808 THE KOREAN LANGUAGE. 



soleW for the purpose of expressing- succiiictl^y this shade of thought. 

 The little word kal-ka of which ka is the stem, meaning- "go," con- 

 tains all the meaning that we put into the words "I wonder now 

 whether he will really go or not." Someone asks you if you are going, 

 and all you need to say is "'ka-na'' to express the complete idea of 

 •• What in the world would I be g'oing- for? Absurd!" 



Another thing which dilferentiates Korean from the languages of 

 the west is the wide ditference between book language and spoken 

 language. Many of the g-rammatical forms are the same in both, but 

 besides these there is a full set of grammatical endings used in books 

 only while at the same time there are many endings in the vernacular 

 that could never be put in print. The result is very unfortunate, for 

 of necessity no conversation can be written down ver})atim. It must 

 all he changed into indirect discourse, and the vernacular endings 

 must largely be changed to the book endings. This must not be 

 charged up against the Korean, for it came in with the Chinese, and 

 is but one of the thousand ways in which their overpowering intlu- 

 ence, in spite of all it has done for Korea, has stunted her intellectual 

 development. V^e would not imply that these literary endings are 

 borrowed from the Chinese, for such is rarely the case; but as Korea 

 has little literature except such as has grown up beneath the wing of 

 China, it was inevitable that certain endings would be reserved for the 

 formal writing of l)ooks while others were considered good enough 

 only to be bandied from mouth to mouth. It is of course impossible 

 to sa}' what Korea would have accomplished had she been given a free 

 rein to evolve a literature for herself, but we can not doubt that it 

 would have been infinitely more spontaneous and lifelike than that 

 Avhich now obtains. 



From a linguistic standpoint the Koreans are proljably far more 

 homogeneous than any portion of the Chinese people \jin^ between 

 equal extremes of latitude. There is in Korea no such thing as dia- 

 lects. There are diti'erent "brogues" in the peninsula, and the Seoul 

 man can generally tell the province from which a counti'vman comes 

 by his speech. But it would be wide of the truth to assert that 

 Koreans from different parts of the country can not easily understand 

 each other. To be sure there are some few words peculiar to indi- 

 vidual provinces, but these are mutual I3' known just as the four words 

 "guess," ''reckon," "allow," and "calculate," while peculiar to cer- 

 tain definite sections of the United States, are universal!}" understood. 



A word in conclusion must be said regarding the laws of Korean 

 euphony. No people have followed more implicitly nature's law in 

 the matter of euphon3\ It has not been done in the careless manner 

 that changed the magnificent name Caesar Augustus to the slovenly 

 Saragossa, but the incomparable law of the convertibility of surds 

 and sonants which is characteristic of the Turanian languages is 



