Monday, July 19, 2010

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.

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