The Korean language

Linguosaurus
Sep 1, 2018 · 2 min read

Korean has nearly 80 million native speakers, and is the official language of two countries. Yet, surprisingly little is known about its history.

It has no known living relatives; though Japanese is often suggested as a candidate, there is no solid evidence that they descend from the same historical language. And before the 15th century, when its current writing system was invented, its written records, which involved creative uses of Chinese characters, were sparse and difficult to decode.

Nevertheless, by comparing Korean to its neighbouring languages, we can infer a few things about the amount of contact that Korean speakers have likely had with them.

The languages with which Korean has the most obvious similarities are the so-called Altaic languages, which include the Turkish, Mongolian, Manchu, and Japanese. Originally thought to be a language family, they are now more widely considered to form a sprachbund (or linguistic area). A sprachbund is a group of languages that share similarities not because they descend from a common language, but because a significant number of their speakers speak more than one of the languages. Over a long time — typically thousands of years — this mutual familiarity causes these languages to become more and more similar. In time, such languages can almost seem like the same language with different words.

Here are some of the features that Korean shares with other Altaic languages:

  • word order is typically subject-object-verb (“Bob chicken ate” instead of “Bob ate chicken”)
  • nouns are followed by case markers that indicate grammatical function (“Bob” and “chicken” would be followed by something telling you who was eating what)
  • lots of segmentable (or agglutinative) suffixes (e.g. meok-eoss-eumni-da “EAT-past tense-high politeness-formal declarative”)
  • vowel harmony, where only certain vowels can occur together in a word (though losing importance in Modern Korean)
  • a small (though not insignificant) number of shared words

In particular, the similarities between Korean and Japanese are especially striking. This suggests that a good number of Korean speakers have also been familiar Japanese to some degree for thousands of years. We’ll look at the similarities between Korean and Japanese more closely in the next post.

Linguosaurus

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Thoughts from a linguistically-oriented dinosaur.

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