|
Overview
한국말(Korean)
Korean
is spoken by about 70 million people.
Although most speakers of Korean live on the
Korean Peninsula and its adjacent islands, more
than 5 million are scattered throughout the world.
The
origin of the Korean language is as obscure as the
origins of the Korean people. In the 19th
century when Western scholars
"discovered" the Korean language, from
what family of languages the Korean language
derived was one of the first questions posed about
the language. These scholars proposed various
theories linking the Korean language with
Ural-Altaic, Japanese, Chinese, Tibetan, Dravidian
Ainu, Indo-European and other languages.
Among these theories, only the relationship
between Korean and Altaic (which groups the
Turkic, Mongolian and Manchu-Tungus languages) and
the relationship between Korean and Japanese have
continuously attracted the attention of
comparative linguists in the 20th century.
Altaic,
Korean and Japanese not only exhibit similarities
in their general structure, but also share common
features such as vowel harmony and lack of
conjunctions, although the vowel harmony in old
Japanese has been the object of dispute among
specialists in the field. Moreover, it has been
found that these languages have various common
elements in their grammar and vocabulary.
Although much work remains to be done, research
seems to show that Korean is probably related to
both Altaic and Japanese.
Back
to top
HISTORY
According
to early historical records, two groups of
languages were spoken in Manchuria and on the
Korean Peninsula at the dawn of the Christian era:
one belonged to the Northern Puyo group and the
other to the Southern Han group. Around the
middle of the seventh century when the kingdom of
Shilla unified the peninsula, its language became
the dominant form of communication. As a
result, the linguistic unification of the
peninsula was achieved on the basis of the Shilla
language.
When
the Koryo Dynasty was founded in the 10th century,
the capital was moved to Kaesong, located at the
center of the Korean Peninsula. From that
time onward, the dialect of Kaesong became the
standard national language. After the Choson
Dynasty was founded at the end of the 14th
century, the capital was moved to Seoul.
However, since Seoul is geographically close to
Kaesong, the move had little significant effect on
the development of the language.
Back
to top
SCRIPT
조선시대(Choson
Dynasty)
The
Korean script which is now generally called Han-gul
was invented in 1443 under the reign of Hing
Sejong (r. 1418-1450), the fourth king of the
Choson Dynasty. It was then called Hunmin
Chong-um, or proper sounds to instruct the
people. However, evidence for a script
version did not appear until 1446 when 훈민정음
Hunmin
Chong-um appeared in a written document.
The motivation behind the invention of the Korean
script, according to 세종대왕King
Sejong's preface to the above book, was to enable
the Korean people to write their own language
without the use of Chinese characters. Until
the introduction of Hunmin Chong-um,
Chinese characters were used by the upper classes,
and Idu letters, a kind of Chinese-based Korean
character system, were used by the populace.
There also seems to have been a second motivation
behind the development of Korean script: to
represent the "proper" sound associated
with each Chinese character.
In
attempting to invent a Korean writing system, King
Sejong and the scholars who assisted him probably
looked to several writing systems known to them at
the time, such as Chinese old seal characters, the
Uighur script and the Mongolian scripts. The
system that they came up with, however, is
predominantly based upon their phonological
studies. Above all, they developed a theory
of tripartite division of the syllable into
initial, medial and final, as opposed to the
bipartite division of traditional Chinese
phonology.
The
initial sounds (consonants) are represented by 17
letters of which there are five basic forms.
The other initial letters were derived by adding
strokes to the basic letters. No letters
were invented for the final sounds, the initial
letters being used for that purpose. The
original Humin Chong-um text also explains
that the medial sounds (vowels) are represented by
11 letters of which there are three basic forms.
After
the promulgation of the Korean alphabet, its
popularity gradually increased, particularly in
modern times, to the point where it has replaced
Chinese characters as the primary writing system
altogether.
One
of the more interesting characteristics of the
Korean script is its syllabic grouping of the
initial, medial and final letters. However,
the Korean script is essentially different from
such syllabic writing systems as Japanese Kana.
It is an alphabetic system which is characterized
by syllabic grouping.
Back
to top
Standard
Language and Orthography
Modern
Korean is divided into six dialects: Central,
Northwest, Northeast, Southeast, Southwest and
Cheju. Except for the Cheju dialect, these
are similar enough for speakers of the various
dialects to communicate. This is due to the
fact that Korea has been a centralized state for
more than a thousand years. The language of
the capital exercised a steady influence on the
language spoken throughout the country.
