The Korean Language

TABLE OF CONTENTS
 

There is a consensus among linguists that Korean is a member of the Altaic family of languages, which originated in northern Asia and includes the Mongol, Turkic, Finnish, Hungarian, and Tungusic (Manchu) languages. Although a historical relationship between Korean and Japanese has not been established, the two languages have strikingly similar grammatical structures.

Some have hypothesized that Korea and Japan stood at the end of two routes of large-scale migration in ancient times: a northern route from Inner Asia and southern route from southern China or Southeast Asia where the differences in the two languages are in part a reflection of disparate "northern" and "southern" influences, with Korean showing more influence from the northern, Inner Asian strain.

Both Korean and Japanese possess what is sometimes called "polite" or "honorific" language, the use of different levels of speech in addressing persons of superior, inferior, or equal rank. These distinctions depend both on the use of different vocabulary and upon basic structural differences in the words employed. For example, in Korean the imperative "go" can be rendered kara when speaking to an inferior or a child, kage when speaking to an adult inferior, kaseyo when speaking to a superior, and kasipsio when speaking to a person of still higher rank. The proper use of polite language, or levels of polite speech, is an extremely complex and subtle matter. The Korean language, like Japanese, is extremely sensitive to the nuances of hierarchical human relationships. Two persons who meet for the first time are expected to use the more distant or formal terms, but they will shift to more informal or "equal" terms if they become friends. Younger people invariably use formal language in addressing elders; the latter will use "inferior" terms in "talking down" to those who are younger. Additionally both employ particles after nouns to indicate case (the particle used to indicate "of" as in "the wife of Mr. Li" is no in Japanese and ui in Korean).

The Korean language may be written using a mixture of Chinese ideograms (hancha) and a native Korean alphabet known as hangul, or in hangul alone, much as in a more limited way Indo-European languages sometimes write numbers using Arabic symbols and at other times spell numbers out in their own alphabets or in some combination of the two forms. See the section on this page for a further discussion of the orginal of hangul.

Because of its greater variety of sounds, Korean does not have the problem of the Japanese written language, which some experts have argued needs to retain a sizable inventory of Chinese characters to distinguish a large number of potentially ambiguous homophones. Since 1948 the continued use of Chinese characters in South Korea has been criticized by linguistic nationalists and some educators and defended by cultural conservatives, who fear that the loss of character literacy could cut younger generations off from a major part of their cultural heritage.

Although the Korean and Chinese languages are not related in terms of grammatical structure, more than 50 percent of all Korean vocabulary is derived from Chinese loanwords, a reflection of the cultural dominance of China over 2 millennia. In many cases there are two words--a Chinese loanword and an indigenous Korean word -- meaning the same thing. The Chinese-based word in Korean sometimes has a bookish or formal flavor. Koreans select one or the other variant to achieve the proper register in speech or in writing, and to make subtle distinctions of meaning in accordance with established usage.

Large numbers of Chinese character compounds coined in Japan in the nineteenth or twentieth centuries to translate modern Western scientific, technical, and political vocabulary came into use in Korea during the colonial period. Post-1945 United States influence has been reflected in a number of English words that have been absorbed into Korean.

Unlike Chinese, Korean does not encompass dialects that are mutually unintelligible (with the notable exception of the variant spoken on Cheju Island). There are, however, regional variations both in vocabulary and pronunciation. Despite several decades of universal education, similar variations also have been heard between highly educated and professional speakers and Koreans of working class or rural backgrounds. The "Standard Language" (p'yojuno) of South Korea is derived from the language spoken in and around Seoul. More than forty years of division has meant that there are also some divergences in the development of the Korean language north and south of the DMZ.

The North-South Divide

It is unclear to what extent the honorific language and its grammatical forms have been retained in the north. However, according to a South Korean scholar, Kim Il Sung "requested people to use a special, very honorific deference system toward himself and his family and, in a 1976 publication, Our Party's Language Policy, rules formulated on the basis of Kim Il Sung's style of speech and writing were advocated as the norm."

The North Korean regime has a policy that has attempted to eliminate as many foreign loanwords as possible, as well as older terms of Chinese origin; Western loanwords are also being dropped.

