Languages & Cultures of East Asia

Trad 101, Sections 18-19-20-21 Fall 2000

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Lecture Outline, 8/30/00 - Overview of Japanese and Korean

Japanese and Korean

     family roots
     where they are spoken
     the number of speakers
     dialectal varieties
     neighbors
     writing
     words and grammar

1) Genetic relationship

Are Japanese and Korean related to Chinese?

Are Japanese and Korean related to each other?

Are Japanese and Korean part of a language family?

Altaic: Mongolian, Turkish, Japanese/Korea??????

Sino-Tibetan: Chinese, Tibeto-Karen

Indo-European: Germanic, Romance, Celtic, Indo-Iranian, Balto-Slavic

Germanic: English, German, Dutch

Afro-Asiatic: Hausa, Arabic

Finno-Ugric: Finnish, Hungarian

How do you support a genetic relationship?

Sound correspondences in basic vocabulary

Not established

But Japanese and Korean are very similar in grammar

2) Where are they spoken and how many speakers?

Korean – North Korea and South Korea
China, Japan, Russia, and U.S.

60 million

Japanese – Japan
Brazil and U.S. (Hawaii)

120 million

3) Dialects

Japanese – Ryuukyuuan and the mainland dialects (fairly uniform)
Korean – fairly uniform

Social dialects
hierarchy, politeness, gender…….

4) Neighbors
     Ainu – close to extinction, no genetic relationship has been established
     Ryuukyuuan
     Manchu
     Chinese dialects (languages)

5) Writing
Borrowed Chinese characters
Developed their own

6) Words

lots of words are from (or based on) Chinese

     Japanese
                 Sino-Japanese words(60%)
                 Native words (30%)
                 Other loan words (10%)

     Korean
                 Sino-Korean words (55%)
                 Native words (40%)
                 Other loan words (5%)

     now borrowing from English
                 Japanese
                        sutoraiku
                        tesuto
                        sekuhara

Japanese syllable is normally CV

                 Korean
                        waiphu
                        milkhu
                        theyipul

Words are conjugated

Japanese

miru
mita
miro
mite
mireba
miruna
miyoo
mimashoo

see
saw
see (it)! – non-polite
see (it)! – polite
if (one) sees (it)
don't see (it)!
let's see (it) – non-polite
let's see (it) – polite

Korean (taken from Handbook for Teaching
Korean-American Students 1992:39)

chot'a
choatta
choeumyeon
choketta
choeushida

(it) is good
(it) was good
if (it) is good
(it) might be good
(s/he) is good - honorific

7) Grammar

Word order

Japanese
Taro ga Taro S	Jon o John O	mita saw V
'Taro saw John'
Jon o	Taro ga	mita

Particle

ga = subject marker o = object marker Korean (taken from Handbook for Teaching Korean-American Students 1992:41)
Koyangi ga Cat S	cwi reul mouse O	meogeotta ate V
'The cat ate the mouse'
cwi reul	koyangi ga	meogeotta
ga = subject marker reul = object marker