Korean and Japanese structural similarity

[Otto Kretschmer]

Japanese and Korean are very distantly related and their ancestor was spoken some 4000 years ago.

Why are they so similar structurally? Most of the time sentences can be translated word by word and they will be correct. Both languages are separated by a sea so their speakers did not even interact much throughout history to my knowledge (I may be wrong though)

[Linguoboy]

Why are they so similar structurally? Most of the time sentences can be translated word by word and they will be correct. Both languages are separated by a sea so their speakers did not even interact much throughout history

[citation needed]

(Seriously, you might want to read, well, anything about their shared history. Start by finding the answer to the question “How did Buddhism first reach Japan?”)

[Otto Kretschmer]

Is that the case?

Czech has had 1000 years of college contact with German (including several hundred years when everyone above a peasant spoke German) and Czech does not look like German grammatically.

[bradrn]

Japanese and Korean are very distantly related and their ancestor was spoken some 4000 years ago.

Citation really needed. Most experts seem to deny any relation at all.

Why are they so similar structurally? Most of the time sentences can be translated word by word and they will be correct. Both languages are separated by a sea so their speakers did not even interact much throughout history to my knowledge (I may be wrong though)

I’d say, because they’re both OV. There’s only so many language structures in the world, and for whatever reason OV-ness seems to correlate with quite a few other factors. If you compare Japanese to any random Papuan or Turkic language, they’ll also come out as pretty similar. What’s not accounted for by OV-ness can often be put down to areal tendencies such as topic-prominence.

(Stassen argues in Black and white Languages that there are only two basic language types in the world. I have a fair amount of sympathy for this view.)

[WeepingElf]

(Stassen argues in Black and white Languages that there are only two basic language types in the world. I have a fair amount of sympathy for this view.)

That's interesting.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

Japanese and Korean are very distantly related and their ancestor was spoken some 4000 years ago.

Citation really needed. Most experts seem to deny any relation at all.

From what I've read, the similarities probably are, indeed, owing to prolongued language contact. It seems likely that the initial Japonic-speaking population of the Japanese Archipelago probably did migrate there from the Korean Peninsula, and there was probably a period of pre-attested-writing language contact that accounts for some of the structural similarities. The contact persisted, by all accounts — Buddhism, and the use of Middle Chinese as a Classical language, seem to have come to Japan from Korea, and The Tale of Genji makes a few references to fancy Korean paper.

Why are they so similar structurally? Most of the time sentences can be translated word by word and they will be correct. Both languages are separated by a sea so their speakers did not even interact much throughout history to my knowledge (I may be wrong though)

Do you perhaps have an example of a large and structurally-complex text in which this is the case?

I’d say, because they’re both OV. There’s only so many language structures in the world, and for whatever reason OV-ness seems to correlate with quite a few other factors. If you compare Japanese to any random Papuan or Turkic language, they’ll also come out as pretty similar. What’s not accounted for by OV-ness can often be put down to areal tendencies such as topic-prominence.

Building on this, and on probable contact before the migration to the Japanese archipelago, Japanese word order also hasn't changed very much from Old Japanese, both being SOV, tending to put the verb as close to the end of the clause as they can, marking case and topicality with particles. No sound change has been radical enough to erode it, though a few of the particles have been replaced or shifted in meaning. The similarity between certain particles in Japanese and Korean can also be accounted for by the fact that they're nearly all short words composed of fairly common sounds.

[Imralu]

SOV head final languages tend to share a lot of syntactic features in common because of their head-final phrase structure: adjectives before nouns, relative clauses before nouns, possessors before possessa, case suffixes and postpositions. If you mix and match, there are often more ambiguities.

For example, in a more head-initial language like English, we say "people in houses", with "in houses" being the modifier of "people". If you put the modifier first, like "in houses people", it may not be clear that it's modifier+head and it may just look like a prepositional phrase with a compound noun phrase inside it. It's much clearer if the adposition comes between the two nouns so its scope can be easily identified. Also, an adposition is the head of it's phrase, so truly consistent languages apply that pattern to all types of phrases, not just verb phrases. (English is not a consistent language, with a lot of things like "House buyers buy houses" showing a difference of head position in different types of phrases and it seems to be the result of a lot of IE languages essentially gradually shifting from head-final SOV languages to head-initial SVO languages.)

