THE KOREAN LANGUAGE.^ 



By Homer B. Hulbert. 



The Korean language belongs to that wideh' disseminated family to 

 which the term Turanian has" sometimes been applied. This term is 

 sufficiently indefinite to match the subject, for scholarship has not yet 

 determined with any degree of exactitude the limits of its dispersion. 

 At its widest reach it includes Turkish, Hungarian, Basque, Lappish, 

 Finnish, Ouigour, Ostiak, SamoiA'ed, Mordwin, Manchu, Mongol (and 

 other Tartar and Siberian dialects), Japanese, Korean, Tamil, Telugu, 

 Canarese, Malayalam (and the other Dravidian dialects), Malay and a 

 great number of the Polynesian and Australasian dialects reaching 

 north along the coast of Asia through the Philippine Islands and 

 Formosa and south and east into New Guinea, New Hebrides, and 

 Australia. 



The main point which differentiates this whole family of languages 

 from the Aryan and Semitic stocks is the agglutinative principle, 

 whereby declension and conjugation are effected b}" the addition of 

 positions and suffixes and not b}- a modification of the stem. In all 

 these different languages the stem of a word remains as a rule intact 

 through ever}^ form of granuiiatical manipulation. That Korean belongs 

 to this family of languages is seen in its strictly agglutinative char- 

 acter. There has been absolutely no deviation from this principle. 

 There are no exceptions. Any typical Korean verb can l)e conjugated 

 through its one thousand different forms without finding the least 

 change in the stem. A comparison of Korean with Manchu discloses 

 at once a family likeness and at the same time a comparison of Korean 

 with any ont> of the Dravidian dialects discloses a still closer kinship. 

 It is an interesting fact that not one of the Chinese dialects possesses 

 any of the distinctive features of this Tui'anian family. There is more 

 similarity l)etween Chinese and English than between Chinese and any 

 one of the Turanian languages. In other words, China has been even 

 more thoroughly isolated linguistically than she has socially; and the 



a Reprinted from The Korea Review, Peoul, Korea, Homer B. HuUjert, editor, 

 Vol. I, 1901, pp. 433-440. 



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