Discussion Post #6

[Ethan Han]

Korean is argued to be from the Altaic language family. However, Korean did not descend from a single-language family. Korean evolved mainly from Chinese and neighboring languages such as Mongolian, Japanese, and Turkish. Korean started off as a spoken language and did not have an official script. Instead, Koreans would have to learn how to write in Chinese. However, the Chinese language system could not accurately represent all Korean words. So in the 15th century, King Sejong created the Hangul alphabet. He did this so the Korean language could have an actual alphabet and become its own language. Another benefit of making the hangul alphabet was that now everyone could learn how to read and write. Previously, only the elites learned how to read and write in Chinese. But now everyone has learned the hangul alphabet together. Because Chinese was the dominant language for Koreans before the hangul alphabet was created, a lot of Korean words used today can be traced back to Chinese roots and sometimes are the exact same word. In fact, in Korea students are taught some basic Chinese so they can understand where and why certain words and grammatical structures came from; thus, allowing them to better understand the language. Other two big languages that impacted Korea are Japanese and English, more specifically American English. Just like Chinese, a lot of Japanese words can be found in Korean too; however, Japanese is not as deeply rooted in Korean as Chinese is. So studying Japanese will only help you understand Korean better to a certain extent. After the Korean war. South Korea opened up its borders and became a big trading partner with America. Because of this, Korea became very westernized and now in the Korean language there are tons of cognates. For example, even though Koreans have a word for “ok” which is 네 (pronounced “neh”), Koreans will often say 오케이 (pronounced “okehee”) which is just supposed to mean “ok” like “okay” in English. Knowing that a large part of Korean derives from Chinese allows me to see that studying some Chinese might help me improve my general understanding of Korean a lot better which will help me understand why the language is what it is today, and know that there are a ton of cognates with English will help me a lot because now I know that I most likely know hundreds of Korean words just from English.