Why do Korean and Japanese seem to relex each other?

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Ithisa
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Why do Korean and Japanese seem to relex each other?

Post by Ithisa »

Korean and Japanese seem to be complete relexifications of each other. Of course I mean syntax, not morphology (Japanese verb conjugation is based upon recursive stem-forming; from the smatterings of Korean verb conjugation I learned from Wikipedia, Korean seems to use ad-hoc agglutination far more). But really, you can gloss a Korean sentence and a Japanese sentence and get exactly the same thing.

Google Translate also seems to able to almost losslessly translate between Korean and Japanese and back; as GT uses statistical methods based on syntax and especially word order, this shows how close the syntax are.

Yet the phonology and words are vastly different, showing Korean and Japanese seem not to be related. But why is the sprachbund effect so strong in syntax, to the point where Korean/Japanese seem total relexes (actually, even more relex than "English relex" conlangs) of each other down to intricate details of grammar (how pro-drop exactly works; all the semantic nuances of topical vs. nominative, etc), but not have any significant amount of loanwords from each other? Usually sprachbunds (say, Uralic/IE) do involve large amounts of loanwords and similar phonology, and also borrowing of morphemes (say, Finnish verbs vs. Latin verbs) but NOT wholesale syntax (Finnish syntax superficially looks IE but is much different in the detailed nuances from, say, Latin). SE Asia is another similar sprachbund, with lots of common phonology (tones), general typology (VSO, analytic), but not large-scale syntactic structures.

What causes two languages to heavily borrow syntactic structure, becoming near relexifications of each other, while refraining to borrow grammatical morphemes, words, and phonology?

Also, a minority of people seem to think Korean and Japanese are related despite the inability to reconstruct a proto-language's words. Is "keep syntax but randomly reinvent all the words" an attested process in any language's evolution?
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Re: Why do Korean and Japanese seem to relex each other?

Post by Serena »

Korean and Japanese come both from the same proto-language. However, Korean was largely influenced by Mongolians and Chinese, also undergoing a complex modification of its phonology. On the other hand, Japanese is very conservative and it is more similar to Proto-Japonic than Korean.
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Re: Why do Korean and Japanese seem to relex each other?

Post by Fanael »

Serena wrote:Korean and Japanese come both from the same proto-language.
They may be. Koreo-Japonic is merely a hypothesis. Yes, it's plausible, but plausibility alone doesn't make it true.
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Re: Why do Korean and Japanese seem to relex each other?

Post by Ithisa »

I personally don't believe in the Japonic-Korean theory. "Relex all the words" doesn't seem to be a valid language evolution step.

Take Okinawan. It is a Japonic language, but it did not directly descend from Old Japanese, the oldest attested Japanese. Its vocabulary shows very regular correspondences in phonology with Japanese, although the sound changes are quite complex and cause word shapes to be very different in some cases. However, its grammatical details are different from Japanese. It keeps the unified nominative-genitive case from Proto-Japonic (which limped vestigially until Early Middle Japanese in Japanese), lost the accusative case, and completely lacks the Modern Japanese innovation around all the different uses of the copula. It also innovated an analytic verb conjugation system, which later fused through sound changes to a half-fusional, half-agglutinative system.

Okinawan is a typical example of an actual sister language. Korean seems to be some Japanese kid's Pig Latin; all the details are same though the words are "reinvented", even counting things that clearly are innovated in Modern Japanese and unattested earlier (all the nuances over が and は almost entirely date from later than the 18th century because が had much different nuances in older Japanese, and は was much more emphatic (Japanese used to simply use the bare noun as a nominative)), yet Korean has all of them. Why do syntactic innovations in nooks-and-crannies of the language propagate so quickly across the sprachbund (and Korea and Japan are separated by Sea of Japan), while no words, conjugation tables, or morphemes are borrowed?

It seems that the Japanese and Koreans have a history of ripping off each others' syntax. Early Middle Japanese syntax was quite different from that of Modern Korean, but somewhat similar (although not nearly as similar as Modern Japanese and Korean) to Middle Korean.
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Re: Why do Korean and Japanese seem to relex each other?

Post by Serena »

Actually some morphemes are borrowed, but I think it happened too recently.

For example, Korean subject particle I 이 was the only subject particle and at some point Ga 가 was introduced. We can see it in some pronouns:

Ko 거 + I/ga 이/가 = goga 거가
거 + I/ga 이/가 = goi 거이 > ge 게

However it's indeed strange that no non-chinese words look alike.
Last edited by Serena on 28 Nov 2013 21:49, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Why do Korean and Japanese seem to relex each other?

