Korean belongs to the Sino-Tibetan language family according to the links provided in the readings as it is a part of Asia. But the related link states that Mandarin Chinese is classified as Sino-Tibetan which is most similar to Korean from the very limited countries named in the link because Korean derives some words from the Chinese language itself like the word for tea (cha) and person (ren → “sah-rram”). Korea is also thought to belong to the Altaic language family, which includes Turkish and Mongolian. However, historically it is more related to Japanese than it is to Chinese because Korea was at one point under the rule of Japan before finally gaining freedom through lots of wars and battles. And some people believe that Korea is in its own koreanization family/category. This just shows how complex and how people cannot agree on the origins and what language family Korean truly is. The structures that exemplify periods of contact with Chinese is hanja, which is basically the body of Chinese characters that were incorporated into Korean (basically Korean adaptation of Chinese pictographs). The reason not all of Chinese was incorporated into Korean even though it has a big influence to this day based on Confucian ideas that affect the culture today is that only the wealthy in the 13-1400s could afford the time and money to study Chinese and make sense of it. These considerations enhance my understanding of the target language and culture in terms of associated historical origin because it shows how these two countries shared part of the language at the same time before splitting off into what the language looks like today. In addition, China’s influence and ideas of Confucianism are still present in Korea today because the ideas put forth by it in terms of respecting elders and filial piety are still held in high regard by Koreans in Korea today. It gives further insight into the development of language because it shows that there was reasons for the language adapting and changing from Chinese and Japanese in order to better communicate and split into own country by gaining independence and a language for the country and the people itself today. In terms of contemporary realization that would talk about the different dialects known as “satori”, which is the idea of different accents and slangs for words and ways of speaking in Korea based on “provinces” or more like regions in Korea. The pragmatic questions of usage would more directly refer to the standardization of the Korean language by the Seoul-based National Institute of the Korean Language (NIKL) which has strong government support and made Seoul-based Korean the standard for the type of dialect spoken by all Koreans and the mainstream slang/abbreviations. Language changes over time in slang/abbreviations and new words getting adapted and linguists track, predict, and extrapolate these changes by looking at cognates. One specific example from the readings was how in languages where the word was a cognate, the researchers assigned it a score of 1 but if the cognate was replaced with an unrelated word it was given a score of 0. Thereby allowing each language to be represented by a string of 1s and 0s based on cognates, which allowed the researchers/linguists to “compute the most likely family tree showing relationships among the 103 languages and track changes through the use of cognates.
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