Language, forms, prosody, and themes

要旨

THE KOREAN LANGUAGE Korean is spoken on the Korean peninsula as the sole native language and overseas as a second or foreign language. The current population of South Korea is over 45 million and that of North Korea around 23 million. Some 5.6 million Koreans reside outside the Korean peninsula. The major countries with a significant Korean population are China (2 million), the United States (2 million), Japan (700,000), and the former Soviet Union (500,000). Due to constant immigration, Koreans in the United States have become the fastest-growing segment of the overseas Korean population. GENETIC AFFILIATION There is no denying that Korean and Japanese are sister languages, although they are not mutually intelligible and their relationship is much more distant than that between, say, English and French. A sizeable number of cognates, partially attested sound correspondences, and many uniquely shared grammatical properties support the existence of a genetic relationship. The common origin of Korean and Japanese has been proposed by a number of scholars since Arai Hakuseki (1657–1725), a Tokugawa Confucian, in 1717, and Fujii Sadamoto (?1732–1797), a pioneer of modern archaeology in Japan, in 1781, first brought up the issue. Samuel Martin systematically compares 320 sets of seeming cognates in Korean (K) and Japanese (J). The grammatical similarities between Korean and Japanese are conspicuous. Both are typical subject-object-verb (SOV) word-order languages.

主題