[bradrn]

SOV head final languages tend to share a lot of syntactic features in common because of their head-final phrase structure: adjectives before nouns, relative clauses before nouns, possessors before possessa, case suffixes and postpositions. If you mix and match, there are often more ambiguities.

For example, in a more head-initial language like English, we say "people in houses", with "in houses" being the modifier of "people". If you put the modifier first, like "in houses people", it may not be clear that it's modifier+head and it may just look like a prepositional phrase with a compound noun phrase inside it. It's much clearer if the adposition comes between the two nouns so its scope can be easily identified. Also, an adposition is the head of it's phrase, so truly consistent languages apply that pattern to all types of phrases, not just verb phrases. (English is not a consistent language, with a lot of things like "House buyers buy houses" showing a difference of head position in different types of phrases and it seems to be the result of a lot of IE languages essentially gradually shifting from head-final SOV languages to head-initial SVO languages.)

The weird thing is that it’s not just word order: e.g. OV languages tend to be cased and have nouny adjectives, VO languages tend to be non-cased and have verby adjectives. Why? I don’t have a clue. It’s just one of those inexplicable phenomena you regularly get in linguistics.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

Does that make Japanese odd for having verby adjectives?

[Imralu]

The weird thing is that it’s not just word order: e.g. OV languages tend to be cased and have nouny adjectives, VO languages tend to be non-cased and have verby adjectives. Why? I don’t have a clue. It’s just one of those inexplicable phenomena you regularly get in linguistics.

The case thing doesn't surprise me at all. I'm guessing that postpositions more easily erode to become case suffixes than prepositions erode to become case prefixes. I can't think of any language right now that has case prefixes (other than, like, arguably French with it's opposition between absolutive l(ə)- / l(a)- / le(z)- and genitive/partitive dy- / dəl(a)- / de(z)-). Can't think of a reason for the differing qualities of adjectives, but yeah, a lot of stuff just seems to have flow-on effects. I know Turkish adjectives are pretty nouny. I thought Japanese adjectives were generally pretty verby though, although I remember there's a few different classes of them from memory.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

Japanese i-adjectives are verby (there used to be several interesting competing forms of these, too):

青い「あおい」aoi — "blue, is blue"
青くない「あおくない」aokunai — "not blue, is not blue"
青かった「あおかった」aokatta — "(was) blue"
青くなかった「あおくなかった」aokunakatta — "(was) not blue"
青くて「あおくて」aokute — "was blue and..."
青ければ「あおければ」aokereba — "If it's blue"

I've only seen a hypothetical adjective once, though; I don't think they're very common.

Japanese na-adjectives are presented to you in textbooks as if they were verby, but are usually nouny:

静かな「しずかな」shizukana — "quiet"
静か(である)「しずか(である)」shizuka de aru — "is quiet" (this conjugates mostly as if you simply tack a copula, of which there are several, onto it)
静かなら「しずかなら」shizuka nara — "if it's quiet"

The な (na) is a remnant of an earlier auxiliary verb なる (naru), a contraction of earlier にある (ni aru). Attaching the copula aru, ari to particles and verbs seems to have been common in Old Japanese. A number of modern verbs look to be derived from it, as was the archaic past form in -keri. The modern past tense in -ta/-da, which forms can also be a kind of ambiguously verby (it is a verby form) or nouny (I don't think you can inflect it further) adjective (verbs themselves can also be put in front of nouns and used attributively) adjective, also derives from such a contraction — てあり/てある (te ari/te aru) > たり/たる (tari/taru) > た/だ (ta/da).

I guess there's also a tendency here for formerly verby things to end up... particle-y (cf. なら (nara) and たら (tara), both contextually "if", or sometimes "when", derived from a hypothetical inflection of the copula with one of those particles attached to it).

