, we can see some similar differences with English, from the different levels of politeness and honorifics when speaking with people, to just the sheer number of words for different types of fish. These are clues about values Japanese society then puts on different things. You can even see in some instances where Japanese may not have originally made distinction, but one now exists because of borrowing from Chinese, for example. A good example here, to make something, whether a chair, a sword, a garden, or a boat, one might use the word "tsukuru." However, when written with the Chinese characters, the same word, tsukuru, shows a difference between small things like the chair and the sword, and larger projects like building a boat or a garden. Language is both shaped by its environment, and in turn it shapes its speakers, giving those of us who speak it a reference for how to view the world. And this is one reason why many people work so hard to preserve their individual languages, despite external pressures to conform, while on the other hand, many immigrants may endeavor to adopt the language of their newly chosen culture in order to better assimilate and be seen as part of the group. Japanese also has meaning in a religious sense as well. Shinto belief puts particular emphasis on the kotodama, the divine power inherent in words. This power is conceived as being in the actual sound and shape of the words and how they are spoken, and it is often used in explanations of why things are named as they are. Shinto formal prayers, or norito, are often in an older form of Japanese and preserved to maintain these sacred sounds. And so we see that language contains more than just a means of being understood. Through language, we can connect with others, and those linguistic connections, like the connections buried in our DNA, may then help illuminate some of the movements in our past, particularly when we don't have a direct historical account. It's also telling how language is adopted. You see, when two languages are commingled for a long period of time, they'll start to affect each other, like Chinese and Japanese, as I mentioned earlier. Simply take a look here at the evolution of English, given the influence from the Anglo-Saxons, the Norse, the Normans, as well as French, Greek, and Latin. All of them have left a mark and the history of England is written in the very core of its language. And when a people are oppressed and one population is replaced by another, such as through war and conquest, we can sometimes see traces of that. Even just which language becomes dominant provides clues regarding state formation, etc. I mean, think of how people often use the example of pork versus pig, and how we eat pork and raise pigs. This is often attributed to the fact that the Norman conquerors would be the ones eating pork, while the Anglo-Saxon farmers would be the ones raising the pigs. So given all of that, what exactly is Japonic? Isn't that just Japanese? Well today Japonic is a language family that realistically includes two, maybe three extant languages, depending on who's counting. Though whether these are full-blown languages or simply dialects is an area up for debate. The two primary languages in the Japonic language family are Modern Japanese and Ryukyuan. Modern Japanese is the language of the modern country of Japan and what is taught in schools today. We should be clear though that this is not the same as the language of the ancient Japanese, as it has gone through many centuries of evolution. The language of the original Japanese chronicles is about as close to Modern Japanese as Chaucer's English is to Modern English. And if we go even further back, we hit the story of Beowulf, one of the earliest examples of quote-unquote "English" that we have, but I doubt few Modern English speakers would be able to recognize it if they heard it today. The other extant version of Japonic that we have is Ryukyuan, the language originally spoken in the Okinawan islands, many of the dialects of which are endangered today. The Ryukyuan language has similarities to Japanese, but it is clearly separate. This is similar to, say, Spanish and Portuguese. Both are Romance languages from the Iberian Peninsula and they have a lot in common, but there is enough difference that you can't necessarily count on a one-for-one translation between the two. Some examples, in Okinawa, a castle is called a gusuku rather than shiro, and even the word Okinawa is read as Uchina in the Ryukyuan dialect. And even Ryukyuan can be broken down. Some classify it really as being six distinct languages, Okinawan, Amami, Kunigami, Miyako, Yayama, and Yonagumi, all languages based around the islands from which they take their names. The third candidate in this mix is actually the Japanese dialect in Hachijoushima and the Izu Islands south of Tokyo, which have had their own insular effects and retain some old Japanese elements that have been lost in modern Japanese. A parallel could perhaps be drawn between the people of Tangiers Island and the Chesapeake Bay, who have retained a distinct accent that goes back to the 17th century, except that the Izu Islands are even further removed from the Japanese mainland, sitting out as they do in the Pacific as part of an underwater ridge that extends south, all the way down to Guam and the Mariana Islands. In the Hachijou dialect, the word yama, mountain in modern Japanese, is used for field, and they continue to use some older words or usages. For example, they use aru for both living and non-living things, and kamu in