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  • The Korean language by Ho-Min Sohn
  • Edward J. Vajda
The Korean language. By Ho-Min Sohn. (Cambridge language surveys.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Pp. xviii, 445.

This newest volume of the excellent series ‘Cambridge language surveys’ builds upon an earlier treatment of the language by the author (Korean, London: Routledge, 1994) which is already out of print. It also nicely complements Suk-Jin Chang’s Korean ([London Oriental and African language library 4] Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1996), making accessible to an English speaking readership a wealth of beautifully explained detail on this important language (with 72 million native speakers, Korean ranks among the world’s top dozen languages).

The book’s contents are arranged in nine chapters. Ch. 1, the introduction, gives a concise typological and sociolinguistic profile of Korean, recounts salient developments in the teaching and scientific study of the language, and discusses writing systems and transcriptions (the book itself makes primary use of the Yale romanization). Ch. 2 is an excellent survey of scholarship on the possible external genetic affiliations of Korean. The author favors a connection with Japanese and Altaic but gives balanced treatment to evidence other scholars have published to suggest some sort of affinity with Austronesian or Dravidian. Ch. 3 discusses Korean history and provides a good account of the language’s diachronic development, with particular attention to changes since the Middle Korean period. Ch. 4 is a detailed account of contemporary Korean dialects, including the development during the twentieth century of separate standard language forms in North and South Korea. Ch. 5 discusses the lexicon and the various sources of borrowed vocabulary. Over 60% of modern Korean words derive ultimately from Chinese roots, but lists also cover loans from Japanese, English, German, Portuguese, and several other languages. Ch. 6 returns to the issue of writing systems, beginning with three versions of the Chinese-character based Itwu script used to write the language before the fifteenth century. There follows a detailed description of the creation and evolution of Hankul, the native alphabet devised under King Sejong in the 1440s. The chapter ends with a comparison of romanization schemes (over twenty have been devised, with the Yale and McCune-Reischauer achieving the greatest currency) and a discussion of the divergent writing conventions practiced by the two Koreas (North Korea effectively dropped the use of Chinese characters for writing Sino-Korean words as early as 1949 while in the South the characters continue to be used in newspapers despite occasional government attempts to stop teaching them in schools and have them replaced entirely by Hankul). The Hankul spelling of many recent international loan words also differs between North and South in ways that reflect divergences in standard pronunciation.

The final three chapters, which provide a detailed structural description of modern Korean, will be of greatest interest to anyone wishing to master the language. Ch. 7, ‘Sound pattern’, contains sections devoted to the language’s phonemic inventory, syllable structure, and lexical and prosodic phonology. Of special interest here is the retention of melodic tone in certain dialects, a feature partly correlated with [End Page 184] vowel length in other dialect areas (neither prosodic property is retained by younger generation speakers of Standard Korean). Ch. 8 discusses word classes and covers derivational and inflectional morphology; Ch. 9 approaches grammatical structure from a descriptive, theory-neutral perspective. The book finishes with an extensive bibliography that includes, in addition to all of the important English-language publications on Korean, some major works written in Korean and Japanese as well as a number of important unpublished dissertations dealing with select topics in Korean linguistics.

This book is essential for any serious student or scholar of Korean as it is now the best single-volume English-language introduction to this important language.

Edward J. Vajda
Western Washington University
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