Mo hitotsu no Manyoshu: Another Manyushu by Yi Yong-Hui

Another case is Yi-Yong-hui's book called Mou hitotsu no Man'youshuu (Another Man'Youshuu).Marc Miyake of the University of Hawaii, on his excellent Amritas web site, says:

Yi Yong-hui's 1991 bestseller Mou hitotsu no Man'youshuu (Another Man'youshuu), an attempt to reread classical Japanese poetry in the Man'youshuu (Collection of Ten Thousands Leaves) in terms of modern Korean. How could ancient Japanese poets write poetry in a 'code' decipherable only to a future Korean with a lot of imagination? The short answer is that they didn't. Yi only found coincidental lookalikes between the two languages. This list shows you how any two languages can have lookalikes that match in sound and meaning - and Yi was only looking for similar sounds, not similar meanings. If you lower the bar that much, almost anything goes. (There are non-coincidental lookalikes between Korean and Japanese that point toward a genetic relationship between them, but you probably won't find them in Yi's book.)For instance, on p. 34, Yi misread ancient Japanese ipe 'house' as ie (like in modern Japanese) and then claimed this was code for modern Korean ie 'hereupon' (mistranslated as 'here', which really corresponds to modern Korean yogi or igot). Oh, so is Latin i.e. (< id est 'that is') code for Korean ie too? Gimme a break.The book goes on like this for 245 more pages. She manages to simultaneously insult the Korean and Japanese languages and the reader's intelligence. Yet she actually was featured in (IIRC) the San Francisco Chronicle back in 1991 (I have the clipping in my files somewhere). She also turned an ancient Japanese word for 'marriage' (mito no magupapi) into broken Korean for 'rubbing male genitalia against female genitalia' (p. 66). That tells us a lot more about her (and her need for PR) than about ancient Japan. Sex always sells.So does this sort of pseudo-decoding. Take the Bible Code fad, for instance. If you read anything about language in the mass media, don't trust it. Even 'expert' opinions are no longer reliable due to Chomskyan dogma. Linguistics is becoming a junk science.