Korean is likely an Altaic language (along with Turkic, Mongolian, Tungusic languages) spoken by some 65 million
people in the Korean penninsula, northeast China, Russia, Japan and North America. It is an Subject-Object-Verb
language which, like the Tungusic languages, lacks number, gender, articles, fusional morphology, relative pronouns,
conjunctions, vowel harmony and agglutination. It became the dominate language of the Korean Penninsula around the
10th century AD. Originally Chinese characters were used for writing but, because the languages are unrelated
lexically and structurally, this system could not adequately be used to represent the language. In the 15th century,
King Sejong invented an alphabetic script for the language (Hang.l) but both systems of writing contiued to be used
until the 20th century when Hang.l became predominate.
Because of the use of Chinese characters and the massive influx of Chinese loan words, today more than half the
vocablary of Korean is derived from Mandarin. Although in many cases native Korean and Chinese loan words existed
side by side, native Korean vocabulary had through time fallen into disuse. Since World War II and the division of
the penninsula into North and South Korea, different language policies have been persued. In North Korea, only Hang.l
is used and the government has an active policy of reintroducing originally Korea vocabulary. In the south, both
Korean and Chinese writing systems continue to be used and there is no official purification movement.
For further information about Korean, please visit the Wikipedia.
|
Dictionaries:
Korean-English dictionary which is used for Information Retrieval
contains 35336 entries including proper names list as described below:
1. Korean proper names list containing 3920 Korean proper names.
2. Korean person names list with 790 entries. Each entry includes its category and
the English translation.
3. Korean place names list with 445 entries. Each entry has a category and
the English translation.
4. Korean organization names list with 1212 entries. Each entry has
its category and the English translation.
5. Other proper names list with 114 entries. Each entry contains its English
translation.
|
|
