[KS] Grammars of Korean and Japanese

Charles Mark Mueller bul2mun at yahoo.com
Mon May 30 13:17:15 EDT 2005


Stefan Ewing wrote:

"It is true, however, that the grammars of Korean and Japanese are 
remarkably (almost uncannily) similar.  Is this just an accidental
consequence of their both being agglutinative, SOV
(subject-object-verb) languages, or does it bespeak of some deeper
long-distant connection between the two languages' ancestor(s)?  (I
have no idea, as it's far beyond my area of knowledge.)"

I've also been amazed at the similarities between the grammars of the
two languages. I know that this is, on one level, deceptive. Many of
the modern particles in Japanese (e.g., the object marker -wo) that
seem to parallel particles in Korean actually evolved from articles
with completely different functions, as can be verified by looking at
old texts. 

One interesting theory I've heard is that Japanese developed from a
pidgin which had a native vocabulary knitted together with a Goguryeo
grammar. One problem with this idea is that pidgin's around the world
tend to look pretty similar and tend to have a shortage of grammatical
inflections or particles (Swahili and Chinook jargon are good
examples). Even so, this idea may point in the right direction.
Historical linguistics may be overly influenced by the example of
Indo-European--a language family born out of vast conquests. In some
regions of the world, languages and cultures may have formed more like
a quilt.



		
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