place of taberu, meaning "to eat". Now notably, there is another language we discussed on the archipelago that is not a Japonic language, and that is Ainu or Ainu Itak. Ainu Itak is a completely separate language from anything else, likely a blend of the northern Jomon language with other elements from the Okhotsk Sea region. We won't really touch on it here other than to say it is a distinct and separate language all its own. So what do we know about the Japonic languages? Well to start with, let me cover something that I know I heard early on and still seems to be out there occasionally. Is Japanese related to Finnish? Yep, I'm talking about that Finland all the way over in Europe. Now for those who haven't heard this one, the story goes something like this. Despite Finland's location in Europe, Finnish is not an Indo-European language. Instead, it is part of a Ural-Altaic language that crosses the Eurasian steppes and includes Japanese on the far end. Many people have pointed out superficial similarities between the two languages. The Ural-Altaic language family was proposed back in the 18th century, but the whole concept of Altaic has largely been disproven by the linguistic community. It still pops up now and again, particularly when people are quoting older sources, however. Alright then where does Japonic fit, and where does it come from? Most likely it was either extant in Japan, perhaps the language of the southern Jomon, or it was based on something that was brought over from the continent. It is unlikely that it just spontaneously evolved all by itself. Coming over from the Korean peninsula, it would make sense for it to be related to Korean itself. And there are certainly some linguistic similarities, particularly as seen in place names. In fact, many linguists seem to agree that there appears to have been one or more forms of Japonic spoken on the Korean peninsula. Known as Peninsular Japonic, there is no extant language on the peninsula, but it shows up here and again in various words and place names. Early Chinese sources don't appear to differentiate much between the Wa polities in the archipelago and what they deem to be the Wa polities on the peninsula. Now Wa, or Wo, is the earliest name used for the people of the Japanese islands by the Chinese chroniclers. Early on we see some close similarities in the material culture of the Samhan areas of the Korean peninsula, especially near the area of Pyongyang where the Gaya Confederacy would eventually arise. In that area, near modern Busan, there has been found a high concentration of Yayoi-style pottery. 94% of the assemblage recovered from the Ye-Sung site appears to be in the Yayoi style, with so much of it that the assumption is that, well, at least some of it had to have been locally produced. It couldn't all be imported from the Japanese archipelago. So does that mean that if we have the Yayoi in Korea that Japonic is a Koreanic language? Well, maybe, but there is still some debate around that. Christopher Beckwith and others have made the claim that Japonic is related to the Goguryeo language, which is a proto-language for modern Korean. They would point out that analysis of modern Japanese and Korean indicates that they have a common root and that they broke off from one another fairly recently. Goguryeo was a kingdom that came out of the Amur River region and established itself in the northern end of the Korean peninsula, in the latter part of the Yayoi period. Importantly, a steal from 414 CE about King Gwanggaeto of Goguryeo gives us some information even though it is written technically in Chinese. Linguists have used this account and accounts in the Chinese histories, largely using place names and the odd word, to reconstruct some of the basics of the various languages of that time. What has been found is that many of the peninsular Japonic words are found to fit within the lexicon of Goguryeo, which would seem to indicate that it is likely a Koreanic language. Alexander Vovin, however, has offered a counter-theory, positing that the Japonic names in Goguryeo were already in use when Goguryeo arrived on the peninsula. He points out that many of the Japonic words and names are for locations in the southern half of the peninsula, in the area traditionally occupied by the Samhan, or “Three Han”, mentioned in the old Chinese history. These by the way are Chinhan, Mahan, and Byonhan. He offers the idea that Japonic likely arrived early on and established itself in the southern Korean peninsula, and it was only later that Goguryeo came down separately. Vovin notes place names and markers that indicate Japonic languages were likely spoken from about the Han River near modern-day Seoul, south to the tip of the peninsula. He posits that many of the early kingdoms may have spoken some form of Japonic, and that when the Goguryeo people came down, that these words, these Japonic words, would have been assimilated into the incoming language. We do know that there were close relations between the Yayoi culture on the islands and the Korean peninsula. We have mentioned examples of Yayoi pottery found over across the straits in the Middle Yayoi period, and the Japanese histories even talk about outposts on the Korean peninsula itself. Though we would assume those might have been later colonies coming back from the archipelago, it's a little unclear and we will get to that in the histories. Then in the Wei Chronicles, the Wa are counted as including both people on the peninsula and people on the archipelago. They specifically mention a place that today is read