Certain consonants when in the final position in the morpheme become a strongly dentalized sound (Ramsey, 1977). Thus, t, tt fortis, unaspirated t, t' (fortis, aspired t), s, ch, and c6?, and ch' (fortis aspirated ch) all are pronounced as if they were t when they occur in the final position.
Intermorphemic Sound Change
Sound change between syllables is an important feature of the pronunciation of Korean morphemes. This feature, also true of Japanese, is made more difficult for the reader of Korean because it is an orthographic convention that the shape of the individual syllable (morpheme) should be preserved (Jakobson, 1971). Although the Korean alphabet itself is highly phonetic, the orthographic convention to preserve the written appearance of the syllable means that the reader must learn a large number of standardized sound changes that occur in the intersyllable position.
Intermorphemic Sound Movement
Sound movement between syllables also occurs. When a syllable that ends in a consonant is followed by a syllable beginning with a vowel, the final consonantal sound passes over to the next syllable. This passage of sound is not represented orthographically.
Nonclustering of Initial Consonants
Clusters of consonants at the beginning of a syllable are not characteristic, there being no equivalents of English sk, st, str, sb, and so on (Vovin, 1997).
Animacy, definiteness and gender.
The vowel system of Korean is as complex as the system of consonants. There arc three ranges of vowels: standard vowels (monophthongs), vowel sounds beginning with y (rising diphthongs), and a wide range of full diphthongs and diphthongs beginning with the sound w. The basic vowels of the monophthong series are pronounced similarly to the vowels of the Romance languages (Jakobson, 1971). The monophthongs are a, 6, o, u, and u. The y series of rising diphthongs are ya, yo, yo, yu. The principal diphthongs number 11, although other combinations are possible. Vowels are characterized by phonemic length, which refers to an alteration in tonal height. There is evidence of an earlier stage of vowel harmony that exists as a residual characteristic in certain linguistic contexts.
Grammar and Syntax
General Features
Korean is an agglutinative language with strong elements of fusion and analytical development. The morphological development of word derivation is a well-developed feature of the grammar of the language. Nouns possess a wealth of case forms, possess the grammatical category of specification, and do not possess grammatical gender (Gruzdeva, 1987). There are forms of demonstrative pronouns that indicate varying degrees of spatial relationship.
Number
There are two types of numeral systems: the indigenous Korean system, and the Sino-Korean system that was borrowed as an entire loanword system (Hankwukhak, 1988). Along with the numeral system, there is a system of classifiers that are bound morphemes used as counting words to refer to objects, animals, or people.
Syntactical Markers
The predicative's, verbs, and adjectives of Korean do not have person, number, or gender. They do possess markers indicating social status, tense, and a sentence conclusion. There are three major bands of social status or reference that can be indicated with the special markers, each band containing within it possibilities for further refinements to indicate the precise degree of social relationship existing between the speakers, the listener, or the person spoken about (Hyen, 1995). Tense markers indicate three broad classes of time: the present, the past, and the future (more properly, supposition about the occurrence of an event). Sentence conclusion markers indicate a wide range of moods and meaning, including simple declaration, interrogation, request, demand, suggestion, and reflection. In addition, there are quotative constructions that may be added to the verb to indicate the quotation of a declaration, interrogation, demand, or request (Ramsey, 1977). The structure of the verb is verb stem + honorific infix + tense infix + sentence conclusion marker (vs. + hi + ti + scm). There is a separate lexical form of the verb that is used to place the verb in alphabetical order in dictionaries, lexicons, and word lists.
Verbal tense and aspect systems; mood and negation.
Word order in sentences for both independent and dependent clauses is always in the sequence of subject, object, and predicate. Modifiers, whether of the adjectival or adverbial type, are always in the preposition modifying the word to which they refer (Ramsey, 1991). Syntactic relations between words may be expressed by postpositional) markers, particles, syntactic nouns, adverbial particles, participles, and the infinitive form of predicative's. Thus, a sentence may consist of a series of clauses, such as an extended adjectival...
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