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If I was granted a research funding to study Korean linguistics, I would begin by analyzing the Korean history, origin story, society, structure of power, etc. to actually figure the unresolved problem of language family affiliation. I think it is an important question to study because it makes language learning a lot more structured and organized. Learning about how Korea developed and what sort of interactions it had with other cultures can help me develop a sense of how Korean finally came to be. But I would also need to compare and contrast grammar rules and the phonetics of the Korean language with other similar language families. For example, Hanja has Chinese characters, suggesting that the Koreans had extensive interactions with the Chinese. But the Koreans also have developed a great etiquette towards the elders that is reflected through language, this same culture of respect for elders is also very strong in Japanese. I am very interested in this Chinese-Korean-Japanese dynamic. Another structural component that I would include is phonetics, there are more sounds in Korean that does not exist in other languages. In addition, there are consonants that together form stressed or accented sounds, such as kk, gg.

We have done a little bit of writing recently and while learning the alphabet. For Korean, I definitely prefer to write free hand, because to type the language, I would have to learn a complete new keyboard that I am not used to yet. What I like about the Korean language is the direct translation between hangul and sound. Similar to English, where spelling and sound are very connected. However, it is frustrating sometimes to write words because there are very subtle nuances that make two completely different words, and sometimes it is impossible to catch those differences. With more complex sentences, there are more grammar rules at play, where the subject, particle, object go differs depend on a lot of factors, such as who you are speaking to. Knowledge of pronunciation has helped the most in the writing process, because of the knowledge of the multiple nuances. Some writing exercises could be writing down sounds and ask for the Korean transcription from it, such as “da, dea” and writing in Korean as “다, 대”

Languages go extinct when there are no speakers of that language left. When a language dies, we lose history and culture that the language belongs to. From the reading, in order to help preserve a language, creating a pool of speakers large enough to maintain its existence seems to be the key. One way linguists can help to preserve a language is by helping to create a dictionary for a weakening language. I think any form of public exposure of these rather "hidden" languages can help to preserve the language in the future. 

I think a "dead" language definitely can be brought back to life just like the Siletz language as long as there are some resources to work with. Nowadays, language studies are a lot more common than before. As long as there are people interested in studying the language and the speaker pool continues to grow, its language, culture, and history can be preserved. Like dictionaries, any form of documentations can be used in researches and studies of that language, but those documentations are necessary for the process to start. In addition, it will take a long time for the speaker pool to grow and may take multiple generations, but it is possible. 

Languages go extinct when there is no people left to speak it and there is no passing the language down to descent groups. When a language die, it carries sounds that are distinct to the language, the cultural practices associated, and we lose meaning in the sense that words convey a certain worldview. Linguists, such as Dr. David Harrison, has helped the Siletz tribe in Oregon to build their dictionary. Other nonprofit organizations have partnered with the tribes to preserve the language and cultural artifacts. A dead language does have possibility of being brought back to life. For example, the article mentioned that the Siletz Dee-ni language only had about five speakers left, but with consistent help from linguists and organizations, they have helped the language revive. By building dictionaries, teaching it in schools, making the language sound “cool,” they have helped with enlisting new members.

I have been trying to communicate with my learning in just Korean more often. 

I have been working on my Korean speaking skills. I have been practicing with my learning partner. I have also been watching Korean videos. I watch them with the subtitles at first, then I watch them without subtitles to see if I can remember what the words mean. This also helps me understand native speakers  better -- the more I listen to native speakers, the more I can understand Korean accent and it helps me with pronouncing words properly. I have also been watching videos at a reduced speed, like we talked about in class, and this has really helped because otherwise I can sometimes miss certain parts of the conversation and then I would have to start the video over. I want to continue watching videos/ listening to recordings by native speakers and get to a point where I can understand write down whatever I hear in Korean. 

I was able to interact with the staff, and order food on own at a Korean restaurant. 

Although I wasn't initially planning on learning how to write Korean, I realized that being able to read would really help me with understanding the grammar rules better. And because of the different sounds in Korean language, knowing the alphabets also helped me to understand how to use the emphasize different parts of different words. My learning partner and I went over the Korean alphabets, I practiced them on my own afterwards. Once I learned the alphabets, my learning partner showed me how the basic alphabets can be used to produce more sounds, and can actually be referred to as a separate character. For example, kk produces a completely different sound than just k. After practicing these, my learning partner made me do dictation exercises. 

The few weeks of the semester, my language partner and I focused on learning how to use single phrases in Korean. For example, I learned how to introduce myself, ask someone how they are, ask their names, where they're from, etc.. After our tutoring session, I continued to listen to Korean recoding that used the same phrases which helped me to remember them. I also started to able differentiate between phrases that can used in formal conversations and informal conversations. After I practiced the phrases on my own, I would try to use them with my language partner in our following sessions -- she worked to correct any of my mistakes and help me with my pronunciation.