The
language of the capital was established as the
basis for modern standard Korea in 1936, as a
result of the deliberations of a committee
organized by the Korean Language Research Society.
The language of the political and cultural center
of a nation usually becomes standard language for
the entire population. In Korea, however, he
case was somewhat different, since the guidelines
for the national language standard were set forth
by a small but dedicated group of scholars who had
worked during the Japanese occupation. They
endeavored to preserve their own language in the
face of an oppressive regime which had sought the
eventual extinction of the Korean language.
Modern
orthography was also determined by this same
Korean Language Research Society in 1933. In
this way, Korean orthography, rather than being a
product of a gradual process of natural selection,
was deliberately manufactured. Whereas 15th
century orthography had been based on a phonemic
principle, which each letter representing one
phoneme, modern Korean orthography operates on a
morphophonemic principle. That is, while a
morpheme, or a minimum meaningful unit, may be
realized differently according to its context, its
orthographic representation is a single base form.
Back
to top
Phonology
The
Korean language possesses a rich variety of vowels
and consonants with nine simple vowels and three
series of stops and affricates: plain, aspirated,
and glottalized. These variations make
it difficult for foreigners to lean and pronounce
the language. They also complicate the task
of Romanization.
Phonemes
of the plain stop series are realized as unvoiced
sounds in the world-initial position, voiced
sounds in the intervocalic position and unreleased
sounds in the word-final position, e.g. kap (kap)
"case or small box" and kap-e
" (kabe) in the case." The liquid
phoneme is realized as "r" in the
intervocalic position and "l" in the
word-final position. For example, tar
(tal) "moon" and tar-e (tare)
"at the moon."
Another
characteristic of modern Korean is that there are
no consonant clusters or liquid sounds in the
word-initial position. As a result, Koreans
pronounce the English word "stop" in two
syllables, as (swt'op), and change the initial
"l" or "r" in foreign words to
"n." Recently, however, there has
been a tendency to pronounce initial liquid sounds
in Western loan words.
Back
to top
The
Korean Alphabet
ㄱ
ㄴ ㄷ ㄹ ㅁ ㅂ
ㅅ ㅇ ㅈ ㅊ ㅋ
ㅍ ㅎ
ㅏ
ㅑ ㅓ ㅕ ㅗ ㅛ
ㅜ ㅠ ㅡ ㅢ
Korean
is similar to the Altaic languages in that it
possesses vowel harmony. Evidence that vowel
harmony was rigidly observed in old Korean, but
rules have been significantly weakened in modern
Korean. Vowel harmony nevertheless continues
to play an important role in the onomatopoetic and
mimetic words so abundant in the language.
Back
to top
Romanization
Korean
is a difficult language to Romanize, given the
variety of vowel and consonant phonemes and the
complex rules for their realization. of the
Romanization systems that have been used since the
19th century, the most widely accepted have been
the McCume-Reischauer System (1939), and the
Ministry of Education System (1959). The
former has been used mainly in the United States
and other Western countries, while the latter has
been used in Korea. In 1984, however, the
Korean system was revised along the lines of the
McCune-Reischauer System, with a few
modifications, so that the two systems most widely
used in Korean and the West are now, in effect,
the same.
The
system is a phonetic one, designed to faithfully
represent modern Korean pronunciation with the
Latin alphabet. Under this system, a single
phoneme of Korean may be represented by more than
one Latin letter, depending on how the Korean
phoneme is realized in a given context. As
explained above, plain stops and affricates in
modern Korea are pronounced as either unvoiced or
voiced sounds, and the liquid "r" and
"l," depending on the context. The
1984 Romanization system reflects these
variations.
Back
to top
Vocabulary
The
vocabulary of the Korean language is composed of
indigenous words and loanwords, the latter being
the result of contacts with other languages.
The majority of the loanwords are of Chinese
origin, often called Sino-Korean words, a
reflection of several millennia of Chinese
cultural influence on Korea. In modern
Korean, native words are significantly outnumbered
by Sino-Korean words. As a result, a dual
system of native and Sino-Korean words pervades
the Korean lexicon, including two sets of native
numbers are used with the shi (the house,
i.e. ahop shi, "nine o'clock")
but Sino-Korean numerals are used with pun (the
minute, i.e. ka pun, "nine
minutes"). The process of modernization
has resulted in a steady flow of Western words
entering the Korean language. Technological
and scientific terms represent the majority of
these loanwords, although Western terms have been
introduced into almost every field.
Back
to top |
