Impulse Japan, Inc.

According to the Book of Genesis, after Noah's Flood, all of humanity spoke a single language. Because there were no linguistic barriers, technology developed swiftly. One day, man began to build a tower that would reach all the way to Heaven. God became angry at the arrogance of this act, and divided what was once a single language up into a variety of tongues.

Currently, there are over six thousand languages on earth. Some of them resemble each other and have been classified into "language families." Impulse Japan's logo symbolizes our philosophy of "smashing the language barrier and uniting the world into one," by depicting the eight language families together. Each family is symbolized by one circle. They are connected in the center, which is an expression of our desire to overcome linguistic challenges and facilitate communication.

The principal language families are as follows.

1. Indo-European languages

Includes the languages of North America and Europe: English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Russia, Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, etc. The Indo-European language family does not have a common word for "ocean." Instead, it shares a word for "ox-drawn cart." This was likely because the people who originally spoke these languages lived in the central part of the Eurasian continent, where there was no ocean. Their descendents moved west by ox cart into Europe, then south into India.

1. Afro-Asiatic languages (also known as "Hamito-Semitic" languages)

Contains languages from the Middle East, such as Arabic, Hebrew, and Egyptian. The term "Hamito-Semitic" comes from the Old Testament, and some felt that this was not an appropriately scholarly term, so it was changed to "Afro-Asiatic."

1. Uralic languages

Includes Finnish and Hungarian. These languages derived from the equestrian Hun tribe, and the names "Finland" and "Hungary" mean "Land of the Huns."

1. Altaic languages

Includes Turkish and Mongolian, which also came from the Huns. They share many similarities, including the sport of wrestling (which Japan also has). In the distant past, people who spoke Altaic languages migrated had a great deal of influence, probably because they migrated so much. There is even the theory that Japanese and Korean are related to this family.

1. Sino-Tibetan languages

Chinese, Thai, Tibetan, Burmese.

1. Austronesian languages

This family is made up of Indonesian, Malaysian, Hawaiian, and Tahitian – all languages from islands in the Pacific Ocean. It is thought that they all came from the single language of an ocean tribe, which spread out and changed.

1. Dravidian languages

Refers to languages distributed about India, such as Telugu, Malayalam, and Tamil. They are used in the south of India, the Deccan Plateau, and portions of Sri Lanka.

1. Other (languages with no clear relationship): Japanese, Korean, Basque, etc.

(7 language families + Other = 8)

There is no established theory regarding the origins of the Japanese language, which contains so many elements that it is hard to say where it came from. Grammatically, Japanese and Korean are very similar. However, they share no common words. In the realm of grammar and everyday terms, Japanese and Austronesian languages are very close. And when it comes to words related to rice cultivation and weaving, similarities can be pointed out with Tamil, which is used in the south of India.

Perhaps seafaring peoples first lived in Japan, and then tribes who spoke Altaic languages arrived, bringing their grammar with them. After that, various tribes brought the newest cultural and technological achievements, along with their languages, which were incorporated into Japanese.

Currently, experts are hard at work studying the DNA relationships between Japanese and other peoples, which seem to line up with the results of linguistic research.