Comparison of Japanese and Korean

The geographically close Japanese and Korean languages share considerable similarity in typological features of their syntax and morphology while having a small number of lexical resemblances and different native scripts (although they both use the Chinese characters, called hanja in Korea and kanji in Japan; see "Writing" section). Observing the said similarities and probable history of Korean migration to prehistoric Japan, linguists have formulated different theories proposing a genetic relationship between them,^{[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8]} though these studies either lack conclusive evidence or were subsets of theories that have suffered large discredit (like versions of the well-known Altaic hypothesis that mainly attempted to group the Turkic, Mongolian and Tungusic languages together).^{[9][10][11][12]} Due to the lack of a sufficient reconstruction of Proto-Japonic and Proto-Korean, any relation between the languages that may have existed may never be conclusively proven (see: Japonic migration from Korea hypothesis and Gaya language).

Overview

	Japanese	Korean
Speakers	125 million	77.2 million
Countries	Japan	South Korea  North Korea
Family	Japonic	Koreanic
Writing	Kanji, Kana	Korean alphabet, Hanja (South Korea)

Grammar

Japanese and Korean both have an agglutinative morphology in which verbs may function as prefixes^[13] and a subject–object–verb (SOV) typology.^[14][15][16] They are both topic-prominent, null-subject languages. Both languages rely heavily on turning nouns into verbs utilizing "to do" (する and 하다).

Modern Korean and Japanese share a similar system of demonstrative pronouns: i~ (이), geu~ (그) and jeo~ (저) for Korean corresponding to the Japanese ko~ (こ), so~ (そ) and a~ (あ)(“this”, “that” and “that over there”). They both lack a compulsory distinction of plurality (for example "an apple" vs "apples" is usually not specifically distinguished).

Japanese and Korean also share the particle system. Korean and the Japonic languages are two of only four extant languages in the world with topic markers. This allows words of different parts of speech to be placed in exactly the same order if some sentences are translated from one language to another. Such direct word for word swapping cannot be so easily done with any other languages, showing that Japanese and Korean are grammatically quite similar.

There are some differences, however. Japanese utilizes passive grammar more frequently than Korean, and has four common verb conjugations to express "if" (〜ならば、〜ば、〜たら、〜と), while Korean has one (-면). Korean also has distinct future tenses (-ㄹ것이다,-겠다) while Japanese often relies on context rather than directly indicating the future nature of a sentence.

Vocabulary

The two languages have previously been thought to not share any cognates (other than loanwords),^[4] for their vocabularies do not phonetically resemble each other. However, a recent 2016 paper proposing a common lineage between Korean and Japanese traces around 500 core words thought to share a common origin. ^[17]

Some previous linguists have listed a tiny amount of translations which may be perceived as phonetic parallels. This is exemplified in the following table:

In addition to the above, there may be a relation between the words for morning (朝, asa; 아침, achim). A historical variant in Korean may have been pronounced "asa" (see: Asadal).

Korean particles and polite grammatical ending conjugations also share a superficial similarity with Japanese. The sentence ending particle ね (ne) has the exact same some sound and function as the Korean counterpart 네 (ne). The Japanese particle が (ga) corresponds with the particle 가 (ga) in function and sound. The honorific ending for questions in Japanese is か (ka), similar to ~까 (gga) in Korean. The informal noun ending in Korean 야 (ya) is similar to the dialectal informal noun ending や (ya) in Japanese (corresponding to だ in standardized Japanese).

Functionally, some peculiar aspects of particles and particle usage are also the same in both languages. For example, the particles も (*mo*) and 도 (*do*) not only share an inclusive function (similar to "too" in English), they also both function to emphasize sheer lack in negative sentences, or sheer intensity in positive sentences. へ and 에 (e) have the same sound and share a similar function. Particles are also used in the same way to form basic vocabulary words. I.e., も (mo) and 도 (do) in the words for *noone* (아무도, 誰も), the similar sounding か (ka) and 가 (ga) particle adding an unknown/questioning element to a word to form the equivalent meaning to English *some*, (i.e. in 뭔가 and 何か, meaning *something*).

However, some percentage of vocabulary in any language may be expected to resemble vocabulary in any other language to a certain extent through random coincidence. The likelihood that a word in one language will be perceived as resembling a word in another language is inversely correlated with the number of phonemes in the word (i.e. the shorter a word is, the more likely it will randomly resemble a short word in another language) and positively correlated with the degree of overlap in the languages' phonological systems (i.e. the more similar the sound systems of the two languages, the more likely it is that any word from one language will be perceived as sounding similar to a word from the other language).

Writing

Both languages use, to some extent, a combination of native scripts and Chinese characters.

Korean is mostly written in the Korean featural alphabet (known as Hangul in South Korea and Chosŏn'gŭl in North Korea). The traditional hanja (Chinese characters adapted for Korean) are sometimes used in South Korea, but only for specific purposes like linguistic or historic study, artistic expression, legal documents, and newspapers. Native Korean words do not use hanja anymore. In North Korea, the hanja have been largely surpressed in an attempt to remove Sinic influence, although they are still used in some cases and the number of hanja taught in North Korean schools is greater than that of South Korean schools.^[18]

Japanese is written with a combination of kanji (Chinese characters adapted for Japanese) and kana (two writing systems representing the same sounds, composed primarily of syllables, each used for different purposes).^[19][20] Unlike Korean Hanja, however, Kanji can be used to write both Sino-Japanese words and Native Japanese words.

Historically, both Japanese and Korean were written solely with Chinese characters, with the writing experiencing a gradual mutation through centuries into its modern form.^[21]

Other features

References

See also

• Japonic languages
• Koreanic languages
• Classification of Japonic languages#Japanese-Korean hypothesis