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I think the classification of Japanese
and Korean is the biggest remaining puzzle in philology.
There are two issues: are these two languages related
to each other, and are they part of any known family?
The Japanese and Koreans call each other ‘close
but distant neighbours,’ and this phrase also roughly
sums up the relationship of their languages. You
often read that the grammar systems of Japanese
and Korean are very similar, but their native vocabularies
are very different. This unusual paradox has deterred
many language experts from embracing a genetic relationship.
Others say that both languages are isolates (orphan
languages), or are distant cousins of Turkish, Manchurian
and other central Asian languages. On the Internet
you still find references to links with Tamil or
Malay. No theory has won real acceptance. Even the
most elementary questions of affiliation remain
unanswered.
I am a Japanese-to-English translator
with basic Korean, and this question has become
a bit of a hobby with me. But the literature in
print and on-line tends to be either superficial
or very abstruse—in other words, of little use,
or inaccessible to the generalist. Now, I don’t
want to take issue with the experts—I know nothing
of Manchurian. Nor am I a grammarian, which is why
I here use schoolboy European parts-of-speech terms,
even though they do not fit Asian languages well.
What I want to do in this little essay is try to
add some basic comparative detail to this debate,
for those without deep knowledge of either language.
First I will illustrate the main resemblances of
syntax, and then look at the native vocabularies,
before finishing up with some thoughts on the impact
of their unusual writing systems. Because this is
a tricky field, there are bound to be gross simplification,
omission, generalization and very likely a few big
errors below, for which I apologize in advance.
The similarities of Japanese and
Korean syntax are remarkable by any standards. To
begin with what is usually considered a superficial
point: Word order is almost the same, not just in
broad SOV (subject-object-verb) terms but often
down to the tiniest quirks of linguistic device.
I would guess they are nearly as close as English
and Danish at the everyday conversation level. But
Danish is not only closely related to English; it
seems the Vikings additionally Scandinavianised
English word order. That Japanese and Korean have
retained a similar degree of closeness down the
centuries may not mean anything, as many linguists
say, but it is certainly suggestive.
Syntax is the bolts and hinges—the
tool kit, if you like—of sentence construction.
Some of the basic features of Japanese and Korean
are also found in other Asian languages such as
Mandarin: lack of plural marker (usually), lack
of relative clauses (all subclauses are backed up
behind the word they modify), lack of “gender” or
other verb classification, few “endings” or inflections
generally, simple tense systems and (to the frustration
of the translator) a tendency to omit words if they
can be assumed. Compared with European languages,
all three Asian languages make heavy use of particles.
But Japanese and Korean also share
basic features that are unusual in other languages,
starting with “topic/subject markers”, which are
a bit like articles but have many other functions
too. These are found in both Japanese (—wa and —ga
) and Korean (—[n]eun and —i,/ga), and one of them,
—ga, is shared. These markers are the most characteristic
feature of Japanese and Korean—no other language
I know of replicates this system—and they dictate
sentence structure. Because of this, we need to
see very basically how they work. There isn’t space
to discuss the specific roles of each of the two
particles. This sentence just shows the two functions
for which they are named, topic marking and identification
of the subject (of an implied subclause in this
case).
English:
I like girls with long hair.
Korean:
Na-neun meori-ga
gin yeoja-reul joa-haeyo.
Japanese:
Watashi-wa kaminoke-ga
nagai josei-o suki-desu.
Literal English for the Japanese/Korean above
I-neun/wa (“as for me”
[topic marker]), hair-(ga
[subject marker])-(is)-long girl-(reul/o
[object marker]) like-do.
It’s not really difficult, just
unfamiliar, but things do get much fiddlier in more
complex sentences. (The “object marker” is something
different and I’ll come back to it later.) The point
to remember is that they underpin what is probably
a unique system of sentence structuring.
The best-known distinctive trait
of Japanese and Korean is the honorific system of
verb endings. While Korean can also stick things
in the middle of verbs, and Japanese at the front,
both systems cover broadly the same bases in terms
of register (technically, “formal polite,” “informal
polite,” “plain” etc). The “neutral” ending, the
one used in teach-yourself textbooks, is –‘mnida’
in Korean and –‘imasu’ in Japanese. In both languages
there is a plain form ending in –‘yo,’ though it
is blunter in Japanese, (and there is an exclamatory
—‘yo!’ as well, as in ‘that’s expensive!’—‘bissandayo!’
in Korean, ‘takayo!’ in Japanese. Both also have
special honorific forms for certain common verbs
that are essentially completely different words—e.g.
