Quote:

 

1.3) Some Altaists have proposed Korean-Altaic affinity.  Others,
          including solidly mainstream ones like Nicholas (Nikolaj
          Nikolaevi^c) Poppe, have supported or at least not
          rejected this proposal.  Poppe's assumption that such a
          Korean-Altaic relationship goes back to a pre-Altaic stage
          ought to be noted.

    (1.4) Some, notably Roy Andrew Miller, have argued for Japanese-
          Altaic affinity.  If this affinity exists, it ought to be
          sought at an even earlier stage than the possible Korean-Altaic
          affinity (1.3).

Quote:

 

I see no grounds in
Reinhard Hahn's statement that Turkic, Mongolian, and Manchu-Tungus are rela-
ted closer to each other than any of them to Korean and Japanese. Poppe is
not an authority here, since his command of Korean and especially Japanese
was  far from being perfect. Any of the Altaicists, who has a direct acces to
Proto_japanese and Proto-Korean data, will  definitely disagree with Reinhard
Hahn. All recent research done here suggests that Japanese and Korean are
on the same level of relationship to Mongolian, Turkic and Manchu-Tungus, as
those have between themselves. Also, it seems that Manchu-Tungus, Japanese
and Korean may be an interdmediate node as opposed to Mongolian, and, especial-
ly Turkic. The most recent state-of -art data can be found in Starostin's
book on Altaic, cited before by Alexis Manaster Ramer and (a brief outline) in
my article "Long-Distance Relationships, Reconstruction Methodology, and the
Origins of Japanese", Diachronica XI-1, 1994, 95-114.

Quote:

 

I believe that Unger's approach is typical for
the absolute majority of historical linguists on Japanese/Korean side of
Altaic in North America: nobody doubts Japanese-Korean genetic relationship,
and everybody looks with a great deal of sympathy on the the further connec-
tion with Manchu-Tungus.

Quote:

 

Japan

J. Marshall Unger's paper, Substratum and Adstratum in Prehistoric
Japanese (241 - 258), discusses the position of Japanese with respect
to Korean, which has implications also for a potential widening of the
Altaic family or an even larger grouping. Unger argues for a careful
and patient bottom-up approach to grouping (characteristic of his own
and Samuel E. Martin's view of the relationship of Korean and
Japanese) and against top-down theories (such as those of Roy Andrew
Miller and Joseph H. Greenberg). Unger points out that the main
problem with positing a Japanese-Korean common starting point is that
the two languages have fewer cognates than would be expected for a
relatively short 2,300-year separation. The author's solution is an
adstratum hypothesis. He proposes that Proto-Korean-Japanese (his
proto-Samhan- Wa) entered the southern Korean peninsula and Northern
Kyushu around the third century B.C., perhaps from the Chinese coast
between the mouth of the Yangzi and the Shandong peninsula. This
population linguistically assimilated the previous populations of the
two areas as they spread southward in the peninsula and the island,
respectively. In the Korean peninsula the languages of the Koguryo and
Puyo (who established the kingdom of Paekche), which have affinity
with Tungusic, were influential both in Korea and, as newcomers, in
Japan. Prestige lexical items from the language of the newcomers
displaced much native vocabulary in Japan, but not in Korea, parallel
to the partial displacement by French of Anglo-Saxon lexis. For this
reason, many proto-Korean-Japanese words that were preserved in Korean
are displaced in Japanese. The stratigraphic evidence for this
scenario is found in the matching of etyma in the following way: a
special set of Korean- Japanese etymologies involve an Old Japanese
word with a limited distribution or semantic range lacking a cognate
in Korean. These etyma match words known from vestigial evidence of
the languages of Koguryo or Paekche on the one hand, or Tungusic
languages on the other.