Korean language is an unclassified language now. It has been compared with various languages, but not with the Bengali language. However specific and detailed similarities were found overcoming typological similarities between Korean and Bengali. This...
Korean language is an unclassified language now. It has been compared with various languages, but not with the Bengali language. However specific and detailed similarities were found overcoming typological similarities between Korean and Bengali. This study is an comparative to examine the possibility that Korean and Bengali belong to same language family.
Bengali became to belong under Indo-European language family because of a misunderstanding about Sanskrit language. It is a commonly accepted theory that North-Indian languages including Bengali were from Sanskrit. But actually those languages were developed from the language of the Indus Valley Civilization through the Prakrit language and the Āpābhrāngṣā language to each of the current languages.
Sanskrit language with the meaning of ‘refined language’ was never spoken, but an artificial language only to write the sacred books of the Aryan who were ruling class. At that time the commonly used language by the people was the Prakrit language having the meaning of ‘natural language’.
The conclusion of the Indo-European language family was made according to the Sanskrit language. But as it is in a position of a borrowed-language, it is not an appropriate language to compare with the European languages. Therefore north-Indian languages including Bengali can not belong to European language family. Not only Bengali, but all the north-Indian languages are different from the European languages typologically. So it is obvious that they must be different diachronically as well.
The method of study used here is the comparison of phonology and grammar. Though it is commonly recognized that the comparison without regular sound correspondence between two languages is meaningless, we must remember that Bopp concluded Indo-European language family by the comparison of grammar, not by the sound correspondence. All the more, sound correspondence is used in the comparison of basic vocabulary. It is well known that vocabulary is the easiest to be borrowed among sound, grammar and vocabulary. Therefore comparing the phonology and the grammar is much more reliable than sound correspondence.
The consonant systems of Korean and Bengali are almost identical. Both have lax, tense and aspirated consonants at bilabial plosive, alveolar plosive, palatal affricate, velar plosive sounds. And both have almost identical glottal fricative, liquid, lateral, nasal sounds. A noticeable difference is the use of retroflex sounds in Bengali that is originated from Dravidian Languages of south India.
The vowel systems of the two languages are almost identical, too. Both languages have the same /i, e, ē, a, ā, o, u/ sounds, and only the /ā/ sound has a minute difference. A noticeable difference between the two languages of vowel sounds is that Korean has /[ɨ]/ sound that Bengali does not.
In addition, both languages have the CVC syllable structure. At the comparison of suprasegmental phoneme, sound length is distinguishable in both languages, but getting lessened. And both languages have a similarity of using emphasis stress.
Both languages have no distinction of gender, and do not use definite or indefinite articles. An interesting point is that they have dependent nouns and measuring dependent nouns. They do not have a category of grammar for number. Thus, the distinction that is single or plural is not applied formally anywhere.
Both languages have personal, demonstrative, interrogative, reflexive, indefinite pronoun. And the case of the pronoun is decided by particle. Furthermore, demonstrative pronouns are made by the combination of a determiner and a dependent noun.
Both languages have honorific expressions at pronoun. They have each pronoun for honorific, common and humble expression. Both languages use the pronouns of the 3rd person without the distinction of gender.
Korean and Bengali both use particles which are subjective, genitive, dative, objective, predicative, adverbial and special particles. And particles can be omitted when the case relation is clear.
The verb of both Bengali and Korean is composed of verb stem / prefinal ending / final ending. And the tense of both languages is expressed by the prefinal ending. An auxiliary verb gets located behind a general verb, and they form a compound verb by combining the general verb, the connective ending and the auxiliary verb.
Korean and Bengali have SOV word order typologically. For causative expression, both languages have derivative and syntactic causation sentence to make general verb into causative verb. Honorific expression is made by the category of grammar not by vocabulary.
To summarize the points mentioned above, we could reach a conclusion that Korean and Bengali Language belong to the same language family potentially. If it is accepted that both languages belong to a same language family through more studies, we can call it Indo-Korean Language Family that includes North-Indian languages which consist of Bengali, Hindi, Assamese, Nepali, Singhali etc.
，韩语论文范文，韩语毕业论文 |
