“Comparison of Japanese and Korean”的意思、由来-开放百科全书

The geographically close Japanese and Korean languages share considerable similarity in typological features of their syntax and morphology while having a small number of lexical resemblances and different native scripts (although they both use the Chinese characters, called hanja in Korea and kanji in Japan; see "Writing" section). Observing the said similarities and probable history of Korean migration to prehistoric Japan, linguists have formulated different theories proposing a genetic relationship between them,^[1]^[2]^[3]^[4]^[5]^[6]^[7]^[8] though these studies either lack conclusive evidence or were subsets of theories that have suffered large discredit (like versions of the well-known Altaic hypothesis that mainly attempted to group the Turkic, Mongolian and Tungusic languages together).^[9]^[10]^[11]^[12] Due to the lack of a sufficient reconstruction of Proto-Japonic and Proto-Korean, any relation between the languages that may have existed may never be conclusively proven (see: Japonic migration from Korea hypothesis and Gaya language).

Overview

Grammar

Japanese and Korean both have an agglutinative morphology in which verbs may function as prefixes^[13] and a subject–object–verb (SOV) typology.^[14]^[15]^[16] They are both topic-prominent, null-subject languages. Both languages rely heavily on turning nouns into verbs utilizing "to do" (する and 하다).

Modern Korean and Japanese share a similar system of demonstrative pronouns: i- (이), ku- (그) and ce- (저) for Korean corresponding to the Japanese ko- (こ), so- (そ) and a- (あ)(“this”, “that” and “that over there”). They both lack a compulsory distinction of plurality (for example "an apple" vs "apples" is usually not specifically distinguished).

Japanese and Korean also share the particle system. Korean and the Japonic languages are two of only four extant languages in the world with topic markers. This allows words of different parts of speech to be placed in exactly the same order if some sentences are translated from one language to another. Such direct word for word swapping cannot be so easily done with any other languages, showing that Japanese and Korean are grammatically quite similar.

There are some differences, however. Japanese utilizes passive grammar more frequently than Korean, and has four common verb conjugations to express "if" (〜ならば、〜ば、〜たら、〜と), while Korean has one (-면). Korean also has distinct future tenses (-겠-) while Japanese often relies on context rather than directly indicating the future nature of a sentence.

Vocabulary

The two languages have previously been thought to not share any cognates (other than loanwords),^[4] for their vocabularies do not phonetically resemble each other. However, a recent 2016 paper proposing a common lineage between Korean and Japanese traces around 500 core words thought to share a common origin.^[17]

Some previous linguists have listed a tiny number of translations which may be perceived as phonetic parallels. This is exemplified in the following table:

In addition to the above, there may be a relation between the words for morning (朝, asa; 아침, achim). A historical variant in Korean may have been pronounced "asa" (see: Asadal).

Korean particles and polite grammatical ending conjugations also share a superficial similarity with Japanese. The sentence ending particle ね (ne) has the exact same sound and function as the Korean counterpart 네 (ney). The Japanese particle が (ga) corresponds with the particle 가 (ka) in function and sound. The honorific ending for questions in Japanese is か (ka), similar to ~까 (kka) in Korean. The informal noun ending in Korean 야 (ya) is similar to the dialectal informal noun ending や (ya) in Japanese (corresponding to だ in standardized Japanese).

Functionally, some peculiar aspects of particles and particle usage are also the same in both languages. For example, the particles も (*mo*) and 도 (*do*) not only share an inclusive function (similar to "too" in English), they also both function to emphasize sheer lack in negative sentences, or sheer intensity in positive sentences. へ and 에 (ey) have the same sound and share a similar function. Particles are also used in the same way to form basic vocabulary words. I.e., も (mo) and 도 (to) in the words for *no one* (아무도, 誰も), the similar sounding か (ka) and 가 (ka) particle adding an unknown/questioning element to a word to form the equivalent meaning to English *some*, (i.e. in 뭔가 and 何か, meaning *something*).{{citation needed|date=March 2019}}

However, some percentage of vocabulary in any language may be expected to resemble vocabulary in any other language to a certain extent through random coincidence. The likelihood that a word in one language will be perceived as resembling a word in another language is inversely correlated with the number of phonemes in the word (i.e. the shorter a word is, the more likely it will randomly resemble a short word in another language) and positively correlated with the degree of overlap in the languages' phonological systems (i.e. the more similar the sound systems of the two languages, the more likely it is that any word from one language will be perceived as sounding similar to a word from the other language).

Writing

Both languages use, to some extent, a combination of native scripts and Chinese characters.

Korean is mostly written in the Korean featural alphabet (known as Hangul in South Korea and Chosŏn'gŭl in North Korea). The traditional hanja (Chinese characters adapted for Korean) are sometimes used in South Korea, but only for specific purposes like linguistic or historic study, artistic expression, legal documents, and newspapers. Native Korean words do not use hanja anymore. In North Korea, the hanja have been largely suppressed in an attempt to remove Sinic influence, although they are still used in some cases and the number of hanja taught in North Korean schools is greater than that of South Korean schools.^[18]

Japanese is written with a combination of kanji (Chinese characters adapted for Japanese) and kana (two writing systems representing the same sounds, composed primarily of syllables, each used for different purposes).^[19]^[20] Unlike Korean Hanja, however, Kanji can be used to write both Sino-Japanese words and Native Japanese words.

