Cherevko, K.E. The ethnogenesis of the Japanese people and the hypothesis of the Indo-European component.

Abstract: Formation of the Japanese language and the Japanese ethnos at a certain stage of social and cultural development of which there appeared a need for writing system, are two closely related problems. The Japanese studies traditionally used a hypothesis according to which the Japanese ethnos was formed due to the interaction of the Austronesian (Malay and Polynesian) aboriginal tribes for whom the “bell culture” was typical and the incoming Altai tribes, for whom the “sword culture” was typical during the first centuries A.C. in the Japanese isles. Accordingly, the Altai language superstratum overlapped with the Austronesian substratum, and the superstratum won during the hybridization. The influence of substratum was shown in the lexical and phonetic elements of the new language, which was also reflected in the law of open syllables, which was not typical for the language of the incomers, and the considerable limitation of the well-developed agglutination system, absence of the consonant conjunction at the start of the word, non-distinguishing the phonemes [R/L], and grammatically it showed itself in lack of numeral changes in counting suffixes and abundance of polite words.

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