Language Analysis Project

November 18, 2022 - Ainsley Hall

Korean is more synthetic than English as there is a lot of inflection used throughout the word clusters to display grammatical information such as formality, tenses and whether it is a noun, a verb, etc. The endings of -의, -다, and -를 are added to a morpheme cluster—after the base word—to respectively mark it as an adjective, a verb, or a plural. Korean is reliant on the grammatical sentence structure base that is subject object verb; however, adjectives can be found before or after a noun depending on how they are describing it. Additionally, verbs and nouns are not limited to matching each other’s grammatical tenses as they do not represent gender or plural distinctions. Therefore, each word needs an ending to provide grammatical information and it cannot stand on its own—unlike in English.

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Plural example:

English word: books

Translation: 책 두 or 도서를

Gloss: 책 and 두 or 도서 + 를

Noun “book” (책) and separate word number marker (two – 두);

Noun “book” (책)and plural marker (deul - 를).

The first provided example is the grammatically correct one as Korean does not technically have a plural marker anymore. The way to express the number of items is by putting the noun first and then placing the describing numeral directly after to indicate that there are multiple of that item. I put the second translation down as an example of what a person could say; however, people would know you were a foreigner if you decided to use this grammar as it is not used conversationally anymore. Korean only has one natural plural—the word for people (사람들).

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Tenses:

The past tense marker (웠) is placed after the word stem/root word but before the ending characters that categorize the word as a verb. Since this is an irregular verb, the last syllable of the root word is removed—if possible—to make a shortened version of the word as conjugation can only occur after this step. Then, the past tense marker and the ending with grammatical information can be added on. The second example is of the regular verb, and it does not need a verb ending as this information has been included in the contraction of the second cluster. If a verb ends in ㅗ orㅏ, the characters 았다 should be added after the word stem. If the verb ends in any other way, 었다 should be used instead.

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In Korean, present tense is marked in almost exactly the same way as past tense. However, the root word remains untouched while the present particle (는) is added after it. The verb ending follows both of these parts. The only difference between regular and irregular verb usage here is when speaking in a formal, less formal, or casual tone, the verb ending gets dropped and exchanged for one of the different formal endings. However, this is a different topic entirely and will not be touched upon further in this language analysis.

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Sentence structure:

ENG: The boy saw the man.

KOR: 소년은 남자를 보았다.    

Korean marks nominatives and accusatives on nouns with “postpositions.” These suffixes indicate subject or object. In this case, “the boy” ended with a 은 to indicate a subject noun while “the man” ended with a 를 to indicate an object noun. This is the main marking, but Korean sentences also follow subject, object, verb order so this is another context clue for the normative and accusative.

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ENG: big house

KOR: 큰집

Adjectives can be placed before or after the noun; however, most of the time, they are placed before the noun­—similar to English. Adjectives are easy to identify as they end in -ㄴ rather than the -다 verb ending. The exception to this rule is if it is in a sentence such as “the car is small” or “차가 작다” (noun: car, adjective: small) where there is an auxiliary verb and the adjective’s ending remains in verb form, but it is placed after the noun towards the end of the sentence.

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ENG: The student's book.

KOR: 학생의 책

When conjugating words, -의 is a particle that can be added to the ending of a noun that is the possessor to show that it has possession of something. The noun/possessor always comes before the possessed object.

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ENG: The boy loved the dog.

KOR: 소년은 개를 사랑했다.

Korean word order is subject, object, verb as the sentence “the boy loved the dog” directly translated from Korean changes to “the boy the dog loved.” Therefore, the object of the sentences goes before the verb and the sentence shifts to follow the grammatical rules of the new language.

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Final remarks:

Korean has a larger focus on morphology then English does as some words in English can stand on their own without an added bound morpheme; however, Korean words cannot. For example, English can have “she bakes” with just a third-person pronoun and a conjugated verb, but in Korean “그녀 굽는다,” the verb also has the addition of a specific character for what tense it is (present tense) and a verb marker at the end while English does not need to have those aspects. For syntax, the word order for English is very structured with a subject, verb, object sentence and Korean uses subject, object, verb placement. Additionally, Korean auxiliary verbs can change the sentence structure as the verb and the attached adjective must occur at the end of a sentence rather than before the noun phrase like normal. In English, the auxiliary verbs just remain in the same position next to the verb and do not have movement as the sentence structure does not change.

Both languages have subject, verb, adjective, adverb, prepositions, nouns, etc. However, Korean also has postpositions, formality markers and has a subject object verb rather than subject verb object sentence structure. English plurals just add an -s to the end of the verb while Korean plurals are a character to acknowledge the plural state and the addition of a character to show what tense it is in. Additionally, English is an analytic language and Korean is a synthetic language as it has more of a focus on morpheme clusters over word order since the added bound morphemes are what gives the words their grammatical information.