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Why didn’t Korean and Japanese become tonal? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| Leurre Bilingual Pentaglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5234 days ago 219 posts - 372 votes  Speaks: French*, English*, Korean, Haitian Creole, SpanishC2 Studies: Japanese | Message 25 of 38 25 January 2011 at 2:10am | IP Logged | ||
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People, we're forgetting that Middle Japanese and Korean actually were tonal languages,
with 3 tones (for Korean at least). I would think that a more interesting question would be to ask why they abandoned their tones. Edited by Leurre on 25 January 2011 at 2:10am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| akprocks Senior Member United States Joined 5095 days ago 178 posts - 258 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German | Message 26 of 38 25 January 2011 at 2:41am | IP Logged | ||
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Simple answer: a tonal Japanese language would be fairly close to impossible to learn
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| OneEye Diglot Senior Member Japan Joined 6659 days ago 518 posts - 784 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, Taiwanese, German, French | Message 27 of 38 25 January 2011 at 2:57am | IP Logged | ||
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Leurre, do you have a source? I'd be interested to read up on it a bit and I have some extra time in the
library tomorrow. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Leurre Bilingual Pentaglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5234 days ago 219 posts - 372 votes Speaks: French*, English*, Korean, Haitian Creole, SpanishC2 Studies: Japanese | Message 28 of 38 25 January 2011 at 3:07am | IP Logged | ||
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OneEye: not being incredibly interested in Middle Japanese and Middle Korean I have not
researched this much, but it came up in one of my readings last semester for school. The person who said it was Ho-min Sohn, a professor of Korean linguistics at the University of Hawaii For Korean at any rate, it actually seems to be the subject of some contention (reveals a quick google search by yours truly). If you read Korean or know someone who does http://www.gugeosa.or.kr/paper/07/0702. pdf can provide a little insight I think. Not as black and white as I thought I guess 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Leurre Bilingual Pentaglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5234 days ago 219 posts - 372 votes Speaks: French*, English*, Korean, Haitian Creole, SpanishC2 Studies: Japanese | Message 29 of 38 25 January 2011 at 3:20am | IP Logged | ||
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Oh right I forgot another thing, the reason, in Korean, that people more or less knew
this is that in the text explaining the creation of 한글 (訓民正音), King Sejong explained the function of the one and to little dots on the side of some characters, indicating whether the pitch was to be falling or rising, or... none at all, or something like that. Those dots have since disappeared from 한글 though 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| OneEye Diglot Senior Member Japan Joined 6659 days ago 518 posts - 784 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, Taiwanese, German, French | Message 30 of 38 25 January 2011 at 3:42am | IP Logged | ||
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Interesting, thanks! For the record, I found this while Googling (I wasn't where I could Google when I wrote my previous post):
http://books.google.com/books?id=NN-yIdLOkCoC&lpg=PA315&ots= qI27kV8Coq&dq=was%20middle%20korean%20ever%20tonal&pg=PA315# v=onepage&q&f=false I generally take S. Robert Ramsey as a reliable source, but that's for Chinese linguistics (his book, The Languages of China, is fantastic). I'll see what else I can dig up tomorrow. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5190 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 31 of 38 25 January 2011 at 5:01am | IP Logged | ||
Middle Japanese was not tonal, which is why we forgot about it. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Leurre Bilingual Pentaglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5234 days ago 219 posts - 372 votes Speaks: French*, English*, Korean, Haitian Creole, SpanishC2 Studies: Japanese | Message 32 of 38 25 January 2011 at 6:01am | IP Logged | ||
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I'm drawing on what I read, from the above professor.
If it's like you say Arekusu, then you did not 'forget' about it, since it would be impossible to forget something that did not exist in the first place ;) 1 person has voted this message useful |
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