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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Reflect on the history of your target language. To what language family does it belong?
Hebrew belongs to the Canaanite group of languages.of the Semitic language family, originating from the Middle East (Afroasiatic) area.
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?
Hebrew's closest living relative is Arabic, and they contain many similar sounds in their vocabulary as well as similar word order (writing right to left, don't write vowels, some same words / letter names). Israelites have (at least in the Torah) records of exposure to multiple Mesopotamian cultures, which makes sense that they would then be exposed to languages such as Arabic and Aramaic. Other journeys have resulted in the language of Yiddish, which is a combination of Hebrew and German.
How do languages change over time? How do linguists track, predict, and extrapolate these changes?
Languages will continue to change over time, especially through globalization and at an even more rapid pace as our technology evolves. The invent of the internet certainly sped up the process of new words emerging, but overall grammar stays relatively the same, at least at its core. Linguists track these changes in history by looking at the similarities and differences in languages we have, looking at ancient texts and other historical documents that give us insight, and reverse engineer the process to show us how these changes took place.
A quick Google search produces the Asia Society Center for Global Education’s page on Korean Language places Korean in the Altaic language family. There are also debates suggesting that Korean may better fit in the Uralic, Dracidian or Austronesian families. With so much speculation around the definitive catorgatizion of the Korean language it comes as no surprise that many consider the language itself to be an isolate. Notable lingual influences include Chinese, Japanese languages, and more recently, English. In briefly reading about the history of Korean I have come to learn it is a much more unique language than I was previously aware of, almost an isolate in the way it cannot quite be categorized. Korean can better be described as an isolate that has been influenced by outside languages rather than one derived from a shared ancestor.
The Korean writing system, Hangul, was formally developed in 1443 by King Sejong who held phonetic pronunciation at the highest importance during its creation. Another interesting aspect of the history of Korean is how formalities have changed overtime. In Korean there is a formal and informal style used to distinguish relationships between speakers. In the past there were several levels of formality. The condensation of these styles reflects socioeconomic changes brought about by industrialization and the rise of a middle class, writes the Asia Society Center for Global changes.
As for pragmatic usage, the inability to pinpoint exactly how Korean developed has little to no effect, as there are currently a relatively large number of speakers. Comparing Korean to languages it shares the most similarities to, such as those in the Altaic and Uralic language families, allows for some incite on how the language has changed over time. Above all else, however, what this sort of reverse engineering teaches is just how unique the Korean language, and others with similar histories can be.
There are many debates on which language family belongs to, but a majority of the support goes to the Altaic language family. The Altaic language family also includes Turkish, Mongolian, and Tungusic. There is also heavy argument for the inclusion of Uralic languages which include Hungarian, Finnish, and Japanese. Korean is really complicated due to the close historical contacts with the Japanese and Chinese. You can see this reflected in the Korean language such as the Sino-Korean number system which is derived from Chinese characters. This sort of confirms what I learned about how Korean came to be with it basically being heavily influenced by Chinese. I learned growing up that King Sejong created “Hangul” to basically create an easier more efficient language system that was accessible to the common people. At the time, only the elite had time to learn how to read and write Chinese due to its complicated nature. Japan also has a large influence on Japan especially due to the fact that they colonized Korea for a period of time. I can’t think of common words but things like ‘오뎅’ (Udong) are cognates that Korea adapted from Japan. I feel like this does indicate how language is changing over time. A lot of languages are just adapting and making cognates for words based off other languages. I believe we are losing a lot of creativity in language as American English is becoming sort of the standard. Korea for example uses Konglish for new words such as ‘핸드폰’ – (haendeupon) which means hand phone.
Korean belongs in the Altaic language family. However, this is highly debatable because of its origin and how it takes inspiration from Chinese. Approximately half of Korean vocabulary is derived from Chinese, primarily through Confucian classics. Most of South Koreans employ a hybrid writing system in which Chinese words are written in Chinese characters and Korean words are written in hangul. Despite word borrowing, Korean has an unique sound and sentence structure from Chinese. These considerations help my understanding with Korean because I speak Chinese, so I am able to decipher certain words because of the similar sounds. For example, for the word exercise, Korean: 운동 (undong), Chinese: 运动 (yùndòng). For the word credit card, Korean: 신용 카드 (sin-yong kadeu), Chinese: 信用卡 (xìnyòngkǎ). It also helps me understand culture and history, by suggesting that Northern migrations and trade have occured for this adoption to occur. But then over time, Korea adaopted its own writing system after realizing the complications of using Chinese characters. A lot of language change comes from feedback from people. Pronounciations change with time, new words are borrowed or formed, the meaning of existing words shifts, and morphology evolves or decays.
Korea's reliance and cultural derivation from China have always been confusing for me. China has colonized or controlled Korea all throughout history but does not receive the hate that Japan receives. A lot of Japanese culture or sentiment has basically been banned from Korea where as you can see Chinese in the language of Korea.
