Korean language as a linguistic phenomenon.

“What is Korean language?”-the puzzlement of millions people around the globe is

currently directed towards this issue. No wonder, why: Korean wave (Hallyu; 할 류 )
entails worldwide awareness and consequently popularity of South Korean culture.
Great example of how effectively soft power can work. Interest to Korean language has
deservedly increased and it is needed to be observed: Korean language is actually worth
attention in case it is unbelievably special among hundreds of other languages. In this
work we will follow the way of growth and development of Korean language as of
extraordinary linguistic creature and see what main criteria and components did
contribute language’s special and unusual structure.
The roots of Korean language are also unclear and are the subject of endless debates.
No surprise. The more this issue is discussed the more theories are born to explain the
origin of Korean language. Without referring to the roots the overview will not be bright
and persuasive enough so it is a tool we use to help us clarify some aspects of the issue.
Variants of probable ancestors of Korean and how they differ from each other are
amazingly impressive. Some linguists think that Korean language is a part of Altaic
family alongside to Turkic, Mongolic, Japonic and Tungusic languages. Here is a pretty
brief map to just have an image of what Altaic family supposedly is.

Although it is the most prominent link, Altaic family nowadays is no more widely
accepted-in other words there is an obvious lack of proves which prevent us from
choosing this version as the only truth to believe. Other scientists would doubt this
opinion saying that Korean language shares ancient roots with the Dravidian languages.
There is an enduring yet unbelievable link between Korean and Tamil (dialect spoken in
India) that is obvious in grammar constructions and even vocabulary. This is a fact that
there are around 4,000 words in Korean and Tamil that has similar meaning. Both
languages are agglutinative, follow the subject-object-verb order, have the same syntax
features etc. However, such similarities can be really called a coincidence in case Tamil
people migrated to the Korean peninsula around the first century AD. But those facts are
unlikely able to give us a right to consider Korean as a Dravidian language.
Also, Korean is associated to Austronesian languages. Another map has some concise
clarifications connected to this theory.

Since there are no particular definitive proves for any of these affiliations, Korean
language is commonly classified as a language isolate. So, it means that Korean
exclusively belongs to Koreanic language family. Isn’t it already amazing that this
language is a sole member of the entire family, that it has taken its own private place in
the system of language families without sharing this precious space? Of course, the
main reason for such scientific decision is lack of evidence, to be more exact-
catastrophic lack of samples of older Korean writing. The oldest ones that people are
aware of go back in time not more than 1000 years. Comparing to Arabic with writing
system established in 328 AD Korean is a pure “teenager”. Old Chinese (1250 BC) is a
wise granddad. But the practical lack of material is not the only obstacle to reach the
understanding. Until the 1443 Korean people were using Chinese characters to represent
Korean words and sounds. The main mechanism is similar to romanization: people were
using linguistic units of other language to write words of their own one. No doubt,
Chinese characters could not adequately express Korean speech. Sometimes it was even
hard to decipher entire scripts. Korean language as well as others went through
historical laboratory of evolution from first century CE that was marked as a period of
three kingdoms (Geoguryeo, Bekje and Silla) until present days. At this point the
statement that Korean is an isolated language is not truly reliable. We can’t speak about
any phenomenon developing independently from single cultural source. It emerged from
languages of various groups of people who populated the territory of Korean peninsula.
The complication of understanding and associating Korean to any language family
mainly consists of specific impacts of other languages that are totally different. If
elements of influencing languages usually immerse into another languages turning into
new words, forcing out old ones, changing grammatical issues and phonetic norms,
Korean absorbed it individually.
Throughout its history Korea was influenced by China due to trade, alliances and wars.
Its pressure grew lower less than a century ago. Cultural and national influence couldn’t
sidestep the language. As it was briefly said earlier, Korean was written with Chinese
characters and it was used pretty well until 15th century although it seemed to never
actually work. Korean even featured 4 tones as its Chinese influencer. It is well-known
that Chinese tone system as a fundamental phonetic feature still exists (and will never
disappear because some traditions are too strong to die) but modern Korean (due to
evolution processes) naturally canceled these tone distinctions. However, there are
numerous dialects that still follow this system. The prove that Korean used to be tonal
as well as Chinese is that the first version of Hangul (Korean writing system that we
will discuss few words later) had dotes that were indicating tones. Here you can see it.

