The Korean language is a part of the Altaic family. The Altaic family of languages originates from northern Asia and encompasses other languages such as Mongol, Turkish, Finnish, Hungarian, and Tungusic. Some words in Korean are written using a combination of borrowed Chinese words which demonstrates the dominance that Chinese culture had during these last few thousand years. This is a common occurrence in most languages in Asia; nearly all of these areas were heavily influenced by the Chinese language. However, unlike Chinese, Korean dialects are not completely unintelligible to each other. There are differences in pronunciation and stress but do not alter too much. In the case of Chinese dialects, each is completely different from another dialect. This can be tied to the size of China and the size of the Korean Peninsula. In this case, size does matter to the history of Korean language since it exemplifies how development was fairly centralized in comparison to China. Additionally, Chinese and Korean come from different language families anyway.
These considerations are significant in that they reveal how the flow of language progresses over time and it was quite different than what I had initially thought. Thus certain cultural factors can be accounted for as a legacy of linguistic history. I am not too familiar with the other Altaic family languages so I can not make a definitive comparison between Korean culture and the other Altaic languages. I can however take into account the history significance of Chinese culture on Korean culture. I am not sure what pragmatic questions of usage would be necessary for Korean or what contemporary realization entails but I would be interested in what native Koreans feel about the connection with their language family. It could be that there is no real connection that natives feel about this linguistic history.
It is interesting how the article discussed using a computer to determine the location of a certain language. Initially, an archeological discovery was made that fueled a theory regarding the origin of Indo-European languages. That theory turned out to be accurate beside the results of the computer calculations but there is still some dispute regarding the research done. To extrapolate from this example, the linguists of the future may use machine learning to break down all of a language’s history. I have studied a bit of machine learning and artificial intelligence and have learned that human error from misrepresentation of statistical data. In the case of determining a language family’s origin, I do agree that there is room for error based on how the parameters were initially set up.
This also dips into the discussion of how languages change over time. Some parameters discussed where the present geographical location of languages were. Thus a conclusion we can draw from this is that languages drift and take on the culture of the locations that they pass through. This is significant because every language is an amalgamation of the areas that I passed through and is continually transformed by other languages and cultures.
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