Abstract

Since 1905 when, on the basis of syntactic and typological similarities, Homer Hulbert first suggested a genetic relationship between Korean and Dravidian, there has been no systematic attempt to examine his theory in light of the lexical evidence available. This paper presents over four hundred sets of Korean-Dravidian cognate pairs, including many basic vocabulary items, in an attempt to uncover links between the two language groups. The evidence suggests that at a very ancient period Dravidian and Korean probably shared a common heritage and that this heritage might have been reinforced much later by migrations to the Korean peninsula, perhaps in the later years of the first millennium B.C.

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