This phenomenon of Chinese language being interestingly but not fully immersed into
Korean language is already a linguistic miracle in some way. Korea historically has
never spoken Chinese although its characters were used in writing and the tension itself
was huge. It survived through absence of its own writing system for 10 centuries but
then something more marvelous happened.
Of course, we can’t avoid discussing the creation of Hangul ( 한 글 )-splendid writing
system, perhaps one of the most scientific to perform in all language families. A strong
prove to insist this is that Hangul contributed to one of the highest literacy rates (97% in
South Korea and 100% in North Korea) in the world. No wonder, why. “Differentiated
from English and French, Korean is a unique language that can be learned easily. One
day is enough to master reading in Korean. Hangul is a very scientific and convenient
alphabet system for communication”,-the Nobel Prize winner for literature Jean-Marie
Gustave Le Clezio once said and in simple words the core of Hangul significant
advantage was expressed.
15th century. Another era, another king. But something was totally different. King
Sejong the Great of the Joseon Dynasty had rough but wise and emphasizing
personality. He concentrated his attention on economic development of the country and
relations with China but he couldn’t ignore language crisis that became too sharp at that
moment. “Being of foreign origin, Chinese characters are incapable of capturing
uniquely Korean meanings. Therefore, many common people have no way to express
their thoughts and feelings. Out of my sympathy for their difficulties, I have created a
set of 28 letters. The letters are easy to learn, and it is my fervent hope that they improve
the quality of life of people”,-this quotation (translated in the modern way for easier
understanding) belongs to King Sejong. His intention to change destiny of the country
became major achievement and a turning point in further course of historical events.
Stubbornly following the goal of increasing literacy among the poor and also trying to
get rid of Chinese pressure King Sejong crafted new alphabet-6 centuries ago he could
never imagine that his invention will remain the most scientific alphabet ever devised.
So, basically the King with the help of group of linguists created a completely new
system of characters that were never seen before, that didn’t have previous images. We
have pretty similar example in Russian history when Peter the Great improved the
alphabet. The work of King Sejong was incredibly large and unbelievable. Hangul was
revealed in 1443, but became an appropriate and well-known system in 1446 when King
Sejong published Hunmunjeongeum ( 훈 민 정 음 : lit. The Proper Sounds for the
instruction of the people)-a script that was describing origin and main purposes of
Hangul, giving brief and simple examples, observing how important it is for vast
majority of Korean population to be literate and how simple Hangul designed for even
non-educated people to learn. This is how it looked like (we can see Chinese characters
mixed with Hangul for better understanding of the mechanism of newborn system; then
there were descriptions of correct pronunciation of all the letters):
“The bright can learn the Hangul in a single morning, and the non-bright can do so in
ten days”,-this is the main idea of this script. Speaking about my personal experience, I
learned how to read and write in Korean within two hours and afterwards my
puzzlement was a logical consequence of it: is this actually everything I need to know?
However, when linguistic freshman was officially represented to people, elites (mostly
Confucian scholars who educated in Chinese) opposed its introduction thinking that it is
a straight disrespect of traditions that were built by wise ancestors. But their
disagreement could never stop Hangul growing since it is even impossible to imagine
how this fantastic system wouldn’t become widespread. Nevertheless, it took some time
for Hangul to replace Chinese. For a long period of time Korea was using mixed script
consisted of Chinese characters (their Korean name is Hanja ( 한 자 ) mostly used for
content words and Hangul for functional words. Here is an example:

This is actually a Bible written in Korean mixed script. You can clearly notice Chinese
characters among harmonized syllables of Hangul-without even knowing both
languages visually you can recognize the difference. Does it look familiar?
Modern writing system of Japanese language works exactly like this using the base of
mixed script (kanji-Chinese characters, hiragana and katakana). They are also visually
differ from each other.
Back at Hangul, it went through some hard times when it was used mostly by women
and non-educated elders and was opposed not only by elites but even by kings. But what
is the secret of it to survive? As we know, time is rough and merciless so how Hangul
made it to remain almost the same 6 centuries later? Referring to the title of this article-
it is a pure phenomenon, a real evidence of the phrase “the easier the better”, a perfectly
coordinated, independent and transparent system to understand.
So, Hangul includes basic set of consonants and vowels that combines together turning
into exact syllables. These are consonants.

The secret point of them to be easily remembered deals with simple associations: letters
literally mimics the shape of mouth during the pronunciation of the relevant sound.
Here is an illustration. Let’s analyse the first letter ᄀ with is matching sound [k]. It is
the sound produced by tongue lifting up to the velum; it turns into the obstacle on the
way of air from throat to mouth and that is how the [k] is made. ᄀᅠ literally represents
the shape of tongue at this exact moment. Next is ᄂᅠ[n]. We raise the tip of the tongue
to the upper teeth involving alveolus in pronunciation process and again Korean letter
turns into scheme drawing of phonetic and biological mechanism of speech. It turns out
that the rest of consonants are made with the same principle-all you need is your
imagination.

