duction to the Historical-Comparative Study of the Japanese- Koguryoic Languages with a Preliminary Description of Archaic

This volume is an attempt to recover the ethnolinguistic history of the ancient Korean kingdom of Goguryeo/Kogury0 (henceforth Kogury0), recently brought to the attention of the public by a politico-historical controversy. It focuses on the reconstruction of the Kogury0 language and its relations to other languages, which will also be the main object of this review, but also encompasses con-nected subjects such as Chinese historical phonology, the origins of the Japa-nese language and people, and the Altaic theory and even devotes a whole chapter to various broader linguistic issues. Beckwith proceeds in this volume to a philological investigation of the “Old Kogury0 ” (OKog) toponyms recorded in the twelfth-century Korean his-tory Samguk sagi and also takes a look at the fragments of the “Archaic Kogury0 ” language (AKog) found in older Chinese chronicles. Interpreting these transcriptions in Chinese phonograms through his personal version of Chinese historical phonology, Beckwith gives then a reconstruction of the phonological system of his OKog, as well as 139 Kogury0 words, out of which he identifies about a hundred cognates with Japanese. Beckwith concludes that the Kogury0 and Japanese languages are genet-ically related, as already assumed by many scholars, but rejects the Korean and Altaic connections. Actually, Beckwith dismisses the Altaic theory as a whole