Figuring Out Foreigners talks about how communication styles differ in different cultures. Some societies are more individualist and some are more collectivist, and place high emphasis on nonverbal cues and some are very literal. However no society is exclusively individualistic or collectivist; and individuals within a society fall on different parts of the spectrum. The United States is a predominantly individualist society -- emphasizing individual rights and achievements. Korean, my target culture, on the other hand, is a collectivist society. This results in Korean culture having norms and traditions that I am familiar with; and working with my language partner and watching Korean videos have helped to better understand how body language and use of different dialects in a conversation and convey different meanings within the Korean society.

Bahasa Indonesia is a member of the Austronesian language family, and is a standardization of the Malay language, which had been used in the archipelago for centuries as an inter-island trade language. The Austronesian language family is the fifth-largest language family in the world, with 386 million native speakers (4.9% of the world's population). Malaysian and Indonesian are the two widest-spoken languages in the Austronesian language family. Malay was influenced heavily by Sanskrit in ancient times, and as a result it is difficult to distinguish Sanskrit loan words as foreign by native speakers. It is so heavily influential on modern Indonesian that one could write a short story using only Sanskrit loan words. Due to its trade relationship with China going back over a millennium, Chinese loan words make up a lot of vocabulary relating to cuisine and trade. Especially since the 12th century, Arabic has influenced Malay language relating to religious vocabulary. Even the word for the Christian bible ("Alkitab", lit. "the book") is of Arabic origin. 

Since the Portuguese were the first Europeans to reach Indonesia and conduct trade, many of the Portuguese loan words have to do with the items that were exposed to native Indonesians with the arrival of the Portuguese. Such examples are Meja (from mesa = table), jendela (from janela = window, and keju (from queijo = cheese). The Dutch, who colonized Indonesia for centuries, left a big impression on the Indonesian vocabulary, including words like polisi (from politie = police), kantor (from kantoor = office) and setrum (from stroom = electricity current). Through globalization, some English words have made their way, although it can be difficult to differentiate from Dutch loan words as they are both of Germanic origin. Examples include imajinasi (imagination) and universitas (university). Bahasa Indonesia uses a latin script, and used to utilize Dutch phonological spellings; these have since been replaced ("tj", pronounced "ch", became "c", and "dj", pronounced "j", became "j", etc.).

This information can be helpful because it allows one to make a guess as to how the Indonesian language may transform words from their original language in order to be incorporated as a loan word. As I know a little Portuguese from being around family who are native speakers, certain words are mutually intelligible for me. 

It seems that languages change over time mostly to incorporate new words for things that had either previously been unnamed or had not been known to exist. I recently learned from my apartment-mate that Latin as used in the Vatican church has been constantly been incorporating new words for technologies such as Television and Cars in order to keep church edicts up-to-date. As the world around us is constantly changing, language, one of the systems we rely on to make sense of it, must constantly be growing and adjusting as well.

Korean belongs to the Atlantic languages of central Asia, which includes Turkish, Mongolian, and the Tungusic languages of Siberia. However, almost half of Korean vocabularies are derived by Chinese characters, or han'gul. Korean did not have a written format until King Sejong came up with the written script of Korean. In Korean schools, students learn hanja to better understand advanced vocabulary. In order to further enhance my Korean, I need to learn some hanja to fully grasp of advanced vocabulary. This is extremely important as hanja is used very frequently. Languages change over time to become more convenient and better able to communicate feelings and to express oneself.

I forgot to do these learning posts throughout the semester, so I am going to do one each week from now until the end of the course.

 This past week I have been continuing to work on basic verb conjugations, especially in simple present tense. Atul and I also started talking about how to describe things in Hindi. So far I have learning about colors and names for rooms of the house.

Although it isn’t in my official learning plan, I think a useful language task would be to describe items, and specifically describe my house in the U.S. Atul and I were discussing how houses (and even the concepts of houses, privacy, and open space like I have in my American suburb) are so different from what an Indian might think of. Thus, being able to describe where I come from once I move to India will be a very interesting conversation starter.

I was listening to Mango lessons, but after a while I got frustrated at the slow progress and stopped. However, I know that slow progress is better than no progress, so I plan to restart that this week. It is also a little frustrating that the lessons do not match up with what I am learning otherwise, but I think at this point, the more comprehensible input I can consume, the better off I’ll be in the future.

