Typological Distance Between Korean And The Other Languages Of Asia

• Authors: Yuri Tambovtsev
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

The present typological study of the Korean language is based on the frequency of occurrence of consonants in comparison to sound chains of various languages of Asia. The article deals with the typological distances between Korean and some languages of Asia from the point of view of the frequency of occurrence of consonants in the speech sound chain, which creates the sound picture of any language. Actually, the chosen 8 phonetic features (labial, front. palatal, velar, sonorant, occlusive, fricative and voiced) are the most informative from the phonetic point of view, since they cover all the three main classifications of consonants: 1) the classification from the point of view of the work of the active organ of speech production, which is often called the place of articulation; 2) the classification by the manner of articulation; 3) the classification by the work of vocal cords. It was discovered that some languages are closer to Japanese and some to Korean. Though Japanese and Korean are considered isolated languages, Turkic languages are closer to Korean than the other languages. In fact, such Turkic languages as Tatar-Baraba (5.20), Turkish (5.64), Ujgur (5.70), Tatar-Chulym (6.24), Dolgan (7.31), Tatar-Crimean (7.71), Tatar-Kazan (7.53), Jakutian (7.58) are closer to Korean than Japanese (7.88). Therefore one can come to the conclusion, that those linguists who place Korean in to the Altaic language unity are quite correct.

Keywords

EN

typology; Korean; phonetics; language taxonomy

• Publisher: Poznańskie Towarzystwo Przyjaciół Nauk
• Journal: Lingua Posnaniensis
• Year: 2008
• Volume: 50
• Pages: 177-186

Contributors

author

Yuri Tambovtsev

• Department of English and Linguistics of NPU P. O. Box 104, Novosibirsk-123 630123, Russia