‘kimasu’ and ‘mairimasu’ (lower and upper register
for ‘come’) in Japanese. These show no resemblances
(between Japanese and Korean), with one very basic
exception. ‘Iru,’ to be in Japanese (for animate
objects; ‘aru’ for inanimate objects) can be elevated
to ‘gozaimasu’ in honorific usage, while its equivalent
in Korean, ‘itda,’ inflates to ‘gessumnida.’ (The
stem parts here are ‘goz’—- and ‘gess’—-; —‘imasu’
and —‘umnida’ are the endings). The plain form of
the verb ‘to be,’ (‘itda’ and ‘iru/aru’) is –‘da’
in both languages (‘it’s a book’ is ‘chaegi—da’
in Korean, and ‘hon—da’ in Japanese).
Another unusual feature of Japanese
and Korean is treating adjectives as verbs: you
don’t say “the house was big”, but rather “the house
bigged.”
Now let’s look at five striking
similarities in syntactical areas more familiar
to Europeans. Both languages have only one noun
“case” ending (particle), the objective (–‘o’ in
Japanese and –‘[r]eul’ in Korean; see above example
about liking girls with long hair). The yes-no question
marker is the same in both: –‘ka?’ in Japanese and
‘–kka?’ in Korean. Korean has a richer spread of
tenses than Japanese, which has only simple past,
but the very common –‘tta’ plain past form is identical
in both. The simple negative in Japanese is –‘nai,’
put on the end of the verb; in Korean it is ‘an’—
, put at the front of the verb (‘I’m not going’
is ‘ika-nai’ in Japanese, versus ‘an-gayo’ in Korean).
Curiously, these two features—‘t’ (or ‘d’) sounds
in past tense endings and ‘n’ sounds in negative
endings—are shared by many European tongues too.
I’d guess too that the adverbial endings, -ge in
Korean and –ku in Japanese, might be linked.
Japanese and Korean tend to put
words for ‘although,’ ‘because,’ ‘while’ etc. at
the end of the clause rather than the beginning.
Several show resemblances: ‘although’ can be —‘noni’
in Japanese and —‘na’ in Korean, ‘since’ or ‘as’
can be ‘node’ in Japanese and ‘nikka’ in Korean.
‘Because’ can be ‘tameni’ in Japanese; Korean has
‘ttaemune.’
Both languages have multiple personal
pronouns (depending mainly on register), but prefer
to avoid use of ‘you,’ which is considered too direct.
There are a number of lookalikes: ‘We’ can be ‘ware’
in Japanese, and is usually ‘uri’ in Korean. He
is ‘kare’ in Japanese and ‘geu’ in Korean (‘karera’
and ‘geudeul’ are ‘they’). Paralleling this are
the words for ‘this’, ‘kono’ and ‘kore’ in Japanese
and again ‘geu’ in Korean (Korean also shares with
Japanese, but not Mandarin, the feature of having
two subtly different ‘there’ words). Locational
words (European ‘prepositions’) show many resemblances.
Two are almost the same: (Japanese)—‘ue’ / (Korean)—‘wie’
(‘on, above’), and —‘e’ / —‘e’ (‘towards’). Others
are similar—‘mae’ / ’ap[e]’ (‘in front of,’ assuming
a shift from ‘m’ to ‘p,’ which I’ll touch on later),
‘ato’ / ’dwie’ (‘behind’), ‘naka’ / ’ane’ (‘inside”)
and ‘yoko’ / ’yeop[e]’ (‘across from,’ ‘next to’).
There are also a number of shared
linguistic devices that are more difficult to explain,
such as verb endings that express surprise or doubt
and particles with no English equivalent. I give
only one concrete example here, the “reported speech
particle.” This is added to the end of statement
to suggest something like the bracketed (‘I hear
that’) in ‘(I hear that) he has been promoted.’
In Japanese, this particle is ‘to,’ and in Korean
it is ‘rago;’ for some reason both seem related
to the words for ‘along with’ in both languages
(‘to’ in Japanese and ‘hago’ in Korean).
