No diligent attempt has yet been made to trace the connexion--if any exist--between the Ainu tongue and the languages of northeastern Asia, but geology, history, and archaeology suffice to indicate that the Yemishi reached Japan at the outset from Siberia. The testimony of these three sources is by no means so explicit in the case of the Yamato, and we have to consider whether the language itself does not furnish some better guide. "Excepting the twin sister tongue spoken in the Ryukyu Islands," writes Professor Chamberlain, "the Japanese language has no kindred, and its classification under any of the recognized linguistic families remains doubtful. In structure, though not to any appreciable extent in vocabulary, it closely resembles Korean, and both it and Korean may possibly be related to Mongol and to Manchu, and might therefore lay claim to be included in the so-called 'Altaic group' In any case, Japanese is what philologists call an agglutinative tongue; that is to say, it builds up its words and grammatical forms by means of suffixes loosely soldered to the root or stem, which is invariable." This, written in 1905, has been supplemented by the ampler researches of Professor S. Kanazawa, who adduces such striking evidences of similarity between the languages of Japan and Korea that one is almost compelled to admit the original identity of the two. There are no such affinities between Japanese and Chinese. Japan has borrowed largely, very largely, from China. It could scarcely have been otherwise. For whereas the Japanese language in its original form--a form which differs almost as much from its modern offspring as does Italian from Latin--has little capacity for expansion, Chinese has the most potential of all known tongues in that respect. Chinese may be said to consist of a vast number of monosyllables, each expressed by a different ideograph, each having a distinct significance, and each capable of combination and permutation with one or more of the others, by which combinations and permutations disyllabic and trisyllabic words are obtained representing every conceivable shade of meaning.