[Pabappa]

actually, i wouldnt be surprised if Korean and Japanese were indeed related, but ... putting the most recent common ancestor at just 2000 BC should be off the table. that's less than the distance between the different branches of IE .... where we can see clear correspondences between languages and, indeed, have a pretty good guess at what the original language was like.

also, since we have attestations of both languages going back to about 700 AD, that's really just 2700 years of separation, so if they really were related, we'd expect to see even more similarity in the earliest attested stages, which, so far as I know, is not the case.

if Korean and Japanese are related I'd say it's likely they branched away from each other so far back that we'll never really know.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

Now that you put it that way, I suppose it wouldn't be that surprising.

[Ketsuban]

Surface similarities between Korean and Japanese are almost certainly coincidental - the Korean verbal complex is of relatively recent origin, and its grammatical particles share only a passing resemblance to their counterparts in Japanese (e.g. が and 가 looks like a slam dunk, but は doesn't really look anything like 는). Attestations of Old Korean exist but are far more sparse than Old Japanese - we don't get anything of substance until the Middle Korean of the 15th century.

That said, if you want a reconstruction of the ancestor of both Korean and Japanese, I don't know of anything freely available which is better than Francis-Ratte's 2016 dissertation.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

I did read through that for inspiration once.

[Linguoboy]

Czech has had 1000 years of college contact with German (including several hundred years when everyone above a peasant spoke German) and Czech does not look like German grammatically.

Doesn't it? I mean, it's not an active-stative OSV language, is it?

I guess what you're saying is that if prolonged contact is enough to account for the similarities between Korean and Japanese, you'd expect what appears to you to be a more prolonged and intense contact between German and Czech to lead to more similarities than it has. But why? Why would you expect such a simplistic correlation?

[alice]

Possibly flippant observation: there are two types of language, those which resemble your mother tongue, and those which don't.

[Linguoboy]

Japanese i-adjectives are verby (there used to be several interesting competing forms of these, too):

青い「あおい」aoi — "blue, is blue"
青くない「あおくない」aokunai — "not blue, is not blue"
青かった「あおかった」aokatta — "(was) blue"
青くなかった「あおくなかった」aokunakatta — "(was) not blue"
青くて「あおくて」aokute — "was blue and..."
青ければ「あおければ」aokereba — "If it's blue"

For comparison, some corresponding Korean forms:

푸르다 /phuluta/ "is blue"
푸른 /phulun/ "blue/which is blue" [relative/modifying form]
푸르지 않다 /phuluci anh.ta/ "is not blue"
푸르지 않은 /phuluci anh.un/ "not blue/which is not blue" [relative/modifying form]
푸르렀다 /phululess.ta/ "was blue"
푸르지 않았다 /phuluci anh.ass.ta/ "was not blue"
푸르렀고 /phululess.ko/ "was blue and..."
푸르면 /phulu.myen/ "if it's blue"

I've only seen a hypothetical adjective once, though; I don't think they're very common.

In Korean, these form a small closed class of heterogeneous origin. The most common is 새 /say/ "new".

The Korean parallel to Japanese na-adjectives would be hata-adjectives.

고요함 /koyoham/ "tranquility"
고요하다 /koyohata/ "is tranquil"
고요하면 /koyoha.myen/ "if it's tranquil"

These are formed from nouns with the addition of the light verb 하다 /hata/, which is also used to derive action verbs in the same manner as the Japanese verb する /suru/. However, when 하다 is used to form descriptive verbs, it takes descriptive verb inflexions and when it derives action verbs, it takes action verb inflections:

평정하다 /phyengcenghata/ "is peaceful" vs 평정한다 /phyengcenghanta/ "pacifies"
평정한 /phyengcenghan/ "peaceful; which is peaceful" vs 평정하는 /phyengcengha.nun/ "pacifying; which pacifies"

[Rounin Ryuuji]

Japanese i-adjectives are verby (there used to be several interesting competing forms of these, too):

