According to the so-called Southern theory, Korean belongs to the Austronesian language family. However, according to the Northern theory, supported by a number of linguists, Korean is a member of the Altaic language family. At the same time, some linguists point to some similarities between Korean and Japanese, suggesting that it might belong in the Japonic group of languages.
한자, words borrowed from Chinese characters, is present in Korean due to the spread of Buddhism from China to Korea. However, the most Chinese characters in Korean is not due to this religious spread, instead it is due to a text called 천자문. Some characters were borrowed directly from the text in simplified Chinese, some were translated based on their pronunciations of Chinese. The characters which are borrowed from Chinese characters change in terms of stroke orders. Research shows that some words borrowed from Chinese are gradually losing its popularity through time since schools abandoned the teaching of 한자 in 1971. Some words remain in common usage in contexts. I noticed this when I first began to listen to Korean because there were Korean words that I can somehow match the Chinese pronunciations. This special language borrowing and mixing makes Korean more approachable for me to learn in both terms of written and spoken.
To predict how language is going to change in the future, we can look at the factors which are causing changes and are retaining the change of language in the past. Internet platforms which provide people to communicate are causing the major change of language. Schools and other education organizations are slowing down the changes because students will study the standard language there, therefore the tradition is maintained. As the example above, after schools decided not to teach Chinese characters, the usage has been declining.
Comments
Hi Lehan, great post! I also noticed that there are some Korean words that match Chinese pronunciations. I think it is interesting to see the development of languages and how much they can change over a period of time. I did not know that a lot of Chinese characters in Korean are due to 전자문.