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Korean is spoken by about 70 million people. Although most speakers of Korean live on the Korean Peninsula and its adjacent islands, more than 5 million are scattered throughout the world.
The origin of the Korean language is as obscure as the origins of the Korean people. In the 19th century when Western scholars "discovered" the Korean language, from what family of languages the Korean language derived was one of the first question posed about the language. These scholars proposed various theories linking the Korean language with Ural-Altaic, Japanese, Chinese, Tibetan, Dravidian Ainu, Indo-European and other languages. Among these theories, only the relationship between Korean and Altaic (which groups the Turkic, Mongolian and Manchu-Tungus languages) and the relationship between Korean and Japanese have continuously attracted the attention of comparative linguists in the 20th century.
Altaic, Korean and Japanese not only exhibit similarities in their general structure, but also share common features such as vowel harmony and lack of conjunctions, although the vowel harmony in old Japanese has been the object of dispute among specialists in the field. Moreover, it has been found that these languages have various common elements in their grammar and vocabulary. Although much work remains to be done, research seems to show that Korean is probably related to both Altaic and Japanese. |
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[History] |
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[Korean Script] |
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The Korean script which is now generally called Hangeul was invented in 1443 under the reign of King Sejong (r.1418-1450), the fourth king of the Joseon Dynasty. It was then called Hunmin Jeongeum, or proper sounds to instruct the people. However, evidence for a script version did not appear until 1446 when Hunmin Jeongeum appeared in a written document. The motivation behind the invention of the Korean script, according to King Sejong's preface to the above book, was to enable the Korean people to write their own language without the use of Chinese characters. Until the introduction of Hunmin Jeongeum, Chinese characters were used by the upper classes, and Idu letters, a kind of Chinese-based Korean character system, were used by the populace. There also seems to have been a second motivation behind the development of Korean script: to represent the "proper" sound associated with each Chinese character.
In attempting to invent a Korean writing system, King Sejong and the scholars who assisted him probably looked to several writing systems known to them at the time, such as Chinese old seal characters, the Uighur script and the Mongolian scripts. The system that they came up with, however, is predominantly based upon their phonological studies. Above all, they developed a theory of tripartite division of the syllable into initial, medial and final, as opposed to the bipartite division of traditional Chinese phonology.
The initial sounds (consonants) are represented by 17 letters of which there are five basic forms. According to the explanations of the original Hunmin Jeongeum text,
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(k) |
depicts the root of the tongue blocking the throat; |
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(n) |
depicts the outline of the tongue ouching the upper palate; |
(m) |
depicts the outline of the mouth; |
(s) |
depicts the outline of the incisor; and |
(.) |
depicts the outline of the throat. |
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The other initial letters were derived by adding strokes to the basic letters. No letters were invented for the final sounds, the initial letters being used for that purpose.
The original Hunmin Jeongeum text also explains that the medial sounds (vowels) are represented by 11 letters of which there are three basic forms.
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(a) |
is a depiction of Heaven; |
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is a depiction of Earth; and, |
(i) |
is a depiction of human. |
By combining these three signs, the other medial letters are formed. |
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After the promulgation of the Korean alphabet, its popularity gradually increased, particularly in modern times, to the point where it has replaced Chinese characters as the primary writing system altogether.
One of the more interesting characteristics of the Korean script is its syllabic grouping of the initial, medial and final letters. However, the Korean script is essentially different from such syllabic writing systems as Japanese Kana. It is an alphabetic system which is characterized by syllabic grouping. Some examples are as follows:
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(na-mu) "tree", |
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(sa-ram) "human" and |
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(son-nim) "guest". |
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[Standard Language and Orthography] |
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Modern Korean is divided into six dialects: Central, Northwest, Northeast, Southeast, Southwest and Jeju. Except for the Jeju dialect, these are similar enough for speakers of the various dialects to communicate. This is due to the fact that Korea has been a centralized state for more than a thousand years. The language of the capital exercised a steady influence on the language spoken throughout the country.
