Chapter 4 demonstrates that Korean has deeply influenced its immediate language neighbors: Japanese and Jurchen-Manchu. The Japanese-Korean parallels discussed here have often been presented as proof of their genetic relationship. However, the chapter argues that the overwhelming majority of these parallels are found only in Central Japanese, the Japonic language, with which Korean was in immediate and direct contact. On the other hand, most of the Korean-Jurchen/Manchu comparisons dealt with in this chapter have not previously been discussed. With few exceptions, they are found only in Jurchen and Manchu but not in other Tungusic languages. These exceptions are easily explained as loans from Jurchen or Manchu into the neighboring Southern or Northern Tungusic languages; they are never found in those Northern Tungusic languages, such as Ewenki and Ewen that are located outside of the area.

In his London years, Pound had ambivalent feelings about the marginal status of the country of his origin, the United States. On the one hand, he had a strong desire to position himself in the centre of Western civilization; on the other hand, he could not help being conscious of his origin in the margin – the frontier – of that civilization. For example, at the beginning of ‘What I Feel about Walt Whitman,’ published in 1909, he wrote, ‘From this side of Atlantic I am for the first time able to read Whitman, and from the vantage of my education and … my world citizenship’ (SP 145), but in his poem ‘A Pact’, published in 1916, he addressed to his imaginary Whitman, ‘We have one sap and one root – / Let there be commerce between us’ (PT 269).