Re: FYI re: Greenberg's Universals

On Tue, 3 Oct 2000, Marcus Smith wrote:

> Yoon Ha Lee wrote:
>
> >   In Korean the
> >influence of Chinese seems mainly to be in the writing and in loan words,
> >*not* the grammar.
>
> Tough to say.  Vocabulary has certainly been influenced in Japanese and
> Korean.  But what about things like the sentence final question
> particles?  Or the fact that wh-words don't move to the beginning of the
Okay, I did think of the sentence final question particle, but I think in
conversation at least it's optional.

Eodi kasseo?  Where did you go?
Eodi kassu-kka?  Where could you have gone?

Hmm.  Maybe that's not quite right either.  :-(  I was thinking of
Japanese ka.

Yeogi isseo?  Are you here?
Yeogi isseokka?  Might you be here?

<banging head in frustration>  ARGH!  *Someone* here ought to know more
Korean than I do!  I do have readers, but they're no good at figuring out
grammatical features (one of them is this "Business Korean" thing--no
help there!)

YHL, regretting she didn't learn Korean better in her past