There seems to be multiple opinions of which language family the Korean language belongs to, such as Ural-Altaic, Austronesian, or Koreanic. The reason behind these contrasting views seem to stem from the fact that Korean was created to counter the complex and expensive learning process of Chinese for the many, and therefore did not have a strong referral point. However, because of the characteristics of Korean, we can tie it into pre-existing families, regardless of historical origin. The most famous viewpoint seems to be Ural-Altaic, which has defining characteristics such as vowel harmony and SVO structure. The SVO structure may have originated from Japanese, which also has a heavy emphasis on such structure. As for Chinese, both SVO and SOV structures are tolerated, so that may be one of the reasons Korean was created - to simplify. Korean also has strong vowel harmony, which was something I learned only after reading into it. There seems to be Positive/”light”/Yang vowels, Negative/”heavy”/Yin vowels, and Neutral vowels. The usage of one vowel in the beginning of the word affects the type of vowel that will appear next, so it was interesting to see a sort of pattern. I found examples of this regarding particles at the end of verbs: 잡았다 (Caught) is pronounced jabatda - there is a symmetry of ㅏ(ah) sound. 접었다(folded) is pronounced jeobeotda - yet again ㅓ(uh/eo) symmetry. As you can see, these words look similar, but the initial vowel affects the latter. Reading about this vowel harmony made me realize that if I study such harmonies, I can better predict syntax, spelling, and pronunciation.
According to asiasociety.org, Korean and Japanese belong to the Altaic language family, which also includes Turkish and Mongolian. Chinese, although it belongs to a completely different language family, influenced Korean greatly. The modern Korean writing system, hangul, was created in 1443 by King Sejong. Before hangul, Korean scripts used a complex system of Chinese characters to represent the sounds of Korean. But because of the differences between Chinese and Korean, Chinese characters could not denote Korean speech. Also, only the elite had the time necessary to study Chinese. King Sejong’s phonetic script was both more efficient and more accessible to the common people. Hangul is one of the most scientific alphabets ever devised. It consists of 24 letters: 14 consonants and 10 vowels.
Japanese and Korean are similar in that they are both Subject-Object-Verb languages that use suffixing. Korean and Japanese also have some similar words. For example, ‘giraffe’ in Japanese is ‘kirin’ and in Korean it is ‘girin’. The word for ‘bag’ in Japanese is ‘kaban’ and in Korean it is ‘gabang’. Based on my observation, it seems like Japanese words use more ‘k’ sounds while Korean words use more ‘g’ sounds. A lot of Korean vocabulary is also derived from Chinese loanwords, which reflects China’s historical influence on Korea. I think this is very interesting to know because if I ever decide to start learning Chinese or Japanese, it will be useful to start by learning the loanwords. I think that languages continue to change over time, especially through globalization and the influence of the internet. Slang words are continually popping up and being added to the dictionary.
I also think it's interesting how Korean used to belong to a completely different language family and how it was influenced by other languages and cultures before. Even though languages are different from each other, they all stem from a similar language family root, similarly to Japanese and Korean. Even though they sound different, they share the SOV word order.
I think it is quite interesting to look in to how all different types of languages influence the creation of one language. In the case of my target language Hebrew, it is a Semitic language that has had influence from Aramic and has close similarities to arabic in many respects. I think researching these commonalities is very compelling and can help to learn more about a particular language.
Hebrew belongs to the Canaanite Group of Languages and was originated from there. It belongs to the Semitic group of languages and has origins from this area of the Middle East. Hebrew has many similarities to Aramaic. A lot of the sounds used in Hebrew will really only be heard in Aramaic, Arabic, and Hebrew. This may because while the Israelites were captive by Babylonians, they heard the language of their captors: Aramaic and picked it up a little bit while allowing it to influence their own language of Hebrew. This influences my perception of the language because it shows that the words and sounds in Hebrew are diverse and derived from many different types of interactions with multiple cultures. It is a cool aspect of the language because in a way because when learning Hebrew you are also learning about the cultural origin and history of the Israelites. This understanding really shows me in a direct way how Hebrew is an ancient language that has taken a very long time to manifest itself in its present form that is commonly spoken all over the world. In other words, it is not a language that has simply been developed over night without much consideration into its structure and phonetics. Languages can change over time with the addition of new words and an expanded vocabulary. As far as structure is concerned, it seems like over time the main structure stays consistent no matter what. I think it would be too hard to change a primary aspect of a language and keep everyone on the same page. New words are the main aspect of language that I see changing with time. This being said, dialects do seem to often times manipulate the structure of a language and how the language is spoken at its core. I think linguists do track these changes with their studies of different languages. I think this is one of linguists main jobs: to track how an individual language is ever changing.