as "Guoxie Han" using the same "Han" as the Korean Samhan states, and it's been identified as being in the area of modern Busan, in the area of the later Gaya Confederacy, which may or may not have been part of the Wa based on the description in the chronicle. This is also where you might remember we just talked about them finding a lot of Yayoi pottery. Another correlation here may be in the kingdom of Tamna on Jeju Island, just off the southern coast of the Korean peninsula. Vovin notes that the old Chinese characters for this kingdom, which lasted until the 15th century as a tributary state, was actually Tamura, which he identifies with Tanimura or Tamimura, the valley settlement or the people settlement in Old Japonic. Although it was fully Chorionic by historical times, evidence such as this from the old histories help provide a glimpse into what was going on back in the old days and what may have been happening. Of course these names were slowly changed and replaced over time, which Vovin attributes to pressures and influences from the north, the Buyeo, Goguryeo, and Baekje who came down from the Manchurian Basin. Gina Barnes notes that there is a recent theory that a people speaking Japonic or Proto-Japonic language actually arrived on the peninsula from across the Bohai Sea on the Shandong Peninsula. Now according to this theory, Japonic speaking people brought rice agriculture over to the peninsula, a pattern that would eventually be repeated in crossing to the archipelago. This theory at least fits the material and genetic evidence we've seen, but we cannot yet say it's been proven in any way shape or form. Still it is quite fascinating to imagine a group of Japonic people moving from the Shandong Peninsula over to the Korean Peninsula and eventually down into Kyushu and out into Japan. Others take this theory a step farther. Some people have suggested that there is a connection between Japanese and Austronesian. This would seem to originally have come from several factors. For one, I'm sure more than one person couldn't help but notice the apparent similarities in the phonology or consonant-vowel structure between Japanese and some Polynesian or Austronesian languages. After all, a cursory look at Japanese and you notice that every syllable, well actually every mora but we don't need to get into the fine details right now, every syllable is made up of either a vowel or a consonant and then a vowel. Like this, a, i, u, e, o, ka, ki, ku, ke, ko. Similarly in Hawaii we have either a vowel or a consonant and then a vowel, compared to a language like English where we can have a consonant at the end of a syllable. That's why we say beer, but in Japanese it becomes biru, with the obligatory u at the end to match Japanese pronunciation rules, even if it gets swallowed a bit. Bii-ru. There have also been claims that some words bear a resemblance to one another. We'll talk about that later, but suffice it to say it is not uncommon for similar words to appear independently across different languages. To actually relate to languages such as Polynesian and Japanese would take a lot more than that. Furthermore, you need to make sure that the cognates aren't simply loanwords from a third language. For example, around much of the world you will find that the word for tea is something like te, or it is something like cha or chai. This isn't because all of these languages are related, but because tea comes from a particular place in Southeast Asia and it spread quickly enough that the original name stayed largely unchanged depending on whether it came by the sea or an overland route. That isn't enough to say any two languages are related. There was also, for the longest time, the theory of people populating the islands from the Ryukyu chain, essentially coming up from southern China and through Taiwan. Polynesian languages are actually part of a larger language family, as I mentioned, called Austronesian and Austronesian languages appear to have originated in Taiwan, where many of the indigenous groups used some Austronesian language. Explorers from Taiwan set sail and eventually their descendants settled most of the Pacific, so why shouldn't it also be the case that they moved north, along the islands between Taiwan and the Ryukyu Islands? Well, while there is some genetic evidence connecting people in the southernmost end of the Okinawan island chain with the people of Taiwan, it just doesn't extend far enough north, and there is no real proof in the material culture. Some people have pointed out to the raised Japanese buildings as similar to South Chinese and Taiwanese buildings, but there are other possible explanations for these, particularly with the spread of rice agriculture to north China and then on to the Korean peninsula and on to the archipelago. There is one theory that keeps a potential Austronesian connection alive, however. Linguist Martine Robbeets wrote an article in 2017 on the connection between Japonic and Austronesian, as well as Transeurasion. She makes the argument that if, as some have suggested, Japonic or a proto-Japonic language was spoken on the Shandong peninsula before coming to the Korean peninsula, then it may have been in contact with a proto-Austronesian language, which she identifies as "para-Austronesian". That Austronesian, which also would have been resonant in the Shandong peninsula at the time, is based on the work of Sagart, who identified such a language back in 1995. Alright, if you feel a bit lost in all of this, you're not alone. There are a lot of ifs that have yet to be