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Grammatical superiority of Korean | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Lessons in Polyglottery |  | |
| sebngwa3 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6149 days ago 200 posts - 217 votes  Speaks: Korean*, English | Message 1 of 16 31 January 2009 at 7:46pm | IP Logged | ||
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Dear Professor,
This passage from Homer Hulbert suggests the grammatic superiority of Korean over Romance languages. The Passing of Korea By Homer Bezaleel Hulbert: ...Korean is an agglutinative, polysyllabic language whose development is marvellously complete and symmetrical. We find no such long lists of exceptions as those which entangle the student of the Indo-European languages. In Korean as in most of the Turanian languages the idea of gender is very imperfectly developed, which argues perhaps a lack of imagination. The ideas of person and number are largely left to the context for determination, but in the matter of logical sequence the Korean verb is carried to the extreme of development. The Korean's keen sense of social distinctions has given rise to a complete system of honorifics whose proper application is essential to a right use of the language. And yet numerous as these may be, their use is so regulated by unwritten law, and. there are so few exceptions that they are far easier to master than the personal terminations of Indo-European verbs. The grammatical superiority of Korean over many of the Western languages is that while, in the latter, differences of gender, number and person which would usually be perfectly clear from the context are carefully noted, in the Korean these are left to the speaker's and the hearer's perspicacity, and attention is concentrated upon a terse and luminous collocation of ideas, which is often secured in the West only by a tedious circumlocution. "The genius of the language has led the Korean to express every possible verbal relation by a separate modal form. The extent to which this has been carried may be shown only by illustration. Besides having simple forms to express the different tenses and modes, it also has forms to express all those more delicate verbal relations which in�English require a circumlocution or the free use of adverbs. For instance, the Korean has a special mode to express the idea of necessity, contingency, surprise, reproof, antithesis, conjunction, temporal sequence, logical sequence, interruption, duration, limit, acquiescence, expostulation, interrogation, promise, exhortation, imprecation, desire, doubt, hypothesis, satisfaction, propriety, concession, intention, decision, probability, possibility, prohibition, simultaneity, continuity, repetition, infrequency, hearsay, agency, contempt, ability. Each one of these ideas can be expressed in connection with any active verb by the simple addition of one or more inseparable suffixes. By far the greater number of these suffixes are monosyllabic. Is there any other language that surpasses or rivals the Korean language in expressing what Hulbert calls "delicate verbal relations"? Hulbert describes Gondi language as being similar to Korean in this respect: Hulbert compares Korean with the Gondi language: "And as an explanation of the contrast between the severe simplicity of the Tamil and the luxuriousness of the Gond verb he says "I conclude that we have here a proof, not of the superiority of the Gond mind over the Tamilian, but simply of the greater antiquity of Tamilian literary culture. The development of the conjugational system of Tamil seems to have been arrested at a very early period by the invention of writing, by which the verbal forms existing at the time were fossilised, whilst the uncultured Gonds, and their still ruder neighbors the Kols, went on age after age as before, compounding with their verbs auxiliary words of time and relation and fusing them into conjugational forms by rapid and careless pronunciation, without allowing any record of the various steps to survive." We quote thus at length because the Korean verb has done just what Caldwell surmises the Gond verb did and probably for the same reason. There is no evidence to show that the Korean language was crystalised into any sort of literary form until at least six centuries after the beginning of our era and even then it was done in such a peculiar way that it would scarcely form a bar to the process of phonetic decay or of declensional or conjugational variation. The Korean verb has a great variety of tenses and of modes. The following ideas are clearly expressed in Korean by simply using agglutinative suffixes with the verb stems. How far this departs from the Tamil simplicity and conforms to the diversity of the Gond will be seen at a glance We can express the ideas of affirmation, negation, doubt, perplexity, hypothesis, desire, expostulation, exhortation, condition, command, entreaty, concession, promise, duration, purpose, causation, iteration, product, limit, and a number of others of lesser importance. In fact the Korean verb represents perhaps the limit to which language has gone in expressing verbal relationships by the use of agglutinative suffixes. In Korea written language differs widely from the vernacular. There are may endings in each that are not to be found in the other, and so the reduction of Korean to writing and the evolution of a literature put no stop to the mutiplication of conjugational differentice. The fact that the Gond dialect of the Dravidian and the Korean developed so broadly under similar conditions of illiteracy shows that there was some native similarity in the two. The genius of the two was the same. "If it is true that the Korean came, by however devious a way, from the Indian branch of the Turanian language, the above facts show that the separation must have been at a very early date, even as we would have expected. Our first notice of the southern settlers on the coast of Korea date from about 200 B. C. and what we can discover of them would indicate that their arrival there was at that time comparatively recent. We might possibly say that in all probability this southern stock entered Korea no earlier than the fifth or sixth century before Christ. If we place the Aryan invasion of India at approximately 2,000 B. C. there would be no chronological difficulty in the way of the supposition that these southern Koreans formed the last distant wave of the dispersion of the ancient Turanian inhabitants of India which followed that invasion. Editing to add the rest of the article: To illustrate the delicate shades of thought that can be expressed by the use of a suffix let us take the English expression, "I was going along the road, when suddenly —" This, without anything more, implies that the act of going was suddenly interrupted by some unforeseen circumstance. All this would be expressed in Korean by the three words naga kile kataga (내가 길에 가다가). The first means " I," the second means " along the road," and the third means "was going, when suddenly —" The stem of the verb is ka, and the ending, taga, indicates the interruption of the