Reflect on the history of your target language. To what language family does it belong? What sounds, words, and structures exemplify periods of contact with other cultures? How do these considerations enhance your understanding of the target language and culture in terms of their associated historical origin, development, and contemporary realization? and pragmatic questions of usage? How do languages change over time? How do linguists track, predict, and extrapolate these changes?
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Korean seems to belong in the Eastern Altaic language family. It has similarities to Japanese and it also borrows from the Chinese language (the sounds, not necessarily the whole language and its' structure). It has similar sounds to both Japan and China because of exposure to them and periods of time they had contact with those countries. Like the word library in Japan and China and Korean are all similar: toshokuan, tushuguan, dosogwan (respectively). It seems that these three countries a pretty tight knit in the aspect that they share similar culture and sounding words. It makes sense because of the locations of these countries and as well as the trading routes that took place, especially between Korea and Japan (specifically Shilla province back in time, as Korea's southern part of the country is close with Japan). The different languages then seem to diverge into their own language instead of borrowing from one another and therefore the culture as well. The languages change with the different trends in culture as well as government and politics as well as resources and trade that are exploding and cultural changes as needed by that specific culture. Linguists cannot actually track and predict changes because as K. David Harrison said, language is a bottomless pit, there is not finite end and trackability to it ad there are a huge number of permutations that are possible.
The history of the language I'm studying, Korean, belongs to the Koreanic language family, which I found funny. In terms of sound and words, a lot of the Korean language tends to be independent and doesn't usually sound like words from other languages. In modern times though, Korean language has taken up a lot of English pronunciations, which is referred to as "Konglish". An example of this is the English word handphone, where the Konglish/Korean translation of this word is 핸드폰, which is essentially pronounced "handphone" but with Korean characters. This assimilation of the English language shows that Korean culture, like many other cultures, is enhanced by the inclusion of western culture and language. I believe that these changes make Korean easier to learn for westerners, which I find exciting. In addition, I believe that language always tends to change over time to adapt to the languages of the global powers and universally dominant cultures. To track changes in language, linguists most likely have to read texts from the past or speak with people from an older era to see how people communicated with one another and understand the vernacular.