KOREAN LANGUAGE

language spoken by more than 72 million people, of whom 45 million live in South Korea and 24 million in North Korea. There are more than 2 million speakers in China, more than 700,000 in the United States, and somewhat fewer in Japan. More than 200,000 Koreans live in Kazakstan and Uzbekistan. Korean is the official language of both South Korea (Republic of Korea) and North Korea (Democratic People's Republic of Korea). The two Koreas differ in minor matters of spelling, alphabetization, and vocabulary choice (including the names of the letters), but both essentially endorse the unified standards proposed by the Korean Language Society in 1933. language spoken by more than 72 million people (mostly in North Korea and South Korea) and the official language of both North Korea and South Korea, with minor variations in orthographic standards. Most of what is known about the Korean language dates from the creation in 1443 of the script (now commonly called Hangul ) to write Middle Korean. Information on earlier vocabulary is found in vocabularies compiled by the Chinese and in poorly deciphered poems of the Silla kingdom called hyangga, which were composed as early as the 10th century. There is no agreement on the relationship of Korean to other languages. The most likely relatives are Japanese and the Altaic languages: Turkic, Mongolian, and especially Manchu-Tungus. The Hangul alphabet consists of simple symbols for the consonants and vowels. These are grouped into syllable blocks, with minor graphic modifications in certain configurations. (See the Table.) The most popular English-language transcription is the McCune-Reischauer system, but for many purposes linguists prefer the Yale romanization because it closely follows Hangul spellings, which are etymological or morphophonemic and distinguish basic forms that merge in a phonetic transcription. Korean has borrowed many words from Classical Chinese, including most of its technical terms and about 10 percent of its basic nouns, such as san mountain' and kang river.' The borrowed words are sometimes written in Chinese characters. Korean sentences are very similar to those of Japanese, though the words sound quite different. Modifiers always precede what they modify. The unmarked order is subject + indirect object + direct object + predicate. Only the predicate is essential, and other information may be omitted. Actions are expressed by processive predicates (verbs), and characteristics are expressed by descriptive predicates (adjectives). There are several different styles of speech and ways to end a sentence with reference to the social situation, the speaker's attitude, and the relationship of the sentence to wider context. The most common style ends a sentence with the infinitive -o or -a, often followed by -yo to show friendly politeness. Depending on the speaker's intonation, a sentence may express a statement, a question, a command, or a proposition. Each of these four types of sentence uses a distinctive ending in both the formal style (which shows deference to the hearer) and the plain style. In the formal style, -(su)mnida marks a statement and -(su)mnikka a question. Frequently the predicate marks the subject as someone special (you or the teacher) by inserting the honorific marker -(u)si-. The predicate also can be marked to indicate tense and aspect, and devices exist to adnominalize a sentence to modify a noun or adverbialize it as a subordinate clause. Nouns attach particles to show their role in the sentence, but the case markers for subject and object are often omitted or are masked by particles of focus used to highlight a word or place a topic in the background. Additional reading Samuel E. Martin, A Reference Grammar of Korean (1992), provides a comprehensive description. Ho-min Sohn, Korean (1994), is a detailed grammar. Textbooks include Fred Lukoff, Spoken Korean, 2 vol. (194547); B. Nam Park, Korean Basic Course, 2 vol. (196869); Samuel E. Martin and Young-sook C. Lee, Beginning Korean (1969, reissued 1986); and two series of textbooks published by Korea University (Seoul): Han'gugo, 4 vol. in various editions (198991); and Han'gugo Hoehwa, 4 vol. in various editions (199193). Informative articles may be found in The Korean Language (1983), edited by the Korean National Commission for UNESCO. The writing system is thoroughly discussed in Young-key Kim-Renaud (ed.), The Korean Alphabet: Its History and Structure (1997). Transcription is discussed in G.M. McCune and E.O. Reischauer, The Romanization of the Korean Language, Transactions of the Korea Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, 29:155 (1939), with an abbreviated account in the same journal, Tables of the McCune-Reischauer System for the Romanization of Korean, 38:121129 (1961); and in Robert Austerlitz et al., Report of the Workshop Conference on Korean Romanization, Korean Studies, 4:111125 (1980). S. Robert Ramsey, Accent and Morphology in Korean Dialects (1978), is a valuable explanation of accentual patterns. The history of the language is chronicled in Ki-mun Yi, Kugosa kaesol, 2nd ed. (1972), also available in a German edition, Geschichte der koreanischen Sprache, trans. and ed. by Bruno Lewin (1977). The prehistory is reviewed in Ho-min Sohn, "The State of the Art in the Historical-Comparative Studies of Japanese and Korean, Korean Studies, 4:2950 (1980); and further explored in three works by Samuel E. Martin: Morphological Clues to the Relationships of Japanese and Korean, in Philip Baldi (ed.), Linguistic Change and Reconstruction Methodology (1990), pp. 483509, On the Prehistory of Korean Grammar: Verb Forms, Korean Studies, 19:139150 (1995), and Consonant Lenition in Korean and the Macro-Altaic Question (1996). The authoritative dictionary is Uri mal kun sajon, 4 vol. (199192), compiled by Han'gul Hakhoe (Korean Language Research Society). Also very useful is the dictionary by Yi Sung-nyong (Sung-nyong Lee), Kugo taesajon, 3 vol. (1960); and the North Korean dictionary Choson mal sajon, 6 vol. (196062). The recommended Korean-English dictionary is Samuel E. Martin, Yang Ha Lee (Yang-ha Yi), and Sung-un Chang (Song-on Chang), A Korean-English Dictionary (1967). Y.H. Lee and J.W. Kwun (eds.), Minjungsugwan's Pocket English-Korean Dictionary, new rev. ed., 2 vol. (1960), is useful for translating English words. Samuel E. Martin