[...]... “Macro-Altaic” combines both hypotheses by including Korean and Japanese within a greater Altaic family Over the years Korean has been compared to a variety of other languages and language families as well, including even Indo-European Most of those attempts have been amateurish and based upon superficial similarities, however.1 1.2 Altaic The Altaic family includes languages spoken across northern Asia,... Mongolic languages, the consonant has been lost entirely Traces of *p in the Turkic languages are even harder to find Only Khalaj has an h in its place; in the rest of this large family the consonant has disappeared altogether Thus, most Altaicists agree that besides Nanai, only Korean has preserved the original bilabial consonant In Ramstedt’s early formulation, he compared, for example, Korean pal ‘foot’... history of the language at that time depth, far beyond what has been actually written down, linguists can only rely upon the comparison of Korean with other languages and hope to find one that has sprung from the same “original” source For if such a “related” language can be found, then the question of origin will at last have a satisfactory answer There are two problems comparativists immediately face The. .. why it was the Silla language that should properly be referred to as “Old Korean. ” It was Silla that effected a linguistic unification of Korea, and its speech, through military conquest and political consolidation, was the language form that eventually became the lingua franca of the entire peninsula In that way, Sillan gave rise to Middle Korean, and is thus the direct ancestor of the language spoken... established a new government and moved the geographic base for the language away from the old Silla capital From the fragmentary evidence ˘ available to us, it appears that Koguryo substrata still existed in local speech at that time, but such traces gradually faded over the centuries as the Sillanbased language continued to exert its influence In this pre-alphabetic period, attestations of the language. .. Related languages are expected to be structurally similar, and such resemblances unquestionably play a role in the formulation of genetic hypotheses 1.2.1 Comparison of Korean and Altaic There are two ways in which comparativists have tried to demonstrate that Korean sprang from the same source as Altaic The principal and by far the more common way has been to use the core concept of the comparative... certainty what the origin of Korean was Chapter 1, “Origins,” is really an essay about prehistory The beginnings of Korean history Chapter 2, The formation of Korean, ” brings the descriptions in this book into the realm of recorded history The historical narratives described there, the earliest about language and ethnicity on the Korean peninsula, were drawn from Chinese histories and were based, at least... a plausible argument that Korean was a member of the Altaic family Then, following the appearance of his monograph Studies in Korean Etymology in 1949, and subsequently, in the 1950s, three more monographs on the subject, the idea won general acceptance among Altaicists But it was in Korea that the hypothesis found particularly broad support In the years since Ramstedt’s works first appeared, Korean. .. in Altaic languages, is not found in Uralic, a language family once believed to be part of a greater Ural-Altaic family.2 However, not only are all these characterizing structural features found in Altaic languages, most are also found in Korean and Japanese as well Of course, exhibiting common linguistic features does not in any way constitute proof of genetic affinity, but they are suggestive Related... been the source of precise and detailed information about the phonological and morphological structure of the language In that year, some three years after an announcement of its creation had been made in the dynastic annals, the reigning monarch, King Sejong, promulgated a handbook introducing the new script and explaining its use, and from that point on Korean has been a language structurally accessible . samgang haengsil to 244 11 The Japanese -language textbook, Ch’o ˘ phae sino ˘ 246 12 The “Tale of Ch’unhyang,” a story of love transcending social class 251 Maps 1 The Korean peninsula ix 2 The. line P′yonggang Wonju Seoul Suwon Munsan Kaesong Haeju Sariwon Ongjin Changyon Namp′o P¢yongyang Wonsan KOREA Hamhung Kimch′aek Ch′ongjin Najin Khasan Tumen Musan Badaojiang Manp′o Ji′an Kanggye Hyesan Huadian Siping CHINA Nakhodka Vladivostok RUSSIA Yongbyon Kusong Sinuiju Dandong Anshan Tonghua Shenyang NORTH Korea Bay East. what might well be the most promising avenue of research of all, the comparison of Korean to Tungusic, a family of languages considered by most comparativists to be a branch of Altaic. More than