810 THE KOREAT^ LANGUAGE. 



in the word "sword," which was orioinally pronounced witli the "w," 

 in imitation of the sound of the weapon sweeping- through the air, but 

 having lost the w sound it now has no phonetic signiticance. One 

 hardly needs a dictionary to learn the meaning of Korean onomato- 

 poeia. AVhat could "jing-geu-rung jang-geu-riing"" mean but the 

 jingle-jangle of })ells or of the steel rings on the horses' bridles^ So 

 again mulsin nudsin means soft to the touch, based on the same idea 

 as our word ■'mellow'' in which the softest sounds of human speech, 

 •' m" and •"l." are used. On the other hand bak-bak means hard, 

 stiti'. unyielding, after the analogy of our word "brittle,"" which 

 is doubtless mimetic. The Koi'ean word whose stem is ch'i means to 

 strike or hit, and is the phonetic equivalent of our vulgar word 

 "chug."' whose mimetic origin cannot be doubted. One nmst con- 

 chide that the prevahmce of mimetic words in all lang-uages forms a 

 serious obstacle to the studv of philology, for attempts on the part of 

 widely separated people to produce a phonetic description of an o})ject, 

 tpiality. or act that is common to them both is most likely to result in 

 similar sounds. And these, later, form dangerous traps into which 

 the eager and unwary philologue is prone to fall. 



It may l)e asked whether the Korean language is adapted to public 

 speaking. We would answer that it is eminently so. For, in the 

 first place, it is a sonorous, vocal language. The Koreans say that in 

 any syllable the vowel is the ""mother"" and the consonant is the 

 "child."' showing that they have grasped the essential idea that vowel 

 sounds form the basis of human speech. The sibilant element is much 

 less conspicuous in Korean than in Japanese and one needs only to 

 heal- a public speech in Japanese and one in Korean to discover the 

 vast advantage which Korean enjoys. Then again, the almost total 

 lack of accent in Japanese words is a serious drawl)ack from the point 

 of view of oratory. So far as Ave can see there is nothing in Korean 

 speech that makes it less adapted to oratory than English or any other 

 western tongue. In common with the language of Cicero and Demos- 

 thenes. Korean is composed of periodic sentences, by Avhich we mean 

 that each sentence reaches its climax in the verb, which comes at the 

 end; and there are no weakening addenda, such as often make the 

 English sentence an anticlimax. In this respect the Korean surpasses 

 English as a medium for public speaking. 



