[KS] Is Korean an Altaic language?

Wed May 30 14:11:37 EDT 2012

"Seom," which is related to Japanese "shima," is a native Korean term, "-do 島" [ seom do 섬 도] is a loan word in Korean borrowed from Chinese [hence it is Sino-Korean]--in Mandarin it is pronounced dao3.

Dr. Edward D. Rockstein 

ed4linda at yahoo.com   

Those who corrupt the public mind are just as evil as those who steal from the public purse--Adlai Stevenson

--- On Wed, 5/30/12, lawrence driscoll <lawdri at hotmail.com> wrote:

From: lawrence driscoll <lawdri at hotmail.com>
Subject: Re: [KS] Is Korean an Altaic language?
To: koreanstudies at koreaweb.ws
Date: Wednesday, May 30, 2012, 11:03 AM

Mr. Wang,

So perhaps "sima" was the Korean suffix that preceded the use of the current suffix, "do" (C:dao) .

Allow me to digress here.

When I studied the hiragana and katagana alphabets years ago, at the Japan Society in New York, I remember the instructor commenting that, the ubiquitous "ng" final sound, heard in Korean and Chinese words, was at some point in time, dropped from the Japanese language. I have always wished I had inquired more about this development. Was this motivated by a separatist and/or nationalistic sentiment? Did it occur along with other cultural revisions at the time of the Meiji Restoration, I wondered.  

Best regards,

Lawrence Driscoll

New Jersey, USA

Date: Tue, 29 May 2012 19:54:37 -0700
From: wangkon936 at yahoo.com
To: koreanstudies at koreaweb.ws
Subject: Re: [KS] Is Korean an Altaic language?

John,

John R. Bentley at University of Hawaii did an exhaustive study of the Baekje language from surviving fragments in the Nihon Shoki and the Samguk Sagi and reconstructed 100 Baekje words.  His conclusion was that Baekje and the language of Silla was more similar to each other than what was being spoken in Japan.

One interesting tidbit is that the Japanese word for island, "shima," was originally from the old Korean world for enclosed and isolated space, "sima."  Shima (as in Takashima or Tsushima) was originally an old Korean word. 

--- On Mon, 5/28/12, John Treat <john.treat at yale.edu> wrote:

From: John Treat <john.treat at yale.edu>
Subject: Re: [KS] Is Korean an Altaic language?
To: koreanstudies at koreaweb.ws
Date: Monday, May 28, 2012, 5:48 PM

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>:

> 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 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>:
>>>
>>>> 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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