Discussion Post #6

[Vivian Shon]

          As of 2017, there are 7,099 languages in existence today. Since there are so many distinct languages worldwide, it is crucial to be able to organize and categorize these different entities. According to Scribd, a language family tree can be broken up into smaller subdivisions, or languages branches. For example, other well-known branches of the Indo-European Language family include:Germanic, Celtic, Hellenic, and Baltic languages. Currently, I am studying Korean as my target language. While Korean is among the world's most misunderstood and misrepresented languages because of its obscure origins, scholarly evidence suggests that Korean and Japanese belong to the Altaic language family, which also includes Turkish and Mongolian. On the other hand, some linguists actually insist that Korean is a language isolate. In Korea when I was very young, I remember learning a few Chinese alphabets and phrases called “한자” or “hanja” was a requirement in our curriculum. This was probably the case because Korea was heavily influenced by China and Japan in its history. This makes sense on why some of the roots of Korean words actually are the same roots as Chinese words. A great deal of Korean words are comprised of hanja. Learning hanja will help me to memorize the words more quickly, as knowing the roots will help me in this process. In English, it can be equated to knowing Latin and Greek root words. Knowing the root of a word can help me better understand its meaning and remember it later. In addition, Languages can transform through genetic or genealogical classification which can be described as the way in which languages develop new traits and characteristics while also maintaining its ancestral roots. Linguists try to track it as best as they can, however, sometimes, this task is very difficult, so we might actually have more language families than we are aware of.