Page:The passing of Korea.djvu/394

 CHAPTER XXII HE Korean language belongs to that widely disseminated family to which the term Turanian has been applied. This term is sufficiently indefinite to match the subject, for scholarship has not determined with any degree of exactitude the limits of its dispersion. At its widest reach it includes Turkish, Hungarian, Basque, Lappish, Finnish, Ouigour, Ostiak, Samoiyed, Mordwin, Manchu, Mongol and the other Tartar and Siberian dialects, Japanese, Korean, Tamil, Telugu, Canarese, Malayalam and the other Dravidian dialects, Malay and a great number of the Polynesian and Australian dialects. It reaches northward along the coast of Asia, through the Philippine Islands and Formosa, and south and east into New Guinea, New Hebrides and Australia.

The main point which differentiates this whole family of languages from the Aryan tongues is the agglutinative principle by which declension and conjugation are effected through the addition of postpositions and suffixes, and not by modification of the stem. In all these different languages the stem of the word remains, as a rule, intact through every form of grammatical manipulation. That Korean belongs to this family of languages is seen in its strictly agglutinative character. There has been no deviation from this principle. There are no exceptions. Any typical Korean verb can be conjugated through its thousand different forms without finding the least change in the stem of the word. A comparison of Korean with Manchu discloses at once a family likeness, and at the same time a comparison of Korean with the Dravidian dialects discloses a still closer kinship. It is an interesting fact that none of the Chinese dialects possess any of the distinctive features of this Turanian