# The passing of Korea/Chapter 22

CHAPTER XXII
LANGUAGE
The main point which differentiates this whole family of languages from the Aryan tongues is the agglutinative principle by which declension and conjugation are effected through the addition of postpositions and suffixes, and not by modification of the stem. In all these different languages the stem of the word remains, as a rule, intact through every form of grammatical manipulation. That Korean belongs to this family of languages is seen in its strictly agglutinative character. There has been no deviation from this principle. There are no exceptions. Any typical Korean verb can be conjugated through its thousand different forms without finding the least change in the stem of the word. A comparison of Korean with Manchu discloses at once a family likeness, and at the same time a comparison of Korean with the Dravidian dialects discloses a still closer kinship. It is an interesting fact that none of the Chinese dialects possess any of the distinctive features of this Turanian ​family. There is more similarity between Chinese and English than between Chinese and any of the Turanian languages. In other words, China has been even more thoroughly isolated linguistically than she has socially, and the evidence goes to prove that at some period enormously remote, after the original Chinese had effected an entrance into the mighty amphitheatre, between the central Asian mountains on the one hand and the waters of the Pacific on the other, they were surrounded by a subsequent race who impinged upon them at every point, and conquered them more than once, but who never succeeded in leaving a single trace upon their unique and primitive language. This surrounding family was the Turanian, and Korean forms one link in the chain.
Korean bears almost precisely the same relation to Chinese that English does to Latin. English has retained its own distinct grammatical structure while drawing an immense number of words from the Romance dialects for purposes of embellishment and precision. The same holds true of Korean. She has never surrendered a single point to Chinese grammar, and yet has borrowed largely from the Chinese glossary as convenience or necessity has required. Chinese may be called the Latin of the Far East. For, just as Rome through her higher civilisation lent thousands of words to the semi-savages hovering along her borders, so China has furnished all the surrounding peoples with their scientific, legal, philosophical and religious terminology. The development of Chinese grammar was early checked by the influence of the ideograph, and so she never has had anything to lend her neighbours in the way of superior grammatical inflection.
The grammars of Korea and Japan are practically identical, and yet, strange to say, with the exception of the words they have both borrowed from China, their glossaries are remarkably dissimilar. This forms one of the most obscure philological problems of the Far East. The identity in grammatical structure, however, stamps them as sister languages.
​The study of Korean grammar is rendered interesting by the fact that in the surrounding of China by Turanian peoples Korea forms the place where the two surrounding branches met and completed the circuit. Northern Korea was settled from the north by Turanian people, and southern Korea was settled from the south by Turanian people. It was not until 193 b. c. that each became definitely aware of the presence of the other. At first they refused to acknowledge the relationship, but the fact that, when in 690 a. d. the southern kingdom of Silla assumed control of the whole peninsula, there remained no such line of social cleavage as that which obtained between the English and Normans after 1066, shows that an intrinsic similarity of language and a similar racial aptitude quickly closed the breach and made Korea the unit that she is to-day.
Korean is an agglutinative, polysyllabic language whose development is marvellously complete and symmetrical. We find no such long lists of exceptions as those which entangle the student of the Indo-European languages. In Korean as in most of the Turanian languages the idea of gender is very imperfectly developed, which argues perhaps a lack of imagination. The ideas of person and number are largely left to the context for determination, but in the matter of logical sequence the Korean verb is carried to the extreme of development.
A Member of the bodyguard of the god of war. The figures to the right are members of council of his godship
Village Devil-Posts On the right is "Great General of Underground"; on the left his spouse. Each has standard of a bird. Note the "won’t-go-home-till-morning" air of the general and the appropriate expression of his better half.