fully proven. This does leave the door open for some form of Austronesian influence on the larger Japonic language, but I think we can still close the door on any southern migration theory. In the end, though, for our current purposes, it's enough to point out that there was early Japonic in the southern end of the Korean peninsula, and it may have arrived there from the Shandong peninsula, which possibly had a proto-Austronesian language as well, but there will need to be a lot more research and proof before the community as a whole comes to a consensus around that. Over time, any Japonic-speaking populations on the mainland were absorbed by either Chinese or Koreanic-speaking cultures, which accounts for why the only remnants of the language alive are in Japan and the Ryukyu Islands. Looking back at the archipelago, John Bentley, in his article "The Search for the Language of Yamatai", believes that the language of the Hwa people as described in the Chinese chronicles was an early form of Japonic, and that it must have evolved on the islands. Some call this specifically Insular Japonic. According to Bentley, the language of the Hwa on the islands was not just the Japonic language from the Korean peninsula, but it also contains words that appear to have yet another origin, a local language related to Ainu Itak, the language of the people of Hokkaido. As we mentioned before, Ainu Itak is a language isolate, meaning it's its own language family, and it likely was influenced from places well beyond the early Jomon settlers of Tohoku and Hokkaido. Modern Ainu culture has seen influences from the Okhotsk Sea culture and other neighboring groups, and it is very likely that it has been changed in at least a small part because of these interactions over the years. In addition, there is no guarantee that the language of Southwestern Japan at all resembled the language of Northeast Japan, even if they were related. Given the sparse population and clearly individual nature of each settlement, I suspect that languages varied quite a bit, but it is still possible that they were related, as we did not see many other large-scale immigrations during the Jomon period prior to the arrival of the Yayoi culture. In fact, I'd say it's not just possible, it's probable. And so Bentley has identified what he feels to be some Ainuic influences on Insular Japonic. This does not include the place names in Eastern Japan that still seem to be related more to Ainu Itak than to modern Japanese, but I feel that could be explained if, as the timeline seems to suggest, Insular Japanese had solidified somewhat in Western Japan before moving eastward. Indeed, this may be demonstrated in the complexity and variability of accents in Kyushu and the Southwest as compared to those of the Northeast. Finally, in Japanese, as with any other language, the final product includes a large number of loanwords, especially from Chinese. Chinese you see is the first official writing system that the Japanese had and it was used for official records. Of course, it proved insufficient to fully capture Japanese names, ideas, and language as the two are really completely different. And so Japanese very quickly came up with a way to use Chinese characters purely for their sounds to render Japanese words. Our oldest source for this type of writing is the Man’yoshu, an old poetry anthology containing poems from 600-759 CE. Nonetheless, Japanese writing in Chinese, or kanbun, meant that Chinese loanwords are found throughout the modern language. There are also a number of words that have come over from Buddhism, with roots in the Old Sanskrit of the Buddhist Sutras and often transliterated through Chinese and Korean scribes. All of these words were modified to fit with the rules of Japanese pronunciation, often making them unrecognizable to their home language. And that process has continued up until modern day. Words like tempura and juban were picked up from the Portuguese and nowadays Japanese is filled with words in katakana to describe things like terebi, hoteru, and takushi. Some of these are brand new, but others are simply more modern versions of existing things where the loanword has become more popular than the traditional Japanese, or perhaps it carries a more modern meaning. Thus, when you travel, you might stay at a best Western hoteru, or you might find yourself in a traditional ryokan, an old word for an inn or hotel for travelers. Alright, so all this is great, but how do we know anything about it before they wrote it down? I mean, with archaeology we can see the artifacts and where they were in the ground, with history we have records that we can read, even with DNA we have, well, some idea of how it's passed on from one person to another and how those markers work, but with language, what exactly are we doing? Alright, here's where I admit that I myself am hardly anything more than an amateur hobbyist when it comes to the full study of linguistics, the study of language. More often than not, my initial reaction to linguistical analysis is a bit of a raised eyebrow, because too often you see false equivalencies made between things in order to prove a point. For example, there have been recent attempts on the internet to claim that "never" is a contraction of "not ever" and that "blush" is a contraction of "blood rush". These are demonstrably false, and let me repeat that, these are demonstrably false when you look at the historical record, but it's still easy to see how people came to these conclusions. Similarly, there have been multiple attempts to suggest