This coming week I have the following goals:

·         memorize the colors in Hindi

·         memorize the directional prepositional words

·         complete lessons 7-10 of Mango Hindi

·         learn 10 more verbs

·         continue to practice verb conjugations in present and present continuous tenses

·         start to formulate sentences to describe my house, including describing colors and size of rooms, and placement of items in relation to other items. Ideally, I would like to be able to say something like “My bedroom is upstairs. It is big. It is yellow. My bed is behind the door. My dresser is beyond the bed. My bookshelf is above the dresser.”

This cultural post shows how I interacted with a native Hindi speaker and he helped me with some grammar. I was texting my fiancé and I send him a block of text I had written in Hindi. He responded in his own writing with corrections. I am fortunate to be able to interact with Indian culture every day because of my Indian fiancé and friends.

My writing - practicing the verb "to eat".

the corrections :)

Languages change over time, and in our increasingly global society, that change often consists of assimilating and sharing words and sometimes even grammar principles. Hindi in particular has been subject to mixing with many other languages, due to its geographic location and place in the global business and trade scene.

Hindi is an Indo-European language (as is English) and is most closely related to Sanskrit and Urdu. In fact, Urdu and Hindi have almost identical vocabularies and grammars, with the difference being in the script. Hindi uses the Devangari script while Urdu uses the Perso-Arabic script. As an example, “Namaste” (hello) would be written नमस्ते in Hindi, and نمستے in Urdu. Some scholars decline to distinguish Hindi and Urdu for this reason, and in some Indian cities the two languages have merged their minor differences to become a sort of hybrid language.

Hindi also uses many, many loan words from English. Even in a lower-SES town you will find people that understand English words like numbers and basic nouns. In higher-SES Indian society, you will often hear constant code-switching as native Hindi speakers switch between Hindi and the business-language of English. Often they switch languages mid-sentence, leaving me in the lurch! This influence of English language and culture on Hindi is obviously because of the British occupancy in India until 1947.

Hindi also shares certain sounds with Arabic, which did not originally occur in Hindi. Certain letters in the Devangari alphabet were modified (by adding a dot) to be able to convey these new sounds from Arabic. For example, Hindi as an aspirated P sound, which, when written with a dot, makes the F sound to accommodate Arabic words. Hindi also has an aspirated K sound which, when written with a dot, makes the guttural KH sound that Arabic has. This hints at the cross-cultural contact between Arab-speaking countries and India, as well as between Islam and India (since Islam is almost always connected with the Arabic language, regardless of the local language).

To go off on a small tangent, one interest thing I have speculated about the connection between this common acceptability of language-switching and Indian/Hindi culture, is that the people seem to use whatever is most useful at the time to achieve a goal. In language, if an English word or phrase best conveys a concept, then that English will be used within an entire sentence of Hindi. Likewise, culturally, people tend to use items for multiple purposes and engage in more creative problem solving than I’ve seen Americans do. This may have something to do with limited resources in India and their culture of making-do with what you have. It’s very interesting to me to think that this value may bleed over into their language use as well.

I think understanding more about language change and inter-language contact is helpful to know, because it can help us create a more complex web of knowledge in our minds. For me specifically, knowing that Hindi shares some vocabulary with Arabic (kursee for chair, for example) is encouraging, as it gives me a little base of vocabulary already. Likewise, although Hindi and English seem so very different, knowing that they are both Indo-European languages makes Hindi seem just a little bit less mysterious.

Korean has a complex vocabulary, a lot of words in Korean has Chinese or Japanese background. The Korean language might have a Chinese background because of the similarities that still in exist in certain words and the pronunciation of those words, and it also terms similar to Japanese language and Japanese culture. The true origins of the Korean language remain uncertain. There are theories that suggest Korean language may be a part of the Austronesian family, and there other theories that argue that Korean language originates from the Altaic language. And because of the similarities between modern day Japanese and Korean language, some argue that the Korean language is a part of the Japonic family. 

Although most languages evolve over time, both in sound and in writing, the changes in Korean writing were intentional. In the mid-1400s, the King made the decision to transition into the Hangul script in place of the Hanja script. The reason behind this was because Hanja used more Chinese characters that had Korean pronunciations, however these characters did not Korean script. And as a result, the general population was not very proficient in Korean because learning how to write required more effort and was a lot more difficult than learning how to simply speak Korean. The new Hangul script was made so that it had all the characters required for Korean sounds and vocabulary -- in fact, the King tried to structure the new script so that people could learn how to write Korean in just a day. Knowing this, I actually feel more confident in my learning efforts. I I have always felt more comfortable in speaking a foreign language, and have been hesitant about my writing skills. However, as I am practicing Korean, I can see how the script is a lot less complicated than other languages which helps me to remember it better.