The language of the capital was established as the basis for modern standard Korean in 1936, as a result of the deliberations of a committee organized by the Korean Language Research Society. The language of the political and cultural center of a nation usually becomes the standard language for the entire population. In Korea, however, the case was somewhat different, since the guidelines for the national language standard were set forth by a small but dedicated group of scholars who had worked during the Japanese occupation. They endeavored to preserve their own language in the face of an oppressive regime which had sought the eventual extinction of the Korean language.
Modern orthography was also determined by this same Korean Language Research Society in 1933. In this way, Korean orthography, rather than being a product of a gradual process of natural selection, was deliberately manufactured. Whereas 15th century orthography had been based on a phonemic principle, with each letter representing one phoneme, modern Korean orthography operates on a morphophonemic principle. That is, while a morpheme, or a minimum meaningful unit, may be realized differently according to its context, its orthographic representation is a single base form. |
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[Phonology] |
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The Korean language possesses a rich variety of vowels and consonants with nine simple vowels and three series of stops and affricates: plain, aspirated, and glottalized. These variations make it difficult for foreigners to learn and pronounce the language. They also complicate the task of Romanization.
Phonemes of the plain stop series are realized as unvoiced sounds in the word-initial position, voiced sounds in the intervocalic position and unreleased sounds in the word-final position, e.g. gap [gap] "case or small box" and gap-e [gabe] "in the case." The liquid phoneme is realized as "r" in the intervocalic position and "l" in the word-final position. For example, dar [dal] "moon," and <>dar-e [tare] "at the moon."
Another characteristic of modern Korean is that there are no consonant clusters or liquid sounds in the word-initial position. As a result, Koreans pronounce the English word "stop" in two syllables, as [swt'op], and change the initial "l" or "r" in foreign words to "n." Recently, however, there has been a tendency to pronounce initial liquid sounds in Western loan words. |
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[The Korean Alphabet] |
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[Romanization] |
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[Morphology and Syntax] |
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Korean is one of the so-called agglutinative languages which add suffixes to nominal and verbal stems in derivation and inflection. Suffixes agglutinate one after another and indicate different styles of speech, express moods and aspects, and function as case markers, connectives, etc. Vowel gradation, that is, the change of vowels to make morphological distinctions such as singular-plural in nouns (e.g. man-men) and present-past in verbs (e.g. sing-sang), is not found in Korean.
Korean is a verb-final language: the verb is always the last constituent of the sentence. Constituents other than verbs are relatively free to switch around, although the normal and preferred word order is subject-object-verb. In Korean, modifying words or phrases precede the modified words without exception: adjectives precede nouns, adverbs precede verbs, etc. Since Korean has no relative clauses, the clauses precede the nouns they modify however long they may be. One of the important characteristics of Korean grammar is the honorific system. Korean is perhaps the only language in the world which has honorific suffixes such as -si-, exalting the subject of the sentence, and -seumni-, showing the speaker's respect to the hearer. Although Japanese has a well-developed system of honorific expressions, it is different from that of Korean in that it utilizes auxiliary verbs instead of suffixes. |
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[Vocabulary] |
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The vocabulary of the Korean language is composed of indigenous words and loanwords, the latter being the result of contacts with other languages. The majority of the loanwords are of Chinese origin, often called Sino-Korean words, a reflection of several millennia of Chinese cultural influence on Korea. In modern Korean, native words are significantly outnumbered by Sino-Korean words. As a result, a dual system of native and Sino-Korean words pervades the Korean lexicon, including two sets of numerals which are interchangeable in some cases but mutually exclusive in others. For example, native numerals are used with shi (the hour, i.e. ahop si, "nine o'clock") but Sino-Korean numerals are used with bun (the minute, i.e. gu bun, "nine minutes"). The process of modernization has resulted in a steady flow of Western words entering the Korean language. Technological and scientific terms represent the majority of these loanwords, although Western terms have been introduced into almost every field. | |