Understanding language families can help us gain a quick grasp of the relationship between languages. Mastery in one language can help master other languages in the same group. Linguists keep track of languages through language family trees to see how languages compare to one another. Dr. Atkinson and colleagues scored words from 103 languages. The researchers assigned a score of 1 where a word was a cognate, and if the word was replaced with an unrelated word, it scored 0. Each language's evolution can be represented by a string of 1's and 0's, showing a family tree and the relationships among the 103 languages.
In 1446, King Sejong presented the Korean alphabet to the public. He had scholars study human speech sounds and the shape and form of speech organs to create an alphabet that is easy to study for people from various academic backgrounds. The Korean language led to one of the highest literacy rates in the world today (92%).
Though the origins of the language are obscure, Western scholars from the 19th century theorize that it is a distant relative to the Ural-Altaic family of languages which includes such diverse languages as Mongolian, Finnish, and Hungarian. Korean is similar to, but distinct from Japanese, which can be noted from the Japanese occupation in the early 20th century. Korean grammatical structure is similar to Japanese, and borrows some words from Chinese.
Since the alphabet's initial introduction, three consonants and one vowel dropped out of use, leaving modern Han'gul with just 24 characters. Korean vowels and consonants are combined to indicate a single phoneme. The modern Korean alphabet is actually comprised of 40 characters: 14 consonants, 5 double consonants (stressed),10 vowels, and, 11 dipthongs, or double vowels. The Korean language has remained incredibly consistent throughout the years, and knowing the initial influences of Japan and China can give some context to my language learning, and knowing that the language was built on acute study of human speech sounds to create the best language learning possible gives me inspiration and hope to learn Korean more efficiently.
Source:
http://linguistics.byu.edu/classes/Ling450ch/reports/Korean3.html
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