action. And what is more to the point, this ending has absolutely no other use. It is reserved solely for the expression of this shade of thought. Again, on the same stem we have the word kalka (갈까), in which the ending ka gives all the meaning that we connote in the expression, " I wonder whether he will really go or not." If, in answer to the question whether you are going or not you say simply kana (가나), it means, "What in the world would I be going for? Absurd! " ... No people have followed more implicitly nature's law in the matter of euphony. The remarkable law of the convertibility of surds and sonants has been worked out to its ultimate results in this language. The nice adjustment of the organs of speech, whereby conflicting sounds are so modified as to blend harmoniously, is one of the unconscious Korean arts. The euphonic tendency has not broken down the languages, as is sometimes the case. Prof. Max Müller speaks of a law of phonetic decay, but in Korea it would be better called the law of phonetic adjustment. Korean is characterised by a large number of mimetic words. As their colours are drawn directly from nature, so their words are often merely phonetic descriptions. The Korean language is eminently adapted for public speaking. It is a sonorous, vocal language. They have grasped the idea that the vowel is the basis of all human speech. The sibilant element is far less conspicuous than in Japanese, and one needs only to hear a public speech in Japanese and one in Korean to discover the great advantage which the latter enjoys. There is nothing in Korean speech that makes it less adapted to oratory than English or any other Western tongue. In common with the language of Cicero or Demosthenes, Korean is composed of periodic sentences, each one reaching its climax in the verb which is usually the final word, and there are no weakening addenda which so often make the English sentence an anticlimax. In this respect the Korean surpasses English as a medium of public speaking." The Passing of Korea (1909) pg. 302-304 Edited by sebngwa3 on 11 February 2010 at 8:41pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Hollow Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United States luelinks.netRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6524 days ago 179 posts - 186 votes Speaks: French*, English*, SpanishB2 Studies: Korean | Message 2 of 16 31 January 2009 at 10:22pm | IP Logged | ||
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I suppose as long as Mr. Arguelles is commenting on the passage, I was wondering if he could address the very concept of the superiority of a language. Here I was unaware that one language having more verb forms made it an inherently better language
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| sebngwa3 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6149 days ago 200 posts - 217 votes Speaks: Korean*, English | Message 3 of 16 31 January 2009 at 11:38pm | IP Logged | ||
It's better in that it avoids tedious circumlocution: "attention is concentrated upon a terse and luminous collocation of ideas, which is often secured in the West only by a tedious circumlocution." 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Hollow Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United States luelinks.netRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6524 days ago 179 posts - 186 votes Speaks: French*, English*, SpanishB2 Studies: Korean | Message 4 of 16 01 February 2009 at 12:13am | IP Logged | ||
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I don't understand how that makes it better, thus my question, not to you but to the professor.
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| Budz Octoglot Senior Member Australia languagepump.com Joined 6358 days ago 118 posts - 171 votes Speaks: German*, English, Russian, Esperanto, Ukrainian, Mandarin, Cantonese, French Studies: Italian, Spanish, Korean, Portuguese, Bulgarian, Persian, Hungarian, Kazakh, Swahili, Vietnamese, Polish | Message 5 of 16 01 February 2009 at 9:32am | IP Logged | ||
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Do you really think if the professor says the language is superior then that makes it so? This is rather silly and I hope the professor removes the thread.
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| Recht Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5786 days ago 241 posts - 270 votes Speaks: English*, GermanB1 | Message 6 of 16 01 February 2009 at 11:55am | IP Logged | ||
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Why are other posters so apprehensive to the idea of a superior language? There are superior things and inferior things in almost any aspect of life, so why do we immediately write off the idea that there could be one can be better than others, based on given parameters?
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| Kugel Senior Member United States Joined 6523 days ago 497 posts - 555 votes Speaks: English* | Message 7 of 16 01 February 2009 at 2:18pm | IP Logged | ||
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A word is the linguistic expression for a term, and the term states objectively what is known subjectively in a concept. And the concept is the person's subjective knowledge of the meaning of the term.
Thus terms can't be superior or inferior, but only clear and unclear. A word, which is the physical thing that mediates between a term and a concept, in a foreign language can be either clear or unclear, depending on the term. Possibly, one could argue that languages with lots of ambiguity or unclear cases could be inferior. I personally think relying on noun endings and knowing the gender leads to unnecessary difficulty. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Mashagu Bilingual Triglot Newbie Germany Joined 5780 days ago 18 posts - 20 votes Speaks: English*, Russian*, German Studies: Japanese | Message 8 of 16 01 February 2009 at 2:45pm | IP Logged | ||
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Growing up bilingual in English and Russian, I would agree regarding "unnecessary difficulty". English grammar being on the whole a lot easier than Russian, whereby the same nouns and verbs can be expressed on a much simpler level. I guess English developed at a rather rapid pace and thus abolished (perhaps through reason and logic) the use of gender and extensive verb conjugation as one can indeed express oneself perfectly without their use. However, I am happy variations exist between languages, even on the level of complexity. Knowing Russian has definitely helped me with my German (in terms of concepts such as cases, gender etc). Also, I would like to mention writing systems...with regard to the use of ideograms or characters in China and Japan. Although beautiful, the writing system is unnecessarily complex, requiring years of study just to read a book (which I find frustrating often). Korean on the other hand uses a wonderful system called Hangul, which is both very simple and retains a unique beauty (thank you King Sejong!). 1 person has voted this message useful |
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