dɮ the phoneme wrote: ↑Fri Jul 26, 2024 11:39 pmI am quite familiar with Japanese but know almost nothing at all about Korean. Much is made of the similarities between the two languages, but what about the differences? Naively I tend to work under the model that Korean is basically a Japanese relex (...a sentence seemingly fined-tuned to maximally piss off Koreans), but obviously this is not actually true. I know that Japanese and Korean share little vocabulary outside of Chinese loans, but what about syntactically, morphologically, and in terms of lexical typology etc.? What are the major differences between Japanese and Korean?
Well, I've talked about some differences in the Pronoun thread. Korean pronouns are more of a closed class than Japanese, with the basic first- and second-person pronouns not being derivable from common nouns nor having common nominal uses.
For me one of the most obvious and striking differences is in speech levels. Much is made of the use of polite language and honorifics in Japanese, but where Japanese is generally considered to have
three basic speech levels, Korean has
seven. These are independent of honorifics (which exalt the subject of verbs and some objects of prepositions) and humble forms (which do the opposite). There are a half dozen suppletive honorific verbs in Korean, but almost any verb can be made honorific with the use of the very productive infix -(으)시- -(u)si-.
Speaking of infixes, I don't recall anything in Japanese parallel to the
retrospective infix -던- -ten- but it could be that I just don't know the verbal system well enough. Korean also has three distinct
attributive endings used to form relative clauses; IIRC Japanese verbs just used the regular sentence-final endings here, except with descriptive verbs.
Korean is known for having an extensive system of
vowel harmony with lexical and syntactic applications. I think its most striking use is in
sound symbolism. I know Japanese is also famed for its rich supply of onomatopoeias, but Korean seems to have more variants (what Martin calls "isotopes") based on systematic two- or four-way vowel alternation combined with three-way (plain ~ tense ~ apsirated) consonant alternation. Here's an example from Kong-On Kim's 1977 article "Sound Symbolism in Korean":
(1) Vowel alternation
/piŋkɯl/ '(turn) round and round'
/pɛŋkɯl/ 'round and round (the circle involved is smaller and the movement faster)'
(2) Consonant alternation:
/piŋkɯl/ 'round and round'
/phiŋkɯl/ 'round and round (the movement is more powerful and faster)'
/ppiŋkɯl/ same as /phirjkɯl/
The alternation between /i/ and /ɛ/ in the examples in (i) brings about a
connotation shift in the speed of the movement and also in the size of the moving
object and of the circle made by the circular movement. In the examples in (2),
the alternation between the word initial lenis stop /p/ on the one hand, and its
aspirated or tense counterpart on the other, signals a connotation shift in the
speed and force of the movement, but curiously not in the size of the circle or of
the moving object. These means of changing the connotation of words are highly
productive in the sense that, given a basic word that belongs to the category of
sound symbolic words, native speakers can predict the form and connotation of
the paired member resulting from the phoneme alternation.
This form of sound symbolism even extends to colour terms, with all basic terms exhibiting "light" and "heavy" isotopes, e.g.: 희다 /huyta/ "to be white/grey" (basic term) ~ 하얗다 /hayahta/ "to be pure white" ~ 허옇다 /heyehta/ "to be cloudy white". In addition, some also exhibit consonant alternation, e.g. 검다 /kemta/, 꺼멓다 /kkemehta/, 까맣다 /kkamahta/, 거멓다 /kemehta/, and 가맣다 /kamahta/ are all variants of the basic colour term for "black".
That's just a few examples off the top of my head. I recommend perusing a good grammar of modern Korean, such as Martin's, because I'm sure you'll notice more contrasts that way. (I'm somewhat hampered here by my ignorance of Japanese grammar beyond the basics.)