Korean Number Woes

Current varieties of English find one set of numbers sufficient. I exclude binary on the pirnciple that it is not used for counting except as a geeky in-joke. I must specify current English because there were rural systems of counting, in formerly Welsh areas such as Cumbria; the non-English system was restricted to counting herd animals, a limited but very important semantic domain for the local culture. In Korean, and I believe Japanese also, there are two counting systems: one native, and one adopted and adapted from the Chinese spoken at the time of contact. A comparison that might make more sense to those who only know Indo-European languages: this situation is as if Slavic-speakers counted numbers using Slavic numerals, but counted things using Greek.

I can more readily recognize the Sino-Korean numbers, thanks to the small amount of Chinese I learned (sadly, the lack of oral practice has made the tones nigh-impossible). Most of the numbers are easily recognizable, although I did briefly find the Sino-Korean vs. native Korean distracting. The use of Sino-Korean numerals as count nouns accords with the isolating, SVO, head-final nature of Chinese, while the agglutinative, SOV, head-final structure of Korean precludes count nouns except as a borrowing from culture languages of the area (i.e., Chinese). The head-final feature of Korean, however, does provide a convenient location for the count noun. The optionality of the plural suffix - a not uncommon feature of non-Indo-European languages - in Korean also makes the count nouns welcome.

Korean Question

I was studying Korean on a Byki program and came across this sentence fragment "...ko shipeundeyo" means "I would like ...". Fair enough. But Korean is an inflected language, like Latin or German, so it is necessary to know what suffix the word for the desired object would use. There are too possibilities here: one is that the desired object requires the accusative suffix (-reul or -eul); if so, the sentence "I would like a rabbit" would be "Tokkireul ko shipeundeyo". The other possibility, which I am inclined to favor in the absence of a grammar, is that the "ko" is the direct object of "shipeundeyo" and that the desired object would take the topic suffix (-ga or -i). Thus "I would like a rabbit" would be translated as "Tokkiga ko shipeundeyo", which is literally "As for the rabbit, I would like it." This structure, if correct, would be parallel to the structure of the question "Where is the hotel", which is "Hoteri eodi isseoyo", literally, "As for the hotel, where is [it]?". But if somebody who speaks Korean could clarify this for me, I would greatly appreciate it.

Hangeul, or No Dyslexic Elves

Recently, I decided that I should learn some Korean, since I spend a great deal of time in a Korean-owned cafe. At the very least, I could learn the basic pleasantries associated with cafe life. Hangeul, the Korean script, is well known for being linguistically sound and astonishingly perceptive, although that language, it must be admitted, is the language of 15th century Korea. The official history has King Sejong as the inventor of the script, although some more recent studies have suggested a connection between Hangeul and 'Phags-pa script, invented in Tibet under Kublai Khan as an international script.

The basic principles of Hangeul were that each block should be square, in order that it look like "proper", i.e., Chinese, writing, and that the block be composed of the consonants which make up a syllable. Although Hangeul looks like a string of Chinese characters, it is much easier to disentangle the parts. The progress of time, both in phonetic change, assimilation, and increasing stylization of the "characters", has created some difficulties, but they are hardly insurmountable. My goal, for now, is to master the jamo (some of which are phonetically complex, but treated as a single graphic unit). The more I examine the jamo, the more I understand why the lovely Miss Moon grasped the principles of my Egyptian hieroglyph homework so quickly.

The systematic structure of the jamo may be linguistically inspired, but as some wag said of Tolkien's tengwar, there is no such thing as a dyslexic elf (I'm sure Tolkien would have found Hangeul fascinating). Some of the diacritics which are used to distinguish various vowels in Korean are minimal, even after the most recent reform of the script, a luxury which small linguistic communities can manage more easily than large democratic ones. It's easy for the Anglophone, accustomed to letters more distinct in shape, to confuse /a/ and /eo/. I can recognize the dental series (d, t, tt) but my brain appears to want that series to open in the same direction as the velar (g, k, kk); this is probably a conflict between the accurate picture of tongue placement and orthographic consistency. If I did not desire regularity in writing, Hangeul would not fascinate me so much! My greatest difficulty, however, is differentiating /oe/, /wi/, and /ui/; I have mastered the regular and iotated forms. The cafeteria method of learning Korean does not enlighten me on the rules of vowel harmony in Korean, leaving some vocalic pronunciations a mystery.