P'yongyang regards hancha, or Chinese characters, as symbols of "flunkeyism" and has systematically eliminated them from all publications. Klloja (The Worker), the monthly KWP journal of the Central Committee, has been printed exclusively in hangul since 1949. An attempt has also been made to create new words of exclusively Korean origin. Parents are encouraged to give their children Korean rather than Chinese-type names. Nonetheless, approximately 300 Chinese characters are still taught in North Korean schools.

North Koreans refer to their language as "Cultured Language" (munhwa), which uses the regional dialect of P'yongyang as its standard. North Korean sources vilify the Standard Language language of the South as "coquettish" and "decadent," corrupted by English and Japanese loanwords, and full of nasal twangs.

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In the early 1440s, King Sejong (세종대왕 - r.1418-1450) of the Yi (or Choson - 조선시대) Dynasty (1392-1910) commissioned a group of Korean scholars to formulate a writing system that was suitable for the Korean language and that was relatively easy to learn.  The system they invented was called HunMinChongUm (훈민정음 - "Correct Sounds for the Instruction of the People").  Originally the system comprised 28 letters but modern Hangul now contains 24 letters - 14 consonants and 10 vowels.

Hangul is an extremely easy writing system to learn. Syllables are based on 2,3 or 4 letters grouped into a character. A word comprises one or more syllables.  Each syllable begins with a consonant (which may be silent) and is followed by a vowel.  Syllables may end in one or two consonants.  Diphthongs are also able to be constructed using a combination of two vowels.

Chinese characters (HanCha - 한자) were still used widely until after the Korean War.  Confucian scholarship imbued HanCha with a prestige which it still enjoys in some circles of modern Korea.  During the Japanese Colonial period, the use of Hangul was seen as nationalistic and was suppressed by the Japanese.  After the Korean War nationalist movements promoted the exclusive use of Hangul. With some further development, including a slightly more sophisticated spelling convention, Hangul was adopted as the official national script.

However, up until the early 1980s school children continued to learn Chinese characters (a minimum of 1000 called the ChonChaMun - 천자문) because they continued to be used in some newspapers and in academic manuscripts. President Chon Du Hwan's administration removed HanCha from school curricula although many schools have reintroduced the study of HanCha.

As a result of a long history of using the Chinese script and close cultural, religious and commercial links between Korea and China, over half of the modern Korean vocabulary came to be made up of Sino-Korean words, the pronunciation of which derive directly from Chinese.  As a consequence of Chinese being a tonal language and Korean not being tonal, there are many Sino-Korean words with identical Korean pronunciations. This can result in confusion and HanCha is often required to overcome this.  When Mr Kim Dae Jung (김대중대통령), was President of the Republic of Korean (ROK - South Korea) he pushed for a reintroduction of Chinese characters into school curricula and this engendered considerable debate in South Korea. Since then the ROK Ministry of Education declared that high school students are no longer legally required to learn Chinese characters in order to graduate. Most students weren't really studying Chinese characters anyway, so the law basically caught up with reality. (Hat Tip: Brian Hobbs)

(1) This could explain the fact that vocabulary of modern Korean is now one half Chinese derived and one half "Altaic" pure Korean.

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 Click here to download a free demo (5 MB)

 Click here to download a free demo (2MB)

Declan's Korean Dictionary is a fully searchable 23,000 word Korean-English dictionary. The database also includes thousands of examples and hanja (Chinese characters) for all sino-korean words. Features include the ability to construct custom word lists which can be exported to Declan's Korean FlashCards XFL format files. Word components can also be copied into the Window clipboard for integration with other applications.

 Click here to download a free demo (1.5MB)

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An Essay on Korean History by Soon-Yong Choi

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Here is a test of whether our machine is already setup to read Hangul:

한늘

If the text on the left does not match the picture on the right then you are not set up correctly and need to explore one of the solutions listed below.....

There are a number of solutions listed below:

Simply download it from here (2 MB - you should download the version with the "language pack" that includes a unicode HanGul font).

Then simply run the executable (called "komodo.exe" when I last downloaded it) to install it. This will install the IME and give you a blue IME icon in your taskbar - like this:

You should be able to use the IME to type Hangul in applications that are IME-enabled like Microsoft Outlook (email program) and some internet sites.

Windows 2000 & XP: Win2000 and XP support Korean internally - all you need to do is go to the Keyboard properties in the Control Panel (Start >> Setting >> Control Panel), select the Input Locales tab and add Korean as an input language.
(See here for full Win2000 and WinXP instructions).

NJStar Communicator from here;
Unionway from here.

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