ayearinlanguage: A Year in Language, Day 60: Korean Korean is considered by most to be a language is
ayearinlanguage: A Year in Language, Day 60: Korean Korean is considered by most to be a language isolate, possibly the member of a small family if one considers certain dialects, most notably Jeju, to be distinct languages. It is not related to Chinese or Japanese or anything else for that matter. Korean employs one of the most unique and artistic writing systems in the world, known as Hangul. It was invented in the 15th century by King Sejong the Great to replace the old system of Chinese characters and increase literacy in the nation. While those unfamiliar with Hangul may assume it is another character system it is actually an alphabet! It consists of 19 consonants, theoretically designed to mimic the way your mouth and tongue move to make the sound it represents, and 21 vowels designed to represent the ebb and flow of yin and yang. What makes Hangul truly unique is that these letters are not written right to left, nor up to down, or in true linear order at all. Instead they are arranged into blocks that look reminiscent of a Chinese character. For example, if I wanted to write “seol” (“eo” represents a single sound) I take the letters “ㅅ” for “s”, “ㅓ” for “eo” and “ㄹ” for “l” (also “r”) and arrange them like “설” Korean has a three way contrast in stop consonants. The contrast is voiceless, voiceless aspirated, and “tense”. “Tense” is linguist talk for “we have no idea what exactly is going on with these consonants”. They have been variously described as glottalized, or lengthened, or all sorts of descriptive features, but the linguistic community has been unable to come to a consensus on what precisely makes them distinctive so… tense it is. While unrelated Korean does share a number of grammatical features with Japanese. Like Japanese it has a complex system of honorifics and register coded into the verbs and nouns. Like Japanese its adjectives are more like verbs than nouns, as they are in Indo-European languages. They both make use of postpositions instead of prepositions, and can often omit most other parts of speech that can be implied through context. Because of the schisming of the country into North and South Korea the language of the two states is slowly drifting. As it currently stands the differences are slight. The most striking difference is not in accent or grammar, but in vocabulary. The North Korean government actively works to keep loanwords and other foreign influences out of the language so North Korean refugees often find themselves having difficulty making themselves understood when dealing with more modern items, many of which South Koreans have loaned the names for. -- source link
Tumblr Blog : ayearinlanguage.tumblr.com