Post by sangi39 »

While I have no knowledge of native grammars of either Korean or Japanese, if we look at various European languages, they have often been described using Latin or Greek terminology, sometimes attempting to fit the languages features around one of those two languages (we can look to the "split infinitive" as one example of this in English). Is it possible that at some point, native Korean descriptions relied so heavily on Japanese that writers attempted to use Japanese nuances which differed from those of Korean?

I don't know whether it's plausible, or how native grammarians of either Korean or Japanese described their own languages, so this is all pure thought, really [:P]
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Re: Why do Korean and Japanese seem to relex each other?

Post by Serena »

sangi39 wrote:I don't know whether it's plausible, or how native grammarians of either Korean or Japanese described their own languages, so this is all pure thought, really [:P]
Actually I have read a few grammar notes about korean written by koreans, and it doesn't look like Japanese at all.
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Re: Why do Korean and Japanese seem to relex each other?

Post by Ithisa »

As I'm said, the morphology and things like verb conjugation are very different, so clearly terms are different. However, syntax and semantics for different constructions are very similar; i.e., everything that is preserved in glosses is similar.
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Re: Why do Korean and Japanese seem to relex each other?

Post by Ithisa »

Serena wrote:Actually some morphemes are borrowed, but I think it happened too recently.

For example, Korean subject particle I 이 was the only subject particle and at some point Ga 가 was introduced. We can see it in some pronouns:

Ko 거 + I/ga 이/가 = goga 거가
거 + I/ga 이/가 = goi 거이 > ge 게

However it's indeed strange that no non-chinese words look alike.
Is there direct attestation of 가 being borrowed from Japanese?
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Re: Why do Korean and Japanese seem to relex each other?

Post by Ithisa »

Serena wrote:
sangi39 wrote:I don't know whether it's plausible, or how native grammarians of either Korean or Japanese described their own languages, so this is all pure thought, really [:P]
Actually I have read a few grammar notes about korean written by koreans, and it doesn't look like Japanese at all.
Historically what "sangi39" said may well have happened. It is well attested that the "machine translation" or glossing algorithm of Classical Chinese into (very stilted and unnatural) Early Middle Japanese (漢文訓読) - for reading by people who don't actually know Chinese - was adapted from a similar algorithm in use slightly earlier in Korea for mechanical translation into bad Korean. 漢文訓読 did have a large influence on the grammar of Japanese, mostly its large amounts of Chinese-influenced idioms (which were clearly preserved in the mechanical translation) and certain constructions (liberal use of genitive as attributive particle being an example).
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Re: Why do Korean and Japanese seem to relex each other?

Post by Hakaku »

Well, there's the idea that Japanese was originally spoken in the Korean Peninsula. At the time, other languages, possibly related to Korean or Japanese, would have also been spoken in the area. It's possible that both Japanese and Silla Korean were influenced by these languages, but weren't influencing each other directly, which could account for the seemingly lack of direct cognates between the two languages, as well as the similarity of their syntax, which could easily have been an areal feature.

There's also the problem with Japanese being a CV(N) language. Assuming the proto-language historically had a more complex syllable structure, it's possible that a lot of information would have been lost as a result. Combine this with the possibility of vowel harmony, and reconstruction would be difficult. The other major issue is Chinese influence. Both Japanese and Korean have been incredibly influenced by Chinese, but not always in the same ways, so we don't always find the same borrowings in use or the same displacements in native vocabulary.

With the available data today, no one has been able to prove a strong relationship between the two languages. If one did exist at some point, then the deviation would have occurred much much further than two thousand years ago. Given such a time frame, any cognates that do exist would likely have deviated significantly on the semantic level.

I also blame a lack of available data on Korean. I mean, very little has been published on Korean dialects in comparison to those of Japanese.
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Re: Why do Korean and Japanese seem to relex each other?

Post by Ithisa »

Old Japanese had a CV structure without even an N. In any case, I think that if there are cognates, things like correspondences among the initial consonants should be fairly obvious. Say, Slavic languages' vocab is difficult to eyeball as belonging into the same family as English, but once you actually try to trace the sound changes, they are fairly regular.

My main question is how did the two languages absorb each other's recent innovations so readily? They can't just happen to independently evolve in such a way that the syntax stays so in sync, without respect to any possible ancient areal/genetic relationship. Modern Korean syntax is very much Modern Japanese-ish, much more so than Early Middle Japanese syntax is similar to Modern Japanese.
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Re: Why do Korean and Japanese seem to relex each other?

Post by Serena »

Ithisa wrote:Is there direct attestation of 가 being borrowed from Japanese?
There is no official truth about this, but it is a theory...
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Re: Why do Korean and Japanese seem to relex each other?