The genius of the language has led the Korean to express every possible verbal relation by a separate modal form. The extent to which this has been carried may be shown only by illustration. Besides having simple forms to express the different tenses and modes, it also has forms to express all those more delicate verbal relations which in English require a circumlocution or the free use of adverbs. For instance, the Korean has a special mode to express the idea of necessity, contingency, surprise, reproof, antithesis, conjunction, temporal sequence, logical sequence, interruption, duration, limit, acquiescence, expostulation, interrogation, promise, exhortation, imprecation, desire, doubt, hypothesis, satisfaction, propriety, concession, intention, decision, probability, possibility, prohibition, simultaneity, continuity, repetition, infrequency, hearsay, agency, contempt, ability. Each one of these ideas can be expressed in connection with any active verb by the simple addition of one or more inseparable suffixes. By far the greater number of these suffixes are monosyllabic.
To illustrate the delicate shades of thought that can be expressed by the use of a. suffix let us take the English expression, "I was going along the road, when suddenly" This, without anything more, implies that the act of going was suddenly interrupted by some unforeseen circumstance. All this would be expressed in Korean by the three words naga kile kataga. The first means "I," the second means "along the road," and the third means "was going, when suddenly -" The stem of the verb is ka, and the ending, taga, indicates the interruption of the action. And what is more to the point, this ending has absolutely no other use. It is reserved solely for the expression of this shade of thought. Again, on the same stem we have the word kalka, in which the ending ka gives all the meaning that we connote in the expression, " Iwonder whether he will really go or not." If, in answer to the question whether you are going ​or not you say simply kana, it means, " What in the world would I be going for ? Absurd ! "
Another thing which differentiates Korean from the languages of the West is the difference between " book language " and " spoken language." Many grammatical forms are common to both, but there are also many in each that are not found in the other. The result is extremely unfortunate, for no conversation can be written down verbatim; it must all be changed into book language. This fact is probably due to Chinese influence, and it is but one of the ways in which that influence acted as a drag upon Korean intellectual development. I would not belittle the enormous debt that Korea owes to China, but some of her gifts had been better ungiven. None of these endings are borrowed from the Chinese language, but as Korea had practically no literature before Chinese influence led up to it, it was inevitable that certain endings should be reserved for the formal language of books, while others were considered good enough only to be bandied from mouth to mouth. It is of course impossible to say what sort of a literature Korea would have evolved had she been left to herself, but one thing is sure; it would have been much more spontaneous and lifelike than that which now obtains. Korean has no dialects. There are different brogues, and a Seoul man can generally detect by a man's speech from what province he comes; but it would be wide of the truth to assert that Koreans from any part of the country could not readily understand each other. There are some few words that are peculiar to particular provinces, but for the most part thes'e are mutually known, just as the four words " guess," " reckon," " allow " and " calculate," while peculiar in a certain sense to particular sections of America, are universally understood.
No people have followed more implicitly nature's law in the matter of euphony. The remarkable law of the convertibility of surds and sonants has been worked out to its ultimate results in this language. The nice adjustment of the organs of speech, whereby conflicting sounds are so modified as to blend harmoni​LANGUAGE 305 ously, is one of the unconscious Korean arts. The euphonic tendency has not broken down the languages, as is sometimes the case. Prof. Max Miiller speaks of a law of phonetic decay, but in Korea it would be better called the law of phonetic adjustment. Korean is characterised by a large number of mimetic words. As their colours are drawn directly from nature, so their words are often merely phonetic descriptions.
The Korean language is eminently adapted for public speaking. It is a sonorous, vocal language. They have grasped the idea that the vowel is the basis of all human speech. The sibilant element is far less conspicuous than in Japanese, and one needs only to hear a public speech in Japanese and one in Korean to discover the great advantage which the latter enjoys. The lack of all accent in Japanese words is a serious drawback to oratory. There is nothing in Korean speech that makes it less adapted to oratory than English or any other Western tongue. In common with the language of Cicero or Demosthenes, Korean is composed of periodic sentences, each one reaching its climax in the verb which is usually the final word, and there are no weakening addenda which so often make the English sentence an anticlimax. In this respect the Korean surpasses English as a medium of public speaking.