These then are the main syntactical
similarities that strike me after ten years of translating
Japanese and three years of on-and-off private study
of Korean. I could lengthen the list, but I think
I’ve said enough to suggest that there must be some
sort of relationship between these two languages.
For reasons I have never fully understood, syntactical
resemblances are not considered significant by many
linguists. My own impression, of course, is that
in this case they are significant. This is much
more than the broad resemblance of grammar between
Mandarin and either Korean or Japanese. In many,
perhaps most, areas of syntax, Japanese and Korean
mirror each other in a way that otherwise only occurs
with close genetic affiliates; the shared use of
the unusual topic/subject marker system alone strongly
suggests affiliation. (By the way, it is a myth
that Chinese is “closer” to English than it is to
Japanese or Korean; there is only one significant
grammatical similarity with English, albeit a very
important one for translators: word order).
Where linguists seek truth is words.
So what about the native lexicons of Japanese and
Korean? Before plunging into this, a few qualifications.
Firstly, we must ignore the huge stock of Chinese
loan words shared by both (though it is interesting
and relevant to compare the phonetic treatment of
Chinese words in both tongues). Secondly, neither
Japanese or Korean has what westerners understand
as an established etymology for native words—if
they did, I wouldn’t be writing this. So there is
no easy way of referring back to ‘proto-languages’,
or of drawing family-wide comparisons as you can
with, say, Romance or Turkic languages. Thirdly,
Japanese and Korean are written phonetically in
different scripts that represent somewhat different
sounds, a source of distortion that I worsen by
turning both into Roman script. Which leads to point
four: although Japanese is simple to romanize and
sounds much as the letters suggest, Korean is not
and does not. Roman script cannot easily accommodate
Korean quirks of aspiration and voicing (listen
to the difference in English between Clay’s bout,
Clay’s pout and clay spout to get an idea of the
distinctions), so that ‘g’ ‘b’ ‘j’ and ‘d’ are often
more like ‘k’ ‘p’ ‘ch’ and ‘t’. Also, some vowels
in the latest official Korean romanization are phonetically
misleading, especially the very common ‘eo’ and
‘eu’, which are not ‘ee-oh’ and ‘ee-ooh’ but simply
variants of ‘o’ and ‘u.’ (In fact, romanizing Korean
generally is a trail of banana skins and I have
probably slipped up a few times). All of these factors
blur comparisons of individual words when written
in Roman script.
I said at the top that Japanese
and Korean have very different native vocabularies,
by which I meant there are few cognates. In fact,
it is all too easy to find candidate cognates. For
example, looking at column two on page 46 of the
Periplus Pocket Korean Dictionary, I notice
that ‘tteonada,’ depart, looks a bit like ‘deru,’
‘leave,’ in Japanese, when you compare the stems
which are ‘tteona’— and ‘de’—. A few entries down
I see ‘tteoreotteurida,’ ‘drop,’ which reminds me
of ‘taoru,’ ‘to fall’ in Japanese. And what about
‘tteoreojida,’ ‘finished, used up’—doesn’t that
resemble ‘tariru,’ ‘be enough’ in Japanese? Moving
down the column, there is ‘ttulta,’ ‘pierce,’ which
calls to mind ‘tsuranuku,’ ‘pierce, go through.’
More speculatively, I see ‘tusu,’ ‘pitcher,’ and
think of ‘taru,’ Japanese for ‘barrel.’ Reviewing,
I spot ‘ttatteuthada,’ to be warm; the stem, ‘ttatteut,’
closely echoes the Japanese word for warm, ‘atatakai.’
And so on. You can amuse yourself for hours in this
way, confident that at least a few of your matches
probably are hits (I’m particularly attracted by
‘ttatteuthada’ / ‘atatakai’ for some reason). Problem
is, there is just no way of knowing.
Nonetheless, certain putative cognate
pairs have won a degree of acceptance over the years,
presumably because they are mostly nature and body
words, the “test beds” favoured by European comparative
philologists. Some examples are (Korean followed
by Japanese): ‘mul’ and ‘mizu’ (‘water’), ‘mom’
and ‘mi’ (‘body’), ‘seom’ and ‘shima’ (‘island’),
‘iri’ and ‘inu’ (‘wolf’ and ‘dog’), ‘gom’ and ‘kuma’
(‘bear’), ‘ip’ (‘mouth’) and ‘iu’ (‘say’), ‘geot’
and ‘koto’ (thing, and also a grammatical particle
in both languages), and ‘nat’ and ‘nata’ (sickle,
blade).