While the true origin of the Korean language is debatable, some believe that it belongs to the Altaic language family, which includes Turkish, Mongolian, and Japanese. Korean was also influenced by Chinese even though it belongs to a different language family. Before the invention of the Hangeul writing system, which was created by King Sejong in 1443, Korean used Chinese characters. Because the sounds in Chinese and Korean were very different, the Chinese characters could not fully express all the sounds of Korean. The implementation of Hangeul, a phonetic writing system, gave the common people access to and ease in learning how to read and write and even later helped contribute to one of the world's highest literacy rates.

Korean definitely has traces from and similarities to Chinese and Japanese. For instance, I know my parents had to learn Chinese characters, or Hanja, which refers to the borrowed Chinese characters that have Korean pronunciation. In the past, Hanja was used in newspapers and scholarly papers. However, the use of Chinese characters has drastically declined. I think it's almost rarely used in a practical sense, but I do see them sometimes. I would see Hanja used in news broadcasts and on TV shows, occasionally using it for emphasis. Korean is also very similar to Japanese. Because I'm currently learning Japanese, I noticed just how similar they are. The basic grammar structures are essentially the same, and since Japanese is also heavily influenced by Chinese, many words sound almost the same. They both use a system of topic particles and the order of subject, object, and verb, and both have complex honorific systems.

The following quote gives a few examples of the striking similarities.

"The sentence ending particle ね (ne) has the exact same some sound and function as the Korean counterpart 네 (ne). The Japanese particle が (ga) corresponds with the particle 가 (ga) in function and sound. The honorific ending for questions in Japanese is か (ka), similar to ~까 (gga) in Korean."

Learning Japanese grammar and vocab was much easier for me since I knew some Korean, but learning Kanji, or the Chinese characters used in Japanese is very difficult. For the older generation in Korea, it would be even easier for them to learn Japanese because they have learned Hanja in school.

The sounds, words, writing systems, and etc. of Korean underwent many changes as time passed. At one point in the past, the Koreans and the Chinese were even able to understand each other through writing even though verbally they were different. Once Hangeul was created, Korean became less and less dependent on Chinese characters. Also, with the Japanese invasions, Korean was influenced by the Japanese language.

Korean belongs to the Koreanic language family. Korean does not belong to any prominent language families, but it is a family in its own. It doesn't really have any connections other than to Japanese and Chinese. It burrows some words from Chinese language and it is similar to Japanese in terms of letters and pronunciation. Korean consists of simple syllabic and vowel system similar to Japanese. In addition, grammatical system in Korean is similar to Japanese, but in terms of sound, Korean has its hangul script which has more "sounds" than Japanese. Although older Korean language did use Chinese characters (hanja), but in modern Korean language hanja is no longer found in most writings. If you have some background knowledge in Japanese, I'd say it would help to learn the grammatical system in Korean as you are able to still "think in Japanese", but other than that, it would be quite new to other language learners. 

In terms of how languages change over time, I think vocabulary, sentence structure, and pronunciation changes the most. Vocabulary seems to be a rather faster change than the other two as borrowing words from other languages is a common practice nowadays. Sentence structure changes slower as we can see that in the English language. Old sentence structures are changed to new modern structures that we use today. Lastly, pronunciation changes slowly as well and even a new dialect can be formed over time. 

Korean is thought to belong to a variety of families. The Northern theory links Korean to Altaic languages of central Asia which includes Turkish and Mongolian. Another theory includes Uralic languages of Hungarian and Finnish as well as Japanese. This theoretical family is believed by most Korean and Western linguists to be the most likely. Another suggests an association with the Dravidian languages of southern India or Austronesian languages. This range of theories appears due to Korea's long history of contact with Japanese and Chinese languages in which it shares linguistic features with each language.

Before the creation of its modern writing system, Hangul, Korea used a series of Chinese characters to represent the sounds of Korean. However, due to the inability of Chinese characters to adequately produce Korean speech and the inaccessibility of the language except elites who studied, a more efficient and accessible phonetic system was made(Hangul). We still see China's influence in Korean in how it borrows half of its vocabulary derived from Chinese in Confucian classics. Today, Koreans write words derived from Chinese with Chinese characters. However, other than vocabulary, Korean is distinct in its sound and sentence structure from Chinese. Although Japan occupied Korea for a time period, few influences are existent in Korean. 

In understanding Korea's great influence from Chinese, I see how Korean is a much more simple version of the Chinese phonetic system and the genius of its efficiency. Korean stands to be one of the easier languages to learn. However, just as in Chinese there are tones and sounds that are very hard to distinguish and reproduce for English speakers there are a few sounds in Korean that give some similar trouble for me. 

Korean is a great example of the mixture and meeting of different languages(Chinese, Japanese, etc) to create one unique language. After the conquest or habitation of the Chinese and Japanese, whether forced to speak the certain language or exposed it frequently, Korean is created after being left alone from these countries being able to cultivate it on their own and being isolated by physical geographical barriers.