|
South Korea The Korean Language
Modern Korean language is descended from the language of the
Silla Kingdom, which unified the peninsula in the seventh
century. As Korean linguist Yi Ki-mun notes, the more remote
origins of the Korean language are disputed, although many Korean
linguists together with a few western scholars, continue to favor
the now widely-contested nineteenth-century theory of an Altaic
family of languages supposed to include Korean, Japanese, and
Mongolian, among other languages. Although a historical
relationship between Korean and Japanese has not been
established, modern Korean and Japanese have many similar
grammatical features, no doubt in part due to close contacts
between the two during the past century. These similarities have
given rise to considerable speculation in the popular press. The
linguist Kim Chin-wu, for example, has 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. In a variant on the
"southern origins" theory of some Japanese scholars, he views the
two languages as reflecting 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.
The Korean language may be written using a mixture of Chinese
ideograms (hancha) and a native Korean alphabet known as
han'gul, or in han'gul 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. Han'gul
was invented by scholars at the court of King Sejong (1418-50),
not solely to promote literacy among the common people as is
sometimes claimed, but also, as Professor Gari K. Ledyard has
noted, to assist in studies of Chinese historical phonology.
According to a perhaps apocryphal decree of the king, an
intelligent man could learn han'gul in a morning's time,
while even a fool could master it in ten days. As a result, it
was scorned by scholars and relegated to women and merchants. The
script, which in its modern form contains forty symbols, is
considered by linguists to be one of the most scientific ever
devised; it reflects quite consistently the phonemes of the
spoken Korean language.
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. Since the early 1970s, Seoul's policy governing the
teaching and use of Chinese characters has shifted several times,
although the trend clearly has been toward writing in
han'gul alone. By early 1990, all but academic writing
used far fewer Chinese characters than was the case in the 1960s.
In 1989 the Korean Language and Education Research Association,
citing the need for Chinese character literacy "at a time when
the nation is entering into keen competition with Japan and
China" and noting that Japanese educators were increasing the
number of Chinese characters taught in elementary schools,
recommended to the Ministry of Education that instruction in
Chinese characters be reintroduced at the primary-school level.
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 possible exception of the
variant spoken on Cheju Island. There are, however, regional
variations both in vocabulary and pronunciation, the range being
comparable to the differences that might be found between Maine
and Alabama in the United States. 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. Standard Korean 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.
Data as of June 1990
|
