806 THE KOREAN LANGUAGE. 



eAndence ^oes to prove thut at some period eiionnoiisly remote, after 

 the original Chinese had effected an entrance to the mighty um[)hi- 

 theater Ix'tween the Central Asian mountains on the one hand and the 

 Pacitic i)n the other, they were surrounded l>v a suhsecjuent race who 

 impinged upon them at every point and con({uered them not once or 

 twice, but who never succeeded in leaving a single trace upon her 

 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 P^nglish does to 

 Latin, English has retained its own distinct grammatical structure 

 while drawing an immense number of words from the romance dialects 

 for the purposes of embellishment and precision. The same holds 

 true of Korean. She has never surrendered a single point to C'liinese 

 gi'ammar, juid yet has borrowed eagerly from the Chinese glossary as 

 convenience or necessity has recjuired. Chinese 'n^ the Latin of the 

 Far East, for just as Rome, through her higher civilization, lent thou- 

 sands of words to the semisavages hovering along her borders, so 

 Ciuna has furnished all the surrounding peoples with their scientitic, 

 legal, })hilosophical, and religious terminology. The development of 

 Chinese grammar was earl}^ checked by the ijifiuence of the ideograph, 

 and so she has never htid anything to lend her neigh])ors in the way 

 of grammatical inflection. 



The granunars of Korea and Japan are pi'actically identical; and 

 yet, strange to say, with the exception of the words they liave l)oth 

 borrowed from China theirglossaries are marvelousl}^ dissimilar. This 

 forms one of the most obscure philological problems of the Far East. 

 The identity in graunnatical structure, however, stamps them as sister 

 languag(\s. 



The study of Korean grannuar is rendered interesting ])v the fact 

 that in the surrounding of China by Turanian peoples, Korea was the 

 l)lace where the two surrounding ])ranches met and completed the cir- 

 cuit. Northern Korea was settled from the north by Turanian people. 

 Southern Koi'ca was settled from the south by Turanian people. It 

 was not until 1!»3 b. c. that each became definitely aware of the pres- 

 ence of the other. At first they refused to acknowledge the relation- 

 ship, but the fact that when in (>90 a. d. the southern kingdom of 

 Sil-la assumed control of the whole peninsula there remained no such 

 line of social cleavage as that which obtained between the English and 

 the Norman after 1()(!6, shows that an intrinsic similarity of language 

 and of racial aptitude quickly closed the breach and made Korea the 

 unit that she is to-day. 



Korean is an agglutinative, polysyllabic language w hose develo))- 

 ment is marvelously complete and at the same time marNclously sym- 

 uietrical. We find no such long list of exce])tions as that which 

 entangles in its web the student of the Indo-European languages. In 



