The discussion of the history of the Korean language came up with my language instructor when we were going over some vocabulary. During my attempts to pronounce the words she gave me, I realized that some Korean words were pretty similar to some Japanese words. The resemblance came up in another instance when we were going over the Korean numbering system, and my instructor told me that it was similar to the Japanese and Chinese numbering system as well. She stated the resemblance with the Chinese language makes sense because Chinese characters are used when writing in “Old Korean”. Additionally, Korean historical linguistics have been compared to Japanese for a considerably long time because when Japan invaded Korea, they had forced the Korean citizens to convert to the Japanese language (1910-1945). Under Japan’s rule, the Korean language was banned and were even forced to adopt Japanese names.
According to AsiaSociety.org, Korean belongs to the northern Asian language known as the Altaic language family, which also included Turkish, Mongolian, and the Tungusic—e.g., Manchu—languages of Siberia. In some deviation, there’s also a competing theory that it associates with the Dravidian languages of southern India, or to Austronesian languages. Others argue for the inclusion of Uralic languages—e.g., Hungarian and Finnish—and Japanese in this macro family. Thus, the differing languages suggest early Northern migrations and trade. The website further acknowledged that Chinese, although it belongs to a completely different language family, has also influenced Korean greatly. Despite this, determining Korean’s linguistic affiliation is noted to be complicated due to its long history of contact with the Japanese and Chinese languages. Therefore, it isn’t surprising that Korea shares certain linguistic features with each of these languages as my language instructor had discussed. In another reference, the authors acknowledged “loanwords” to be another source of resource to the Korean language (Lee and Ramsey, 2011). They had stated, through the Yuan-dynasty China (1279-1368), Koreans borrowed a number of terms from Mongolian, and these words provide information about the sounds of Korean at the time.
The current modern Korean writing system, hangul, came about in 1443 during the reign of King Sejong, a monarch of the Yi Dynasty. Before this writing system, other Korean scripts used a complex system of Chinese characters to represent the sounds of Korean (AsiaSociety.org). However, due to the many differences of the Chinese language and Korean language, Chinese characters could not adequately denote Korean speech. Along with the fact that only the elite could afford to the time necessary to study Chinese, King Sejong commissioned the invention of a phonetic script, so it can be more accessible and efficient to the common people (AsiaSociety.org). This is how hangul came to consist of 24 letters: 14 consonants and 10 vowels—along with the combination of these letters to represent 5 double consonants and 11 dipthongs.
The consideration of language families definitely has enhanced my understanding of the Korean language because it educated me more about its history and derivation of how the language came to be. It’s startling to read about some of the atrocities that the Korean population had to endure throughout history from its invaders and how far Korea, as a country, has come. It’s definite that war and invasions had a huge impact on the development of the language, which is how linguistics had the ability to track, or extrapolate, the changes made in Korean. Nothing is still concrete in its origins, but there is a lot more information that we know about Korean and probably more information will be extrapolated in the future with increasing innovations in technology.
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