KoreanConnection

The Korean Language:Three Korean kingdoms appear to dictate the three main periods of development of the Korean language. Old Korean was spoken by the people of the Ancient Kingdom of Silla and when Silla conquered Paekche in AD 660 and then Koguryo in AD 668 the language of the conquerors became the language of the whole peninsula. With the passage of time, Middle Korean development from the Old Korean and in turn gave way to Modern Korean from 1600 onwards.Today the Korean language is spoken by more than 60 million people in North and South Korea and amongst the Korean diaspora in Manchuria, eastern Siberia, Central Asia and Japan.The Korean language is classified as being a member of the broad linguistic family known as the Uralo-Altaic Family. Korean’s precise linguistic affiliation is undecided, although its grammatical structure is most similar to Japanese.Korean is an a tonal language which means that unlike Chinese, tone or pitch is not used to make distinctions between similar sounding words. Instead, Korean uses a rich repertoire of sounds, for example consonants may be similar to English, tense (or double), or aspirated with a strong puff of breath as in ‘tal’, ‘ttal’ and ‘t’al’ (meaning moon, daughter and mask respectively!)Korean is also an agglutinative language, therefore every word in Korean has a tag at the end of it which indicates its function in the sentence, such as subject, direct object or adverb.This is not a wholly unfamiliar concept, in English the reader or listener who sees or hears the sound -ly at the end of a word knows immediately that is an adverb, such as ‘quickly’.The Korean language richly reflects Korean culture and like Japanese, has different speech levels. For example the suffix on the verb which ends a sentence can reflect the social relationship between the speaker and the person being addressed.Therefore when a stranger is asked, ‘Where is the shop?’ the sentence would be completed with -issumnikka, for a friend -isso would be used and for a child -inni.Source-(http://www.poetrytranslation.soas.ac.uk/poems/ index.cfm?lang=10)