Excerpt from Fifty Years of New Japan Kaikoku Gojunen Shi, Vol. 2 The pride which a man takes in his mother tongue is confined neither to race nor to country, and the Japanese language, like others, has been lauded to Heaven by its devoted students, who assert its divine origin and its superiority over every other language in the world. But this very reverence has unfortunately impeded scientific inquiry, for we could not, holding these views, study impartially the relations between our native tongue and other languages. But the advent of the Meiji era saw the necessity for such a research, especially as we were impelled thereto by the efforts of foreign inquirers; so at last, in 1886, a course of comparative philology was provided in the Imperial University, which contributed not a little to the study of our mother tongue. Foreigners had, before this, not been idle in their researches. In 1820 Klaproth assigned the Japanese language to the wide family of Ural-Altaic tongues. In 1857 Boller published the same opinion, and, considering that our language bore a close resemblance to the North Samojedic language, gave some concrete examples - a view which found many advocates. Among these, Gabelentz dwelt on the resemblance between Japanese and Manchurian, while Aston scientifically compared the languages of Japan and Korea, and made public the result of his study. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.