linguistic relationship between korean and japanese
this is something i’ve wondered about a long time. the two countries of japan and korea are very close together, and due to the proximity, there are many similarities in culture as well as language. what’s even more striking is the fact that two cultures can be vastly different in some respects, as well as the language, which when it comes to non-kanji and hanja derived traditional words, are usually very dissimilar.
yet, in terms of the grammatical structure, one can almost say that the two laguages are identical, and is uniquely monotonal in east asia. this is one of the reasons why a korean can learn japanese relatively quickly, as the sounds and grammar of japanese are easily grasped by koreans. japanese people, on the other hand, have a bit more difficulty, even though the grammar maybe identical (retaining the subject, objective, verb order, as well as the entire particle system), the pronunciation of korean is much more difficult for most japanese.
it seems obvious, even discounting the influence of chinese character derived words like “air planes” and “baseball”, these two languages are somehow related. the question is, how? some scholars theorize that japanese language originated in isloation, which i find hard to belive, since if that was the case, why would one see such remarkable similarities in structure and the sounds of the two languages?
some theorize that japanese is derived from korea, many hundreds of years ago. and some say the other way around.
i have a feeling that it maybe that korea has influenced language of japan, and there has been much indigenous development as well.
well, here is shimizu kiyoshi, a japanese professor who supports the korea influencing japan theory. he argues that many indigenous words of the two countries, such the word for “bear” is remarkably similar. “gohm” is the korean word for it, and in the olden days, it was “goma”. compare that to modern japanese word for bear “kuma”, and one can kind of see where he is going with this. another example might be the japanese word for “cut”, which is “karu”, comparable to the korean word for knives or swords “kahl”.
so why not japanese influencing korean? generally he says, that more complex sounding language usually evolves to a simpler sounding language. and since japanese sound is more streamlined and simpler in its sounds, it seems pretty likely that the infleunce is from korea to japan, not the other way around. and historically, there has been cultural infleunce in that direction since the yayoi period of japan.
read the full article in korean here