The usual objection to putative
cognates is that they could be borrowings. In the
case of the animal and farming words above, this
is quite possible, as Korean technologies influenced
Japan round about the fifth century. But for words
as basic as ‘thing’ and ‘water,’ it seems less likely.
Either way, the main argument against borrowings
is whether systematic sound correspondences exist,
across a range of words. How do Japanese and Korean
fare in this respect?
Again, the overall picture is suggestive,
but the leads are fragmentary. There is some evidence
for at least one sound shift, involving Korean initial
‘p/b’ and Japanese ‘h’ (a shift found within Japanese
too). It is seen in pairs such as ‘bul’ and ‘hi’
(‘fire’), ‘baem’ and ‘hebi’ (‘snake’) ‘byeol’ and
‘hoshi’ (‘star’), ‘byeo,’ and ‘ho’ (‘rice ear’),
‘bom’ and ‘haru’ (‘spring’) and ‘bari’ and ‘hae’
(‘the fly’). ‘M’ and ‘p/b’ also show a good deal
of interchangeability between and within Japanese
and Korean (eg. in Japanese the character ‘bun,’
learning, can be read ‘mon’). There is also the
sequence ‘sul,’ ‘sol,’ ‘dal,’ ‘gul’ versus Japanese
‘sake,’ ‘sugi,’ ‘tsuki,’ ‘kaki’ (‘alcohol,’ ‘pine,’
‘moon/month’ and ‘oyster’); also, perhaps, —‘dul’
and —‘tachi,’ the plural markers. But there is also
this set: ‘nal,’ ‘dol,’ ‘seoli’ versus ‘nama,’ ‘tama,’
‘shimo’ (‘raw,’ ‘stone/ball’ and ‘frost’), and—an
odd one, this—‘dari,’ ‘dari,’ ‘darri-‘ versus ‘hashi,’
‘ashi,’ ‘hashi’- (‘bridge,’ ‘foot’ and ‘run’). Interesting
pairs are ‘ttae,’ ‘dae’ versus ‘toki,’ ‘take’ (‘time,’
‘bamboo’); ‘gureum,’ ‘ssireum’ versus ‘kumo,’ ‘sumo’
(‘cloud,’ ‘wrestling’); ‘chupda,’ ‘jopda,’ versus
‘samui,’ ‘semai’ (‘cold,’ ‘narrow’) as well as ‘ap’
and ‘mae’ (‘in front of’); and ‘eonje,’ ‘meonjeo’
versus ‘itsu,’ ‘mazu’ (‘when?’ ‘first’). Finally,
compare ‘eodi,’ ‘eotteo-’ and ‘eoneu’ with ‘doko,’
‘dou’ and ‘dono’ (‘where,’ ‘how’ and ‘which’).
So much for the comparative cherry-picking.
Yet it bears repeating that, despite the above,
the majority of words in Japanese and Korean look
and sound very different (even the shared Chinese
words often sound different, mainly because Japanese
has lopped off all those –ng endings). So how do
we reconcile the similarity of grammar with the
divergent lexicons?
I can’t offer any new theories,
but would make a few points. First, if Japanese
and Korean are related—and that is my belief—they
separated at a very early date, and are the only
two significant survivors of whatever branch of
whatever language family they belonged to. This
important point bears repeating: the absence of
other family members makes it impossible to confirm
cognates and sound shifts by cross-referencing.
If Indo-European did not exist, I suspect it would
be quite difficult to conclusively link English
with, say, Albanian, or even its traditional neighbour
Welsh, although all are now known to be IE tongues.
If asked to assess the relationship
of Japanese and Korean in Indo-European terms, I
would perhaps cite English and Russian as a rough
parallel. They must have parted ways at least two
thousand years ago. In the absence of solid historical
documentation, I doubt that “proto-Koreans” invaded
Japan (or vice versa) and imposed their language
as the Romans did in Gaul; more likely they were
two branches of one people who settled eons ago
on opposite sides of a sea and grew apart—a bit
like Finns and Hungarians, perhaps. That’s little
more than gut-feeling, though.
