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Shichirō Murayama
Born	12 (1908) Ibaraki City,Ibaraki Prefecture, Japan
Died	May 15, 1995(1995-05-15) (aged 86)
Known for	Critic of traditional Japanese Philology on methodological grounds.
Scientific career

The goal of this article is to shed some light on the work of the late Shichiro Murayama who investigated the origins of the prototype-Japanese language, or Old Japanese. His reports on archaeology findings suggest an earlier date than previously supposed of the induction of Chinese characters in Japanese usage; or at least serves as a puzzle piece to this question in general. Initially in his academic career, S.Murayama advocated for an Altaic origin of Japanese, he gradually shifted his view, that Japanese is a mixture Altaic-Austronesian. Today, through his work on etymology showing a close relation to Ryukyuan, it is more generally held that Japanese and Ryukyuan form a unique category together: that they are not strongly shown to be related to any other language group.

Major Contributions to Japanese Etymology

• On Japanese Language Origin: the main contribution of his work amalgamated in providing the groundwork for important etymological patterns. He also showed evidence of the Japanese-Rukyuan (Japonic) relation, a portmanteau family shown not to be related to other languages.
• On Mongolian: By deciphering Genghis Khan epigraphs and Khitan scripts
• Phonology: Old Japanese and Malayo-Polynesian Languages

Used knowledge of Hideyo Arisaka's Vowel Association Law as well as the observed vowel harmony in Altai as a means to begin investigating proto-Japanese lineage.Studied the oldest text document from the Korean peninsula, known as 三国史記 which is an Ateji for Samguk Sagi, meaning The History of the Three Kingdoms. From these sagas, Murayama was able to extract knowledge about the then language, Goguryeo, which he showed to have a remarkably high rate of similar words with Japanese. Even today, Korean lexicon shows many similar words. The section from this work exemplifies other eminent linguists who specialized on this subject: _SEE Suggested Further Readings. In Obayashi Taryo (1973), he shows how S. Murayama laid out his argumentation for Japanese as a "mixed language". On page 420-424, he lists some cross-linguistic argumentation from a phonological standpoint. On page 424, he cites the work of Otto Dempwolff for his development of Malayo-Polynesian phonemic notation (*t')

• The next work discusses the archaeological findings in aTumulus/Kofun and its implications on Old Japanese

In this fascinating article, which includes an X-ray photograph, an old sword found in a tumulus has phonographic inscriptions of Chinese Hanzi (pp.408-09; Hand-copy on 411), showing that Hanzi had been in some kind of use in Japan earlier than thought at the time of the article's publication. From page 417 on, other archaeological findings of similar ilk are cited (such as an epigraph on a tombstone in Chinese). Page 420-421 goes over examples of the earliest discovered written records of Japanese with a line-by-line parsing and extensive notes on the translation.

Other Contributing Linguistists

Arisaka, Hideyo; Obayashi, Taro; Otto Dempwolff; Miler, Roy Andrew;

Suggested Further Readings

(J. Rahder, An Etymological Dictionary of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Ainu (Rahder 1956-61) ; Ozawa Shigeo 1968 (lexical comparisons between Japanese and Mongol); R. A. Miller, Japanese and the Other Altaic Languages (1971); Matsumoto Nobuhiro (1928); N. A Syromjatnikov (1972))\

Publications

Shichirō, Murayama, and Roy Andrew Miller. “The Inariyama Tumulus Sword Inscription.” Journal of Japanese Studies, vol. 5, no. 2, 1979, pp. 405–438., www.jstor.org/stable/132104.

Shichirō, Murayama. “The Malayo-Polynesian Component in the Japanese Language.” Journal of Japanese Studies, vol. 2, no. 2, 1976, pp. 413–436., www.jstor.org/stable/132060.

村山七郎. 漂流民の言語 : ロシアへの漂流民の方言学的貢献. Tōkyō: Yoshikawa Kōbunkan, 1965. Print.

Murayama, ShichiroHyōryumin no gengo : roshia e no hyōryūmin no hōgengakuteki kōken

Tōkyō: Yoshikawa Kōbunkan, 1965. Print.

村山七郎. 日本語の比較研究. Dai 1-han. Tōkyō: ichi Shobō, 1995. Print.

Murayama, Shichiro. Nihongo no Hihakukenkyū. Dai 1-han. Tōkyō: ichi Shobō, 1995. Print.

Miller, Roy Andrew, Murayama Shichiro, and Obayashi Taryo. "The Origins of Japanese." Monumenta Nipponica 29.1 (1974): 93. Print.

Miyake M.H. "Philological Evidence for *e and *o in Pre-Old Japanese." Diachronica 20.1 (2003): 83-137. Web.

References

Brown, E. K., and Anderson, Anne. Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics. 2nd ed. Kidlington, Oxford, UK ; Amsterdam ; Boston: Elsevier, 2006. Print.