William McClure (1962) is Associate Professor at Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is the author or editor of four books on Japanese language and linguistics. Currently, he is serving as the Dean of Arts and Humanities at Queens College.Alexander Vovin (1961), Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales, is a Directeur d’études of Japanese and North-East Asian historical linguistics in this graduate university. He has published many monographs and articles on Japanese, Korean, Ainu, Tungusic, Mongolic, and Turkic, including his multivolume edition and translation of the Man’yōshū (2009-) and A Descriptive and Comparative Grammar of Western Old Japanese (GO/Brill, 2005-2009).