that the Japanese word "arigatou" which means "thank you" is related to the Portuguese word of the same, meaning "obrigado". However, when you take a look at these, as superficially similar as they sound, we can prove that they were both in their individual languages before they actually came in contact with each other, and any similarities are merely coincidences. And you know, it's sloppy work like that which can lead one to paraphrase an academic saying "you have lies, damn lies, and linguistics", but that doesn't mean there isn't anything to the study. Far from it. When done correctly, linguistics can be quite illuminating. So what do linguists do to reach their conclusions? How do we learn more about a dead language where we don't have any of it written down and the people are long gone? Well first, we look for what records we have of the language from the people who spoke it. For us, the earliest known writings in any Japonic form are the early Japanese histories, though these are somewhat problematic because they are written in Chinese. Even when they use Chinese as a phonetic language rather than true Chinese, we need to consider just how the Japanese were pronouncing the Chinese characters at the time. Some of that can be accomplished by looking at the later phonetic alphabets, like Katakana and Hiragana, and figuring out just how a word was pronounced earlier. That leads us then to our next source, names and place names. You see, while language changes, place names often remain what they are. There may be some shift as long as people remember what a name stood for, and even today it can be difficult to know if someone intended "Yama-shita" or "Yamanoshita" if they didn't include the particle. In many cases, though, names have retained some semblance of the original name that was used, as in the case of Tamna previously. Then there are names like Nara, which barely translates into modern Japanese in any discernible way. Some languages have suggested that it could be related to a chorionic word, "narak" referencing "our land". How they came to such a conclusion is usually with the second piece of information, and that's a look at the ever-changing pronunciation of the Chinese characters used to write things down. As Bentley and others point out, when Chinese scribes were recording names, well first off we assumed they were recording them as accurately as they could, using the Chinese dialect of the time, and without a phonetic alphabet of their own, Chinese pronunciation has changed and drifted over the centuries. Today, Chinese is broken out into a variety of what are known as, well, mutually unintelligible dialects. For example, Mandarin, or Putonghua, is based on the Beijing dialect and is distinctly different from Cantonese, which is spoken down in Hong Kong. Over the years, Chinese has drifted, but fortunately Chinese scholarship has done their best to record changes where they can, and there are generally enough written works, including rhyming poetry and other such things, that scholars have at least some idea of what Old and Middle Chinese might have sounded like. This then in turn helps us to understand what they were transcribing at any given time. And a key piece here is that they don't always use the same character for what we see today as the same sound, so the character that was used for "o" in one word might be quite different from the character that was used for "o" in another word. And though different authors might use different characters, or kanji, they were internally consistent in using different characters for these different "o" sounds. Through this kind of study, linguists have been able to conclude that early Japonic actually had more vowels than modern Japanese, which today only uses five, "a, i, u, e, o." We may touch on this more when we actually discuss the man’yoshu poetry, one of the earliest examples of a purely Japanese work written using Chinese characters. For now, we can leave with the understanding that the variety of Chinese characters used in different circumstances, as well as our understanding of the old readings for those characters, is helping linguists to reconstruct what the language actually sounded like, even without a phonetic script. Now, beyond the direct textual evidence, linguists have a few other tools up their sleeves that they can use to determine what words may have meant or sounded like. One of these is statistical analysis. Over the years, using languages for which we have ample evidence of their changes over time, linguists have built statistical models that suggest ways in which languages might change. These models can be applied to what we know about the language to test a theory on how the language might have sounded or might have evolved. We can run these models against our limited sample size of data and use it to help determine if our theories pan out or not. Finally, there are ways to compare multiple dialects and languages in a given family and trace them back to where they may have come from, or at least when they might have broken off. This uses the concept that change in a language usually takes time, and that time can be assumed given other known factors about the language and known changes throughout the years. While not perfect, these linguistical genealogical studies can then be tracked against what we know of the historical or archaeological record to see if there is evidence of why and when a change may have occurred. Of course, I do feel obliged to bring up here a reminder oft quoted in discussions of statistics that all models are