The other point I want to look at
is the role of East Asian writing systems, particularly
in the first millennium. In western European countries,
the use of a single phonetic script must have helped
stabilize pronunciation and moderated phonetic divergence
among languages more or less since the Romans faded
away. Nothing like this happened in East Asia, for
the main script was for centuries Chinese. Chinese
characters are semantic symbols, and exert little
influence on pronunciation, so that even many of
the ‘dialects’ of Chinese have evolved into mutually
unintelligible languages. In these unusual circumstances—most
of the world’s other major scripts have long been
phonetic—it is possible to see one reason why Japanese
and Korean words, lacking the binding force of a
common phonetic script, might have drifted far apart
over time.
Unfortunately this idea cannot be
tested as we know virtually nothing of early spoken
Japanese and Korean. This is of course another byproduct
of use of Chinese. For centuries, Japanese and Koreans
wrote in Chinese, or contrived to make Chinese characters
express their languages phonetically and carry their
grammar, an insanely complex business that must
have barred all but a tiny elite from anything approaching
literacy. Scholars have sweated blood trying to
figure out Japanese and Korean phonetic and grammatical
rules based on the way characters were used, but
to little avail. All we can really do is speculate.
So here is one last speculation.
For both the Japanese and Koreans, one of the consequences
of adoption of Chinese writing was that they learnt
to think of language in terms of syllables, not
letters (a Chinese character cannot be reduced to
its constituent ‘letters’). So when the Japanese
came to inventing hiragana, the Japanese phonetic
writing system, they duly used syllables—usually
a consonant followed by a vowel (‘to-yo-ta,’ ‘ya-ma-ha,’
‘mi-tsu-bi-shi’). In other words, the Japanese writing
system forces words into a fixed set of syllables,
each of which must finish on a vowel (or an ‘n’).
It seems to be the consensus that Japanese has in
fact always been a syllabic language, with syllables
always ending on a vowel. But is it possible that
the Chinese-derived syllabic straitjacket has flattened
what was once a richer and more complex phonetic
system?
Korean faced the same problem as
Japanese, but found a different solution. Hangeul,
the native phonetic writing system, were invented
in the 1400s (an extraordinarily late date when
you think about it) and are both a syllabic and
alphabetic writing system. Hangeul characters
are structured in the same way as Chinese characters—single
squarish units written from top to bottom, left
to right. But hangeul are not ideogrammes, but little
phonetic packages containing their constituent ‘letters’
bundled up inside them—imagine ‘cat’ with the ‘ca’
written above the ‘t’. It is possible that, because
of this quality, hangeul were able to preserve sounds
in Korean that have been lost in Japanese. It is
certainly striking how much richer phonetically
Korean is today than Japanese.
The interesting thing is, the core
sounds of Japanese or Korean are similar, as anybody
who has heard Japanese or Koreans speak English
can probably testify—their accents can be hard to
distinguish. Neither have a ‘European’ f or v, or
a ‘European (rolled etc.)’ r sound (both have a
sort of combined r and l sound—the one that gives
rise to all the flied lice jokes), or any true consonant
clusters. They both also have ‘tensed’ doubled consonants
(distinctive but hard to explain), such as in the
shared –‘tta’ ending mentioned above. Words have
“level” stress in both, and their intonation, in
particular the way sentences are pronounced phrase
by phrase, is also similar. As with syntax, it looks
as though phonetically too both languages worked
from same tool kit.
I said at the beginning that the
classification of Japanese and Korean is the biggest
remaining puzzle in modern philology. In fact, I
should have written ‘ought to be’, as the big questions
(unlike the minutiae) have received little informed
attention really. Outside the region, I suppose
this is mainly due to eurocentricism and the sheer
inaccessibility of Asian languages without years
of study. Within the region, the major obstacles
are cultural. Neither the Japanese or the Koreans
are comfortable with the idea of a genetic link
between their languages, and what it would imply,
because both peoples like to think of themselves
as “unique”. It doesn’t help either that they don’t
like each other very much. So, as far as I can make
out, few people anywhere are seriously researching
the genetic affiliation of their languages.
I have tried to be as comprehensive
and accurate as possible in this short essay, but
its purpose is not really to educate. There isn’t
much new or original here. I just want to publicise
the issues and get others interested. So, if you
have deeper or supplementary knowledge, please correct
my mistakes, or contribute comment, at aufwindian@yahoo.co.uk. I’m
particularly interested in information on Mongolian
and other North Asian languages.