Post by Ithisa »

When is the earliest attestation of 가? Japanese が as a general-purpose subject particle was quite recent; が used to be a genitive particle that acted as a nominative in some cases, but mostly a genitive (still preserved in words like 我が).
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Re: Why do Korean and Japanese seem to relex each other?

Post by Hakaku »

Ithisa wrote:In any case, I think that if there are cognates, things like correspondences among the initial consonants should be fairly obvious. Say, Slavic languages' vocab is difficult to eyeball as belonging into the same family as English, but once you actually try to trace the sound changes, they are fairly regular.
Not quite. If the languages really were at a time depth of way over two thousand years, then there would be some significant semantic drift between the two, making the search for correspondences quite difficult. Even if they weren't related, any borrowings would be heavily skewed over that time period. If you also factor in the fact that over 60% of Japanese vocabulary is borrowed from Chinese, and likely about the same percentage for Korean, then finding cognates will be hard since the native terms may no longer exist in one or the other language.

In comparison, Proto-Slavic only seems to go back a few centuries BCE, which is a comparably much shorter timeframe that makes it easier to see correspondences.
Ithisa wrote:My main question is how did the two languages absorb each other's recent innovations so readily? They can't just happen to independently evolve in such a way that the syntax stays so in sync, without respect to any possible ancient areal/genetic relationship. Modern Korean syntax is very much Modern Japanese-ish, much more so than Early Middle Japanese syntax is similar to Modern Japanese.
Ignoring any relationship, languages in contact can influence each other very easily. For example, French dialects in contact with English will tend to borrow a very English-like syntax, adding prepositions at the end of phrases, changing verb arguments, calquing, etc.

English: "I miss you"
Standard French: Tu me manques. (you me miss)
Regional French: Je te manque. (I you miss)

English: "I support you"
Standard French: Je te soutiens.
Regional French: Je te supporte.

English: "The girl (that) I talked about"
Standard French: "La fille dont je t'ai parlé" (the.F girl of_whom I you=aux talked)
Regional French: "La fille que je t'ai parlé de" (the.F girl that I you=aux talked about)

In these three examples of regional Canadian French, no borrowing from English appears, but we do see calquing, noticeable syntax changes and similarities between verb and preposition usage, among other things. Given this, a similar phenomenon likely happened with Japanese, Korean and the other languages spoken in the Korean peninsula.

However, unless you can provide examples of how modern Japanese syntax is closer to Korean than to Middle Japanese or earlier forms, I'd have to reject that idea as pure speculation.
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Re: Why do Korean and Japanese seem to relex each other?

Post by Ketsuban »

I apologise for necrobumping; I read an administrator's post elsewhere that they're okay with it as long as new information is added, but I can't find it now because I can't remember the synonym of "necrobump" they used.
Ithisa wrote: 28 Nov 2013 17:37 Also, a minority of people seem to think Korean and Japanese are related despite the inability to reconstruct a proto-language's words.
"Inability" is a bit of an overstatement, but you're right that it's distinctly nontrivial - both branches of the family underwent some large-scale changes in phonology, and Korean's first unambiguous attestation is comparatively late (Middle Korean written in hangul dates to the 15th century CE, with older attestations written in Chinese characters which are very much not straightforward to read).

The most recent work on reconstructing the common ancestor of Japonic and Korean that I know about is Alexander Francis-Ratte's 2016 dissertation. Here's an example of the difficulty in reconstructing a common ancestor for these languages, which Dr Francis-Ratte explained to me in more detail when I contacted them about it. The dissertation lists two possible etymologies for Old Japanese koto "different", but they're more confident in this one.

Old Japanese koto "different" : Middle Korean thul- "twist/turn something"; thulGí- "be wrong"; thúm "difference, gap"

thúm and thul- indicate an underlying *thu- via the addition of nominalizer -m and continuative -(o/u)l- morphemes respectively. Aspirated consonants in Middle Korean descend from crasis of *k or *h with a plain consonant, hence *kutu / *hutu, either of which could correspond to Old Japanese koto /kətə/ - the latter would be proto-Korean-Japanese *kɨtɨ, the former *xɨtɨ.
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Re: Why do Korean and Japanese seem to relex each other?

Post by Khemehekis »

Ketsuban wrote: 25 Mar 2019 01:42 I apologise for necrobumping; I read an administrator's post elsewhere that they're okay with it as long as new information is added, but I can't find it now because I can't remember the synonym of "necrobump" they used.
Maybe "necroing"? Or "necromancy"?
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