The Impact of Japanese Colonisation on Korea - Essay Example

Japanese apart from kanji, had three other writing systems, namely two syllabaries (hiragana & katakana) and romanized script (romaji) mainly to spell foreign words. Japanese is noted for its careful representation of the social structure, male& female varieties, and hierarchical levels of honorific suffixing style. Burgess, Anthony (1992, p.174-176) says that Japanese is not tonal; it is not made out of single-syllable semantemes. There is a syllabic pattern of single vowels or vowels preceded by single consonants, but these are merely building blocks of words. The Polly-syllabic melody is recognized by Japanese sound. The literary style that came to prominence is Haiku. Korean favorite genre was sijo, a kind of rubai with 7 or 8-syllable lines.

Modern Korean shows traces of vowel harmony, whereas old Korean has strong vowel harmony. The linguistic aspects of the enormous ill will accumulated during the brief Japanese occupation of Korea are documented by concrete examples of the replacement of Japanese lexical tones either by Korean equivalents or by involved bilingual calques. Another aspect that interestingly survives unchallenged in Korean linguistic circles is concealed in the statement that "the Korean word for 'loanword' is only-e" (Lee, Iksop p. 136). But this is merely Japanese gairaigo borrowed from Korean. Some linguists admit, that Korean and Japanese may well be Altaic (Osada, 1972) or Dravidian, or Tungusic (Vovin, 1997). Sohn, Ho Min (1999 Chap.2) discusses the genetic affiliation of the Korean language with specific reference to Japanese. The most widely known hypothesis is the Altaic hypothesis. According to the Altaic hypothesis, the Koreans and Japanese were Altaic people who migrated to Korea and Japan with basic elements of their language. A noteworthy point is that Korean, Japanese, and Altaic languages manifest striking syntactic similarities (i.e. SOV- Subject, Object, Verb word order). While accepting that the genetic relation between Korean and Japanese is remote, he illustrates that there are sizable shared cognates, phonological correspondences, and morphological, syntactic & semantic characteristics. The common origin of Korean and Japanese was proposed by Arai (1717), again by Fuji Teikan (1781), and by Aston (1879). Aston found ten consonant correspondences based on 70 lexical items comparing the Chinese sounds borrowed in Japanese with those borrowed in Korean, similarities in grammar & word formulae.

Later in the 19th century, Kanazawa (1910) claimed that the Korean and the Ryukyu are the branches of the Japanese. Martin (1966) systematically compared 320 sets of seeming cognates, re-constructed their protoforms, established a proto-Korean-Japanese phonemic system including pitch accents, and provided rules of phonological correspondences. He reconstructed accent patterns and found striking similarities between Korea (15th century) and the Japanese (12th century). Middle Korean (MK) had three significant tones (low, high & rising) whereas Japanese had two significant pitches (low & high). Observing that several rising tone words of MK go back to disyllables, Martin suggests that interpreting MK rising tones as a result of the application of pitch accents to long vowels would make the Korean accentual patterns look very similar to those of Japanese (Sohn, Ho Min, 2001, p.34). Japanese has high pitch accentuation in place of tonic stress. Syllable flow evenly- a long syllable is two moras; a short syllable is one more. Pitch is not marked. Ramstedt (1979) was cautious in defending linguistic affinity between the two languages. Whiteman (1985) found correspondences in 352 lexical sets and noticed borrowings from Middle Chinese. If both Korean and Japanese had a level tone system and an agglutinative structure, it is to be expected that the tone pattern of a word is determined by a sequence of inherent pitch features in the root and the following suffixes. Since cognate words in the two languages can easily have had different suffixes while original prefixes seem to have been absent, the initial tone of a word should be an inherent feature of the root and we should expect a correlation between the initial tones of presumed cognates in the two languages if they are genetically related, argues Kortlandt. F.

The Japanese and Koreans call each other ‘close but distant neighbors,’ and this phrase also roughly sums up the relationship between their languages. The grammar systems of Japanese and Korean are very similar, but their native vocabularies are very different. This unusual paradox has deterred many language experts from embracing a genetic relationship. Others say that both languages are isolates (orphan languages), or are distant cousins of Turkish, Manchurian, and other central Asian languages.