If I would receive a research grant for a linguistic study of Korean, I want to investigate the development of hangul by communicating with other countries. As we discussed in class and in some lessons with my language partner, Korean has a large proportion of words that are derived from other languages, such as Japanese and Chinese. Since Japan and China are close to Korea geographically and have a lot of interchange activities, it is not hard to understand the reason behind it. However, the Korean language also has a lot of words derived from English, German, or French, which I found surprising and interesting. In my opinion, the uniqueness of hangul’s pronunciation-based system is one of the factors of the derivation. I also noticed that Korean share a common sentence structure with Turkish as S, O, V. Is the sentence structure of Korean and the particles used to clarify the structure also a result of these interchanges? How has Korean culture changed as a result of these activities? I believe the result of this research would help predict the change in Korean the language better as well as the culture change in Korean society as South Korea has an increasing amount of communication with other countries.
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It would be a really interesting topic to explore, and I believe you might be able to find a trend in these developments. I think if you look at the Chinese loan words, they are more likely to be embedded within many words without people noticing, and they are likely to root from thousands of years ago. Japanese on the other hand will be more likely to root from the 1920s and 30s during the Colonialism period, maybe the Japanese loan words fit in a certain category? Such as technologies that were produced during the period or cultural artifacts passed from Japanese society. In recent years I would guess that the majority of the loan words will come from English and other European languages due to the increase in globalization and the cultural exportation of Europe and the United States.
In regard to the possible interchanges between Korean and Turkish, I would not be surprised. While Turkish proper is the official language of the Turkish nation state, Turkic languages are spoken across Asia. The Uighurs of China are a Turkic speaking people. Historically, the language is thought to have originated in Mongolia and spread outward with nomadic tribes. There are ancient accounts of Turkic peoples in the area of the north of China in Chinese sources. Depending on where this and possible other periods of contact were in northern China, it may put Turkic and Chinese speakers in proximity to Koreanic speakers, thus allowing for such interchanges.