Re: FYI re: Greenberg's Universals

On Tue, 3 Oct 2000, Marcus Smith wrote:

> Yoon Ha Lee wrote:
>
> ><puzzled look>  Isn't Japanese an agglutinating isolate (or next best
> >thing), like Korean, rather than an isolating language?
>
> Agglutinating?  Yes.  Isolate?  Controversial.  One of the currently most
> popular theories is that Japanese is a form of Old South Korean imported to
> Japan when the northern kingdom of Korea conquered the two southern
> kingdoms.  (Or something like that -- I'm not to current on my Japanese
> historical stuff.)  Supposedly the original inhabitants were Austronesian
Oh, the Three Kingdoms period?  Paekchae, Koguryo and Silla, I think; I
can't remember which was which.  (My mom would kill me.)

The "controversial" was what I meant by "next best thing."  Sorry.  :-p
I've heard several theories on Japanese and Korean and where they fit
into the world's languages, but my understanding was that no one really
had a consensus.  It's a little disappointing--I wouldn't mind having an
edge on learning related languages.  =^)

> >   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
> sentence?  Or the fact that they allow for long distance anaphors (ie, they
> can all say something like "I wish that John gave myself a present", which
> is bad in many other languages)?  Or the fact that all three have
> topicalization?  One thing that is almost definitely due to Chinese is the
> classifiers used with numbers.
I know -ka is the question particle in Japanese, but I can't think of one
in conversational Korean.  OTOH there are fairly noticeable changes
between my grandparents' and parents' Korean and the Korean I grew up
speaking with other kids.  (My grandparents' Korean had the same sounds
as German ö and u-umlaut, except they've now morphed into "wae" and
"wi.")  I would know more about this if I ever finished reading _The
Korean Alphabet_.  :-/

wh-words...hmm.  Conversational:

eodi kanunya?  Where are you going?  eodi = where
mo kajeosseo?  What do you have?  mo = what
wae anwasseo?  Why didn't you come?  wae = why

Far's *I* can tell, wh- words go to the beginning..."anwasseo wae" just
sounds *wrong.*

I'm not sure what's meant by a long-distance anaphor.  How is "I wish
John gave myself a present" different from "I wish John gave me a
present"?  <hoping for enlightenment>  Do you have a Japanese example I
could look at?

I won't argue with topicalization.  :-)  And as for numbers--there are
two number systems, and I know one's from Chinese (il, i, sam, sa, o,
yuk, ch'il, p'al, ku, sip) and one possibly isn't, and I seem to remember
being told it's "native" (hana, dul, saet, naet, daseot, yeoseot, ahop,
yeol).  I think they're used in different situations--the Chinese?
system is sure faster for reciting multiplication tables.  <G>

han saram = one person (Chinese?)
il saram...it sounds odd and I don't ever remember hearing this

However,
sip won = 10 Won (unit of currency) (Chinese?)
yeol won...sounds odd and I also don't remember hearing this.

Maybe one's used with money and the other with people/objects?  Gosh, I
wish I were in Korea right now.  :-(  My mom knows enough about Korean to
answer questions like this, but international phone calls suck.

> Just for the record, I know next to nothing about Korean, so if anything I
> said above does not apply to it, I wouldn't be overly surprised.
'Sokay, I know next to nothing about formal grammar though I can hold my
own in casual speech.  I've spent the past two weeks trying to compose a
letter in Korean for my mom as a surprise, and each paragraph takes
something like an hour even with all the misspellings I *know* I'm
using.  But she's so used to hearing from me in English I thought it
would be a nice thing for her, so I'm still plugging away at that
letter.  No doubt she'll send back a photocopy with corrections.  =^)

I should add I know very little about Japanese.  :-p

ObConLang: letter-writing protocols in conlangs?  I'm holding back on
that for Chevraqis until I have "more basic" things like, oh, greetings.

All I know about Korean letter-writing protocols comes from laboriously
reading my mom's letters.  <guilty look>  I think I can still do
Christmas cards if you allow for spelling mistakes, though.

YHL