About the Korean Language

There was as huge debate over if Korean is or not an isolate language. Butโ€ฆ Korean has a strange mixture of Altaic elements with Sino-Tibetan elements. As you know, Altaic languages are, for example, Turkish, Azeri, Turkmen, Kazakh, Uzbek, Kirgiz, Mongol, Manchu and Tungus among others. They have as features agglutination and vowel harmony.
By the other way, Sino-Tibetan languages are made with particles, each one is a true stem (a true lexema), and the order of its components and its prosody and tone are the elements which determine the meaning of its sentences.
Well, Korean has elements of both. It has partial vowel harmony, it has partial tonal harmony, it has agglutination and it has isolation of particles. All of this. Even though: the alphabet designed by King Se-Jong in 1443 reflexes brillitantly how to deal with both issues: a 24-letter phonemic alphabet who is able to stack into syllables, like radicals in Chinese characters.

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I donโ€™t believe that Korean is an isolate. The Japanese and Korean grammar are so similar. I think itโ€™s because of political reasons that they say that these two languages arenโ€™t related. But I havenโ€™t researched this topic. Itโ€™s just my experience as learner of these two languages.

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Some sentences in Korean

ยป https://tatoeba.org/eng/sentences/search?query=&from=kor&to=und

Hi there! Iโ€™ve been studying Kazakh recently and Iโ€™ve noticed many similarities with Korean - word order, case markers/postpositions (ํ•™๊ต์—/ะผะตะบั‚ะตะฟะบะต), evidentials (๋‚˜๊ฐ”๋Œ€/ะบะตั‚ั–ะฟั‚ั–), a similar way of forming relative clauses (์ œ๊ฐ€ ์ƒ€๋˜ ์ปดํ“จํ„ฐ/ะผะตะฝ ัะฐั‚ั‹ะฟ ะฐะปา“ะฐะฝ ะบะพะผะฟัŒัŽั‚ะตั€) and others. I find these similarities interesting, but itโ€™s hard to say whether they are a result of contact or a linguistic ancestor.

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@Miriam
Korean and Japanese donโ€™t share the vocabulary (except Chinese-related words), which is one of the main reasons why their relationship is not proved yet. Itโ€™s not a political reason.

@Ewan
"์ œ๊ฐ€ ์‚ฐ ์ปดํ“จํ„ฐ"๋Š” ์นด์žํ์–ด๋กœ ์–ด๋–ป๊ฒŒ ํ•ด์š”?

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Well, Ewan, in that sense Kazakh is a Turkic language. But I wonder if Korean has Altaic elements itself without being necessarily an Altaic language.

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'์ƒ€๋˜โ€™๊ณผ โ€˜์‚ฐโ€™ ์‚ฌ์ด์— ํฐ ์ฐจ์ด๊ฐ€ ์žˆ์„๊นŒ์š”?

์•„๋ฌดํŠผ ์ œ ์•Œ๊ธฐ๋กœ๋Š” โ€˜์ œ๊ฐ€ ์‚ฐ ์ปดํ“จํ„ฐโ€™ = โ€˜ะผะตะฝ ัะฐั‚ั‹ะฟ ะฐะปา“ะฐะฝ ะบะพะผะฟัŒัŽั‚ะตั€โ€™.
ะœะตะฝ = ์ œ๊ฐ€ (์ฃผ์–ด)
ัะฐั‚ั‹ะฟ ะฐะปัƒ = ์‚ฌ๋‹ค (-า“ะฐะฝ ์ด๋ผ๋Š” ์–ด๋ฏธ๋Š” ๊ณผ๊ฑฐํ˜•์ด๊ณ  ๊ด€๊ณ„์‚ฌ์ ˆ์„ ๋งŒ๋“ค ์ˆ˜ ์žˆ์Šต๋‹ˆ๋‹ค)
ะšะพะผะฟัŒัŽั‚ะตั€ = ์ปดํ“จํ„ฐ

์ €๋Š” ์•„์ง ์นด์žํ์–ด ์ดˆ๋ณด์ž๋ผ์„œ ํ‹€๋ฆด ์ˆ˜๋„ ์žˆ์–ด์š”.

@Ewan
์˜๋ฏธ ์ฐจ์ด๊ฐ€ ์•„๋‹ˆ๊ณ  ๊ทธ๋ƒฅ "-ใ„ด"๊ณผ ์–ดํ˜•์ด ๋น„์Šทํ•œ ๊ฒƒ๋„ ์นด์žํ์–ด์— ์žˆ๋Š”์ง€ ์ข€ ์•Œ๊ณ  ์‹ถ์—ˆ์–ด์š”. ๋Œ€๋‹ตํ•ด ์ฃผ์…”์„œ ๊ณ ๋ง™์Šต๋‹ˆ๋‹ค ^^

Yeah, Iโ€™ve discussed how I think the languages are obviously related with a language partner who was Japanese with Korean heritage. She was very polite in listening but had nothing to say on the topic at all and seemed to think me very brave or foolish to do so. At least that was my impression.

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Yeah many of the Koreans I have met baulk at the idea that Korean is related to Japanese, although to be honest Iโ€™ve met many who think itโ€™s likely too. I think they must share an ancestor somewhere, even if the genetic links are hard to prove. Two languages right next to each other that share so many structural similarities seems like perfect candidates for related languages to me

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๊ทธ๊ฑด ๊ทธ๋ƒฅ ์–ธ์–ดํ•™์ ์œผ๋กœ ์•„์ง ์ฆ๋ช…๋˜์ง€ ์•Š์€ ๋ฟ์ด๊ณ  ์ ˆ๋Œ€ ๊ด€๊ณ„๊ฐ€ ์—†๋Š” ๊ฑด ์•„๋‹Œ ๊ฒƒ ๊ฐ™์•„์š”. ์ €๋Š” ๋ช…ํ™•ํ•œ ์ฆ๊ฑฐ๊ฐ€ ์—†์œผ๋ฉด ๊ธ์ •๋„ ๋ถ€์ •๋„ ํ•˜๊ณ  ์‹ถ์ง€ ์•Š์€๋ฐ ์–ธ์  ๊ฐ€ ๊ด€๊ณ„๊ฐ€ ์ •์‹์œผ๋กœ ์ฆ๋ช…๋˜๋ฉด ์žฌ๋ฏธ์žˆ๊ฒ ๋„ค์š”.

์ €๋„ ๊ทธ๋ ‡๊ฒŒ ์ƒ๊ฐํ•ด์š”. ๊ด€๊ณ„๊ฐ€ ์žˆ๋‹ค๋ฉด ํฅ๋ฏธ๋กœ์šด๋ฐ ์ €๋Š” ์ ˆ๋Œ€์ ์ธ ๊ฒฐ์ •์„ ๋‚ด๋ฆด ์ž๊ฒฉ์ด ์—†๋Š” ๊ฒƒ ๊ฐ™์•„์š”. ๊ทธ๋ƒฅ ์ œ๊ฐ€ ์•Œ๊ณ  ์žˆ๋Š” ๋ฐ”๋กœ๋Š” ๊ด€๊ณ„๊ฐ€ ์žˆ๋Š” ๋ชจ์–‘์ด์˜ˆ์š”.