wrong, but some models are useful. By that I mean to say there is no model that we can guarantee represents the full complexity of human behavior, whether in language or anywhere else, but with some models we may get close enough to the truth to better illuminate what we know. There are times when a great change occurs that may throw off a model, or you may choose a word that, while it looks like a fit, only later find it was a loanword from yet another language. This is why there is still so much work to be done to validate historical linguistical research. Now, a simple example here is the word "wo". This is the word that is generally accepted as the name of the various Yayoi people on the Japanese archipelago and on parts of the Korean peninsula. Of course, today the character is pronounced "wo", but that isn't how they would have pronounced it back in ancient times. Then it would have been "wa" or "?uiᴇ". And the evidence shows that, while the Chinese used the character pronounced today as "wo", meaning dwarf in Chinese, the Japanese eventually decided to use another character "wa", which has the Chinese meaning of "peace". Of course, it isn't like anyone was actually calling them dwarves or peaceful. Rather, "wa" was likely how they introduced themselves, and then the Chinese chose a character that matched the sound. Of course, the Chinese chronicles regularly used derogatory characters to transliterate the names of foreign groups, thus the "dwarf" comment. Furthermore, "wa" may not have been the name of a nation or even what we would think of as an ethnicity, not originally at least. It may have been simpler than that. "Wa", you see, is a first-person pronoun in Japonic, and that may have been the meaning at the time. But the Chinese character merely captured the sound of the word, which is common practice in Chinese chronicles when dealing with foreign words, and they used that as the name. Thus, this is also where we get the names of many of the states that the chronicles say are in the islands. So thank you for taking this detour with me. I know we have jumped around in the narrative, focusing on a rather narrow area of study. Hopefully though, this pays off dividends as we move forward into proto-historic and historic periods. As the archipelago starts to interact more with the continent, we will want to keep in mind the idea that Japan is not isolated and alone, but it is part of a larger world, and initially it is part of a larger world that is speaking, if not the same, at least a similar language. This may help us to better understand some of the early relationships and provide clues as to just why things are working out as they are. I'll also want us to keep in mind how language affects the people writing the histories as well, and be careful that we pick our way through them. For the most part, I'll be using the modern Putonghua pronunciation or my best approximation for anything having to do with China unless there is a specific reason not to. However, for things in Japanese or Korean, I'll try to make a note about historical pronunciation where it is useful, but otherwise I'll probably use the pronunciation that you are most likely to find if you go off looking for information on your own, as that is probably going to be the most helpful. So to recap. The Yayoi culture appears to have brought the Japonic language to the island from the Korean peninsula. On the peninsula, we have Japonic speaking people who are probably part of the Samhan states, the area whose material culture is most closely aligned with the Yayoi culture. This may or may not have originally come to Korea with early rice farming techniques from the Shandong peninsula, and this reinforces much of the archaeological evidence we have seen. Then, as the Chinese come into the picture, they give us a new label for these people, one we will be using more as we move forward in this period, the Hwa people. But Hwa is probably not a defined state, but may refer in this case to an ethnicity or just a people likely bound by the linguistic commonality of Japonic. I want us to keep this in mind as we move forward because understanding the dynamics between the various people, not just in the islands, but also on the peninsula, will be crucial. Too often we can let ourselves get bogged down in our modern conceptions of nations and borders drawn on a map, and that can hinder our exploration of what is going on. Certainly nationalism has played a large hand in some of what we know, or perhaps what we don't know, about various periods and various places. But that's all for now. From here on out, we'll get more into the history of the islands as detailed in the Chinese chronicles. We'll take a look at the growing Hwa states on the island, including the famed Yamatai, as well as other less known states such as Izumo and Kibi. Until then, thank you for all of your support. If you like what we are doing, please tell your friends and feel free to rate us on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. If you feel the need to do more, we do have information about our Ko-Fi site, where you can support us monetarily if you want to help us keep this thing going, over at our main website, sengokudaimyo.com/podcast, where we'll also have some of the various things that we've discussed, references, and other material for this episode. Questions or comments, feel free to tweet at us at @sengokupodcast or reach out to our Sengoku Daimyo Facebook page. That's all for now. Thank you again, and I'll see you next episode on Sengoku Daimyo's Chronicles of Japan.