Korean vowels has not only practically simple form and meaning but besides a
philosophical point that retrospectives briefly Asian perception of world. Vowels are
based on three main elements that the world consists of: horizontal line is Earth itself,
flat ground, associated to yin, short strokes previously were dots and symbolize Sun and
Sky with yang nature and vertical line represents Human who struggles on the way
between Heaven and Earth. Moreover, vowels are made to indicate whether the word is
dark or bright (based on the philosophy of Yin Yang). So they are bright and dark
vowels consequently.
You can see the distribution of vowels based on Yin Yang philosophy that contains
relations between men and women, human and nature, world and element. The simple
example of how incredible vowels follow along this principle. The word “ 어 머 니 ”
(“omoni”) means “mother”: using the scheme you can see that it starts with dark vowel.
Dark side belongs to Yin which represents woman spirit according to main philosophy
statements. “ 아 버 지 ” (“abeoji”) means father, starts with light sound that is Yang
vowel connected to man force and nature. Unbelievable, but still a fact.
However, perfect Korean alphabet (both syllabic and phonetic) faced the problem of
absence of [w] sound originally. It became necessary to create variety of possible
combinations with it so diphthongs joined Hangul system.
It is not random that they are called compound sounds. It looks like elementary school
math when you get complicated numbers by summing up the easier ones. [W] sound can
be made through the combination of [o], [u] or [a] sounds phonetically so no new letters
were needed to be invented. However, the philosophy order is too strict to be disrupted:
light horizontal vowels combines with exclusively light vertical vowels and vice versa.
Undoubtedly, nothing in the world is perfect and Hangul has its flaws as well , like, for
instance, complicated and completely extra phonetic assimilation that is caused
historically, but this system might be called one of the most close-to-perfection
approached ones. Its evolution is unstoppable and it becomes one of the strongest
proves for us to think that Korean language is linguistically phenomenal invention.
Anyway, it is the only writing system in the world that has its own official holiday (we
know that determination is a lead feature of Asian mentality and while people have not
more than 10 days of holidays for year in Korea they still celebrate the Hangul day-it
makes us think about how valuable it is in people’s minds and culture in general).
Another interesting specific of Korean language is speech level classification. In Korean
this system is much more fragile-it includes seven different levels of respect. In short
words, there are seven various set of grammatical endings for verbs that indicates the
formality of any situation more meticulously than we usually are used to do.
Although some levels are vanishing from everyday speech due to similarities between
some of them that excludes grammatically weaker ones, this is really important to be
aware of this system and use it properly in different situations. Otherwise, you may
provoke a conflict or be simply marked as uncultured, disrespectful person. This system
has both strong advantages and weaknesses: on the one hand, it supports incredible
ancient traditions, regulates relations in society making respect and veneration
significant criteria of communication. On the other hand, Asian hierarchy tradition is a
disease that young generation suffers from being burdened with discriminating
stereotypes, ageism etc. Anyway, time will never let something remain constant-in some
years we will see if young revolutionary people in Korea will be able to cancel this too
detailed system of levels or not. For us it appears as a beautiful example of Korean
language’s phenomenal capability and stunning continuity with traditions and history.
Korean language is able to take your curiosity faster than you expect once you meet this
language. Hangul as a unique writing system has withstood 6 centuries and proved that
it is made out of stone-it is too strong to be beaten by time. The fact that the King
himself worked on the creation of never seen before alphabet sounds like a fairy tale but
it is more truthful than we can even suppose. Unclear roots and unexpected influence of
Chinese language add the veil of secrecy to this language when you can’t agree with any
of theories of Korean origins. It is important also to pay attention to several points:
1) levels of speech;
2) huge differences between Korean interpretations of two Korea;
3) national holiday for writing system;
4) simple but unwonted comparing to roman languages grammar;
5) philosophical points piercing language through, deep symbolism;
6) loads of foreign words:
 Sino-vocabulary that came from China: Korean even has two numeral systems:
Sino-Korean which is used in most occasions and Pure Korean that is used to
speak about age and hours;
 huge amount of Japanese words that came from different historical periods;
 English words, most of them are terms but not only (for example, 주스 (juseu)
literally means “juice”),
 words from European languages ( 빵 (pang) means “bread” and supposedly it
came from Portuguese);
7) mixed script that was widely and continuously used.
This is not the full list of features confirming that Korean language as a system of
various linguistic categories strongly stands out from the line of not only other Asian
languages but from most of languages the story of establishment we are aware of.
Modern Korean is an extraordinary mix of everything that has ever happened to Korea
but it never forgets how it all began. It obeys traditions and respects history gathering all
the events, all the cultural changes inside. “Asian Tiger” definitely speaks unbelievable
language that made its way “per aspera ad astra” and still fights for better place. Korean
reflects the character of the nation better than any mirror and impresses you with its new
linguistic sides and if it is not phenomenal then at least it is exceptionally remarkable.