Historically, both Japanese and Korean were written solely with Chinese characters, with the writing experiencing a gradual mutation through centuries into its modern form.^[21]

Other features

Honorifics

Both languages have similar elaborate, multilevel systems of honorifics. They are cited as the two most elaborate honorific systems, perhaps unrivaled by any other languages.^[22] It has been argued that certain honorific words may share a common origin.^[23] Uniquely, the honorifics rely heavily on changing verb conjugations rather than only using t-v distinction or other common methods of signifying honorifics. See Japanese honorifics and Korean honorifics.

References

1. ^{{Cite web|title = Are Korean and Japanese related? The Altaic hypothesis continued.|url = https://koreanology.wordpress.com/2013/11/22/are-korean-and-japanese-related-the-altaic-hypothesis-continued/|website = Koreanology|access-date = 2016-02-17|last = Andrew Logie}}
2. ^Kornicki, Peter. Aston, Cambridge and Korea {{webarchive |url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080529111209/http://www.eai.cam.ac.uk/Aston-and-Korea.pdf |date=May 29, 2008 }}
3. ^Poppe 1965:137
4. ^¹Martin, Samuel (1990).
5. ^Whitman, John (1985).
6. ^E. Riley, Barbara (2004).
7. ^Starostin, Sergei (Moscow, 1991). The Altaic Problem and the Origins of the Japanese Language.
8. ^Georg et al. 1999:72, 74
9. ^"While 'Altaic' is repeated in encyclopedias and handbooks most specialists in these languages no longer believe that the three traditional supposed Altaic groups, Turkic, Mongolian and Tungusic, are related." Lyle Campbell & Mauricio J. Mixco, A Glossary of Historical Linguistics (2007, University of Utah Press), pg. 7.
10. ^"When cognates proved not to be valid, Altaic was abandoned, and the received view now is that Turkic, Mongolian, and Tungusic are unrelated." Johanna Nichols, Linguistic Diversity in Space and Time (1992, Chicago), pg. 4.
11. ^"Careful examination indicates that the established families, Turkic, Mongolian, and Tungusic, form a linguistic area (called Altaic)...Sufficient criteria have not been given that would justify talking of a genetic relationship here." R.M.W. Dixon, The Rise and Fall of Languages (1997, Cambridge), pg. 32.
12. ^"...[T]his selection of features does not provide good evidence for common descent" and "we can observe convergence rather than divergence between Turkic and Mongolic languages--a pattern than is easily explainable by borrowing and diffusion rather than common descent", Asya Pereltsvaig, Languages of the World, An Introduction (2012, Cambridge) has a good discussion of the Altaic hypothesis (pp. 211-216).
13. ^Bernard Comrie: "Introduction", p. 7 and 9 in Comrie (1990).
14. ^S. Tomlin, Russell. Surveyed in the 1980s.
15. ^[https://books.google.com/books?id=MWbrvUiYzSkC&pg=PA36 Introducing English Linguistics International Student Edition by Charles F. Meyer]
16. ^Russell Tomlin, "Basic Word Order: Functional Principles", Croom Helm, London, 1986, page 22
17. ^{{Cite thesis|title=Proto-Korean-Japanese: A New Reconstruction of the Common Origin of the Japanese and Korean Languages|url=https://etd.ohiolink.edu/pg_10?0::NO:10:P10_ETD_SUBID:113782|publisher=The Ohio State University|date=2016|language=en|first=Alexander Takenobu|last=Francis-Ratte}}
18. ^Hannas 1997: 68. "Although North Korea has removed Chinese characters from its written materials, it has, paradoxically, ended up with an educational program that teachers more characters than either South Korea or Japan, as Table 2 shows."
19. ^[https://books.google.com/books?id=BDisMH0IpFcC&pg=PA28 Advances in Psychology Research]. Google Books. Books.google.co.uk. Retrieved on 2013-08-24.
20. ^[https://books.google.com/books?id=FkBdWFwh-MEC&pg=PR12 Learning Japanese in the Network Society]. Google Books. Books.google.co.uk. Retrieved on 2013-08-24.
21. ^The Handbook of Korean Linguistics By Jaehoon Yeon
22. ^{{Cite journal|jstor = 41913346|title = Contrasts Between Korean and Japanese Honorifics|journal = Rivista Degli Studi Orientali|volume = 81|issue = 1/4|pages = 369–385|last1 = Brown|first1 = Lucien|year = 2008}}
23. ^https://www.researchgate.net/publication/237116691_Grammaticalization_in_Sentence-Final_Politeness_Marking_in_Korean_and_Japanese