青い「あおい」aoi — "blue, is blue"
青くない「あおくない」aokunai — "not blue, is not blue"
青かった「あおかった」aokatta — "(was) blue"
青くなかった「あおくなかった」aokunakatta — "(was) not blue"
青くて「あおくて」aokute — "was blue and..."
青ければ「あおければ」aokereba — "If it's blue"

For comparison, some corresponding Korean forms:

푸르다 /phuluta/ "is blue"
푸른 /phulun/ "blue/which is blue" [relative/modifying form]
푸르지 않다 /phuluci anh.ta/ "is not blue"
푸르지 않은 /phuluci anh.un/ "not blue/which is not blue" [relative/modifying form]
푸르렀다 /phululess.ta/ "was blue"
푸르지 않았다 /phuluci anh.ass.ta/ "was not blue"
푸르렀고 /phululess.ko/ "was blue and..."
푸르면 /phulu.myen/ "if it's blue"

Interesting; the forms don't seem to be cognate at all.

I've only seen a hypothetical adjective once, though; I don't think they're very common.

In Korean, these form a small closed class of heterogeneous origin. The most common is 새 /say/ "new".

I... meant an adjective conjugated in its -eba form.

Oh, but a few details I left out — that ka in shizuka(na) seems to be some sort of archaic adjectivalising morpheme. In Old Japanese, the i-adjectives actually usually ended in -ki, for which I've encountered a few multiple explanations: one that it's identical to the Classical Past Tense, which is itself possibly related to classical 来 (ku), modern 来る (kuru), "come". It's also possivle the -k- morphology (note -kute, -kunai, -kereba) derives from some other earlier verb. A separate adjectival ending in -shi (now regularised to -shii) was originally used as the predicative, with -ki the adnominal, and some of the other forms, like an archaic infinitive in -mi, appear to have been suppletive.

I haven't encountered this expounded upon before, but I notice that the Classical copula was ari rather than aru, so I do suspect that some form of Pre-Japanese had predicative verb forms in */i/, of which the copula and some adjectival morphology in -i may be holdover. I'm less-certain, but I think the -ka, seeming to be a more archaic adjectivaliser, might be connected with the archaic pronominal genitive (and subject marker) ga (which I suspect to be a contraction of the -n- genitive, modern no — some sources say this was originally a verb which meant "which is", and some sort of *ka-particle)

The Korean parallel to Japanese na-adjectives would be hata-adjectives.

고요함 /koyoham/ "tranquility"
고요하다 /koyohata/ "is tranquil"
고요하면 /koyoha.myen/ "if it's tranquil"

These are formed from nouns with the addition of the light verb 하다 /hata/, which is also used to derive action verbs in the same manner as the Japanese verb する /suru/. However, when 하다 is used to form descriptive verbs, it takes descriptive verb inflexions and when it derives action verbs, it takes action verb inflections:

평정하다 /phyengcenghata/ "is peaceful" vs 평정한다 /phyengcenghanta/ "pacifies"
평정한 /phyengcenghan/ "peaceful; which is peaceful" vs 평정하는 /phyengcengha.nun/ "pacifying; which pacifies"

Seeing the parallel forms in action is nice; thank you.

Surface similarities between Korean and Japanese are almost certainly coincidental - the Korean verbal complex is of relatively recent origin...

How recent, do you think? Our earliest attestations of Japanese have it as a heavily-inflected language, so it sounds as if it may have been a strong areal influencer for the development of inflections in Koreanic (if a substratum is capable of having that sort of influence).

[Linguoboy]

Surface similarities between Korean and Japanese are almost certainly coincidental - the Korean verbal complex is of relatively recent origin...

How recent, do you think? Our earliest attestations of Japanese have it as a heavily-inflected language, so it sounds as if it may have been a strong areal influencer for the development of inflections in Koreanic (if a substratum is capable of having that sort of influence).

I read this as saying that the particular forms are of recent origin. I don't think there's any strong evidence that older forms of Korean had substantially less inflectional morphology than contemporary forms (though I would think it likely that the multiplicity of speech levels--the modern language is considered to have seven--is a relatively recent development).