[KS] Is Korean an Altaic language?
John Treat
john.treat at yale.edu
Mon May 28 20:48:01 EDT 2012
On 5/28/12 2:46 PM, Edward Kim wrote:
There are really very few compelling questions in Japanese linguistics
(Phonology? No. Syntax? No.), but this is ONE of them. I was taught
decades ago that Japanese (likely) has a genetic relationship with
Paekche, but Paekche itself was overwhelmed so evidence has been lost.
John Whitman toils in the fields, by the way.
> Regarding the possible relationship, I would say that current
> scholarship is leaning on saying no. Here is a quick summary:
>
> 1) Christopher I. Beckwith (author of Koguryo: The Language of Japan's
> Continental Relatives) gives a resounding no.
>
> 2) Roy Andrew Miller (author of Languages and History: Japanese,
> Korean and Altaic) says yes.
>
> 3) Alexander Vovin (author of Korea-Japonica: A Re-evaluation of a
> Common Genetic Origin) says no. He had originally started believing
> that Korean and Japanese shared a genetic relationship, but after
> studying the most archaic forms of Japanese on the Ryukyu islands, he
> came to the conclusion that they were not. Interestingly, Vovin does
> believe that a common "Old Korean" was spoken on the peninsula during
> the Three Kingdom's Period.
>
> 4) J. Marshall Unger (author of The Role of Contact in the Origins of
> the Japanese and Korean Language) says yes, but with caveats. He
> actually believes that Proto Korean and Proto Japanese were both
> spoken widely on the peninsula, but that Proto Korean eventually
> displaced Proto Japanese and pushed it into the archipelago. The main
> evidence that he has is that Japanese place names on the peninsula are
> not just in old Koguryo areas, but also in other areas on the
> peninsula as well.
>
> My personal belief, as an informed lay person, is a combination of
> three and four. Korean and Japanese may have had very distant genetic
> relationships somewhere in Manchuria or Siberia, but separated a very
> long time ago. It is very hard to know for sure because we have
> fragmentary information on Old Korean due to Korea's more turbulent
> history. At the same time information on Old Japanese isn't
> exhaustive either.
>
> I know there was an interesting paper by John R. Bentley that took old
> Han and Wei documents and glossed Proto Korean and Proto Japanese
> words and found out that both had a similar number of vowels at that
> time. It also collaborated the works of Japanese scholars as well.
> Turns out that Proto Japanese may have had seven vowels as opposed to
> the 5 vowels that it has now. Proto Korean also had seven vowels back
> then as opposed to the 10 vowels it has now. It was also determined
> that those vowels were overlapping. Thus, it appeared based on this
> evidence that back then at least the two languages sounded similar.
>
> Again, based on the dearth of information, we may never really know.
>
>
> --- On *Mon, 5/28/12, Adam Bohnet /<adam.bohnet at utoronto.ca>/* wrote:
>
>
> From: Adam Bohnet <adam.bohnet at utoronto.ca>
> Subject: Re: [KS] Is Korean an Altaic language?
> To: koreanstudies at koreaweb.ws
> Date: Monday, May 28, 2012, 3:55 AM
>
> Dear Eugene:
>
> My own fealing, having read a little bit about it as a
> non-specialist,
> is that the safest course is to tell students that there is a great
> deal of debate concerning Korea's relationship to Japanese and the
> so-called Altaic languages, and that otherwise it has no obvious or
> undisputed connection to any other language. I then direct
> students to
> Sasha Vovin, etc. My own impression (no doubt based on insufficiently
> deep reading) was that all of the participants in the debate were
> able
> to claim that what other scholars treated as evidence of a genetic
> relationship was actually just the result of borrowing of words, so
> that unless one really wants to wade deep into the waters of this
> debate, it is best to stay dry and on the edge.
>
> In response to Henny's comment, note that Eugene's question was not
> concerned with simple "similarity" but with language families. Note
> that English speakers have a notoriously hard time learning Sanskrit,
> although Sanskrit is also an Indo-European language. Perhaps I might
> direct list-members to a comment made by Sasha Vovin on the Yahoo
> Manchu Studies List. His comment concerns Manchu, but in some
> respects
> it applies to Korean as well.
>
> http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ManchuStudy/message/390
>
> "Manchu belongs to the Tungusic language family, namely to its South
> (Nanaic) branch. The Tungusic language family is spread from Western
> Siberia to Pacific, and includes about a dozen languages, among which
> Ewenki, Ewen, and Nanai alongside with the Sibo dialect of Manchu in
> Xinjiang have the most number of speakers. Manchu, as well as other
> Tungusic languages have a remarkable similarity to languages belonging
> to languages families found in Central and East Asia (Turkic,
> Mongolic, Korean, and Japonic) that used to be called 'Altaic', but
> the similarity is superficial, mainly due to the fact that all these
> languages have SOV word order. Students of Manchu who make use of the
> Japanese translation of the Manwen laodang will notice that the
> Japanese text placed beneath each line of Manchu text follows the same
> word order as Manchu. But they should keep in mind that a similar
> translation into Hindi or the Sepik language (a Papuan language) would
> enjoy the same privilege, as these languages are also SOV. Meanwhile,
> this will not work for Ewen, which, although obviously related to
> Manchu, has developed SVO order in certain types of clauses. Though
> linguists have debated whether Altaic languages are actually
> genetically linked or whether their similarities merely reflect
> extensive borrowings from one another, most of Western and Japanese
> specialists in 'Altaic' languages believe that these similarities are
> the result of centuries long contacts. In other words, we deal here
> with a Sprachbund situation."
