Korea since early times has employed two languages: Chinese for writings and native Korean for speech, Chinese if spoken being an acquirement like French in America. The literature in Chinese is some times translated into Korean, however; and the work of the missionaries in making general use of the en-mun or native script has reacted to the great appreciation by the Koreans of their own language. The reforms are pro claimed in the vernacular.
Korean is of a not extreme agglutinative type, belonging to the polysyllabic branch of the Mongol-Tartar languages like Japanese, and unlike the monosyllabic Chinese; it is structurally unrelated to the latter, though it has very many Chinese loan-words, pronounced after its own phonology. Its resemblances to Japanese are far closer : mutual translations word for word, and even particle for particle, are quite feasible. The particles and gram matical terminations in both represent punctua tion, emphasis and inflection of nouns and verbs. The honorific vocabulary — almost a complete ceremonial language even in construc tion, to express relations between superiors and inferiors and equals—is common to both. The differences are mainly euphonic: Korean vowels are heavily assimilated to those which follow, the syllables need not end with a vowel, and the spelling is as irregular as English, none of which is true of Japanese.
The grammar of Korean is extremely flexi ble and pregnant; like Chinese, the roots are invariable. There are no inflectional forms for number, person or case, or conjunction of verbs, and no form for gender; all are indi cated by particles without meaning, or whose meaning has been lost, affixed to the stem, and varying with its terminal letter, as consonant, vowel or liquid. There are no pronouns of the first and second person; the third, with rela tional particles, serving for both. Development has expended itself on the verbs, which are marvels of varied, flexible and ingenious ex pressiveness. Many words not primarily verbs can be turned into them (as in English), and these with the true verbs constitute 20 per cent of the entire vocabulary. The grammatical forms of the verb are said to average 300. Adjectives and adverbs are not distinguished from the verbs, and the prepositions are verb forms. All conditions expressed by inflections in Western languages — present, continuing, past, unfin ished or completed, optative, subjunctive, po tential, interrogative, participial, etc.—exist in Korean, and a vast number of others expressed by us in long sentences. Some verbs have no passive, but all have a negative voice. There is no number; the three persons in every vari ant are expressed by courtesy forms — one to or of superiors, one for equals, one for in feriors or of things. The syntax is positional, as with Chinese. The object precedes the verb or other governing word, the prepositions are postpositions, the adjective precedes the noun it qualifies and the adverb its verb or adjective (as in English). A dependent clause precedes its principal.
Korean has an alphabet of 25 letters, 14 consonants and 11 vowels, a very simple and scientific one, analyzed by organs of speech. The vowels are a, ya, 0, yu, o, yo, u, yu, i, eu, a; with the diphthongs 6, e, e'. The consonants are—labials, p, ph, m; dentals, t, th, n, 1; palatals, ch, chh, s; gutturals, k, kh; laryngeals. ( ?) h, ng final. There are no letters f, v, w. b, d, g, j or z, though (except the first, which is replaced by p) they exist in speech. There is but one character for 1 and r, and neither of them can begin a word, their place being taken by n. The characters — women and children's only, the true "learned" characters being Chi nese — are of an extreme simplicity, contrast ing strongly with the complex Chinese; and there is a cursive form. This alphabet is called
en-mun, "the vulgar"; and there is a system called nido, in which the letters are grouped in the 199 possible combinations and learned by rote. The writing is in syllables, in columns from right to left, as with Chinese. There is already a very respectable volume of Christian literature expressed in en-mun and the news papers of the capital and large cities are printed in this character.
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