難隱別 is meaningless, and hence seems to represent the sound of the name. From other examples, we infer that 難隱 means 'seven' and 別 means '-fold, layer', while the 'county' part of the gloss is not represented. Such inconsistencies suggest that the names were collated by someone unsure of how they were originally intended to be read. In this way, a vocabulary of 80 to 100 words has been extracted from these place names. Characters like 買 and 忽 presumably represented pronunciations based on some local version of the Chinese reading tradition, but there is no agreement on what this sounded like. Korean scholars tend to use the Sino-Korean readings of 15th century dictionaries of Middle Korean, in which 買 is pronounced may. Another approximation is to use the Middle Chinese reading pronunciations recorded in such dictionaries as the Qieyun (compiled in 601), yielding a pronunciation of mɛ for the same character. In some cases, the same word is represented by several characters with similar pronunciations. Vocabulary Several of the words extracted from these names, including all four of the attested numerals, resemble Japonic languages, and are accepted by many authors as evidence that now-extinct Peninsular Japonic languages were once spoken in central and southern parts of the Korean peninsula. Others resemble Korean or Tungusic languages. Interpretations The first authors to study these words assumed that, because these place names came from the territory of Goguryeo, they must have represented the language of that state. Lee and Ramsey offer the additional argument that the dual use of Chinese characters to represent the sound and meaning of the place names must have been done by scribes of Goguryeo, which would have borrowed written Chinese earlier than the southern kingdoms. They argue that the Goguryeo language formed a link between Japanese and Korean. Christopher I. Beckwith, assuming that the characters represented a form of northeast Chinese, for which he offers his own reconstruction, claims a much larger proportion of Japonic cognates. Beckwith's linguistic analysis has been criticized for the ad hoc nature of his Chinese reconstructions, for his handling of Japonic material and for hasty rejection of possible cognates in other languages. Other authors point out that most of the place names come from central Korea, an area captured by Goguryeo from Baekje and other states in the 5th century, and none from the historical homeland of Goguryeo north of the Taedong