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Korean Language

language:King Sechong picture to the left made Korean Language in 15th Century. Korean is the national language and is spoken in a variety of local dialects generally coinciding with provincial boundaries. The Seoul dialect is the basis for modern standard Korean. Written Korean uses Han’gul, the Korean phonetic alphabet developed in the fifteenth century. The McCune-Reischauer System of romanization for Korean has been used widely since its development in 1939. However, in 2000 the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, in an effort to make the language more compatible with computer and Internet usage, promulgated the Revised Romanization System of Korean, which is used widely in South Korea today. Chinese characters (Hanja), once used exclusively by the literati, occasionally still are used. English is also widely taught in junior and high schools.

Korean Alphabet Chart (Han gul 한글)

Language Origin

The classification of the modern Korean language is uncertain, and due to the lack of any one generally accepted theory, it is sometimes described conservatively as a language isolate.

On the other hand, since the publication of the article of Ramstedt in 1926, many linguists support the hypothesis that Korean can be classified as an Altaic language, or as a relative of proto-Altaic. Korean is similar to Altaic languages in that they both lack certain grammatical elements, including number, gender, articles, fusional morphology, voice, and relative pronouns (Kim Namkil). Korean especially bears some morphological resemblance to some languages of the Northern Turkic group, namely Sakha (Yakut). Vinokurova, a scholar of the Sakha language, noted that like in Korean, and unlike in other Turkic languages or a variety of other languages surveyed, adverbs in Sakha are derived from verbs with the help of derivational morphology; however, she did not suggest this implied any relation between the two languages.[2]

Similar Language in Asia

It is also considered likely that Korean is related in some way to Japanese, since the two languages have nearly identical grammatical structures, and share a number of possible phonological cognates (though a majority of them are likely due to local pronunciations of the Chinese characters from which they are derived), as noted by such researchers as Samuel E. Martin and Roy Andrew Miller in the late 1960s. Sergei Starostin (1991) found about 25% of potential cognates in the Japanese-Korean 100-word Swadesh list, which places these two languages closer together than other possible members of the Altaic family.[3]

Chinese influence

IKoreant has borrowed heavily from chinese vocabulary. It is presumed that modern Korean may be more closely related to the languages of Samhan and Silla than the Buyeo languages; many Korean scholars believe they were mutually intelligible, and the collective basis of what in the Goryeo period would merge to become Middle Korean (the language before the changes that the Seven-Year War brought) and eventually Modern Korean. The Jeju dialect preserves some archaic features that can also be found in Middle Korean, whose arae a is retained in the dialect as a distinct vowel.

There are also more marginal hypotheses proposing various other relationships; for example, a few scholars, such as Homer B. Hulbert (1905), have tried to relate Korean to the Dravidian languages through the similar syntax in both.[6]