>
>
> Quoting Henny Savenije <webmaster at henny-savenije.pe.kr
> </mc/compose?to=webmaster at henny-savenije.pe.kr>>:
>
> > I am not a linguist either but I do remember that Turkish and
> > Hungarians and even Finnish have a relative easy time learning
> Korean.
> > I have met people from each group telling me so. Which indicates
> to me
> > the similarity between the languages.
> >
> > At 02:29 PM 5/27/2012, you wrote:
> >> Dear all,
> >>
> >> On a somewhat related note: what is the latest consensus, if
> any, among
> >> historical linguists on whether Korean (as well as Japanese) is an
> >> Altaic language? I am not a linguist, but would it be fair for
> me to
> >> tell my students that Korean is either a member of an Altaic
> language
> >> family or a language isolate to which Altaic languages, more
> than any
> >> others, are probably most closely related? My own very limited
> >> understanding of the literature on historical linguistics seems to
> >> suggest to me that if one were to place Korean in a language
> family,
> >> then the Altaic seems to be the best choice.
> >>
> >> Best,
> >>
> >> Gene
> >> ---
> >>
> >> Eugene Y. Park
> >> Korea Foundation Associate Professor of History
> >> Director, James Joo-Jin Kim Program in Korean Studies
> >> University of Pennsylvania
> >> http://www.history.upenn.edu/faculty/park.shtml
> >>
> >>
> >> On 5/26/2012 11:02 PM, gkl1 at columbia.edu
> </mc/compose?to=gkl1 at columbia.edu> wrote:
> >>> Hi List,
> >>>
> >>> Admittedly a huge number of Chinese words and compounds have
> become
> >>> part of Korean's vocabulary, just as a huge number of Greek
> and and
> >>> Latin words have become a part of the vocabulary of English
> (and the
> >>> other European languages too). But it's distressing to learn that
> >>> people might think ANY Korean word would be writable with Chinese
> >>> characters. If that were so, then Korean would be a language
> in the
> >>> Sino-Tibetan family. It's hard enough to get scholarly
> agreement on
> >>> what language family CAN claim Korean's ancestry, but any
> linguistic
> >>> reference work would make it clear that it's not a
> Chinese-type language.
> >>>
> >>> Gari Ledyard
> >>>
> >>> Quoting Clark W Sorensen <sangok at u.washington.edu
> </mc/compose?to=sangok at u.washington.edu>>:
> >>>
> >>>> Caren,
> >>>>
> >>>> Namaksin is a native Korean word, so it doesn't have
> corresponding
> >>>> Chinese characters. However, any of the on-line dictionaries
> will give
> >>>> the characters for Korean words such as at naver.com. The
> problem is
> >>>> you have to input the Korean in hangul.
> >>>>
> >>>> Clark Sorensen
> >>>>
> >>>> On Fri, 25 May 2012, Freeman, Caren (cwf8q) wrote:
> >>>>
> >>>>>
> >>>>> I¡¯m asking this question on behalf of a colleague who is a
> >>>>> sinologist. He asks:
> >>>>>
> >>>>>
> >>>>>
> >>>>> ¡°i want to see what chinese characters correspond to korean
> >>>>> "Namaksin" wooden clogs. Namaksin (³ª¸·½Å)
> >>>>>
> >>>>>
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Is there an online dictionary that gives the classic
> readings for
> >>>>> korean words entered in pinyin type western alphabet?¡±
> >>>>>
> >>>>>
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Many thanks for your recommendations,
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Caren Freeman
> >>>>>
> >>>>>
> >>>>>
> >>>>>
> >>>>>
> >>>>>
> >>>>>
> >>>>>
> >>>>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >
> > _ _
> > (o) (o)
> > oOOO----(_)----OOOo---
> > Henny (Lee Hae Kang)
> > -----------------------------
> > http://www.henny-savenije.pe.kr Portal to all my sites
> > http://www.hendrick-hamel.henny-savenije.pe.kr (in English) Feel
> free
> > to discover Korea with Hendrick Hamel (1653-1666)
> > http://www.hendrick-hamel.henny-savenije.pe.kr/indexk2.htm In Korean
> > http://www.hendrick-hamel.henny-savenije.pe.kr/Dutch In Dutch
> > http://www.vos.henny-savenije.pe.kr Frits Vos Article about
> Witsen and
> > Eibokken and his first Korean-Dutch dictionary
> > http://www.cartography.henny-savenije.pe.kr (in English) Korea
> through
> > Western Cartographic eyes
> > http://www.hwasong.henny-savenije.pe.kr Hwasong the fortress in
> Suwon
> > http://www.oldKorea.henny-savenije.pe.kr Old Korea in pictures
> > http://www.british.henny-savenije.pe.kr A British encounter in
> Pusan (1797)
> > http://www.genealogy.henny-savenije.pe.kr/ Genealogy
> > http://www.henny-savenije.pe.kr/phorum Bulletin board for Korean
> studies
>
>
>
>
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