Page:The passing of Korea.djvu/395

 family. There is more similarity between Chinese and English than between Chinese and any of the Turanian languages. In other words, China has been even more thoroughly isolated linguistically than she has socially, and the evidence goes to prove that at some period enormously remote, after the original Chinese had effected an entrance into the mighty amphitheatre, between the central Asian mountains on the one hand and the waters of the Pacific on the other, they were surrounded by a subsequent race who impinged upon them at every point, and conquered them more than once, but who never succeeded in leaving a single trace upon their unique and primitive language. This surrounding family was the Turanian, and Korean forms one link in the chain.

Korean bears almost precisely the same relation to Chinese that English does to Latin. English has retained its own distinct grammatical structure while drawing an immense number of words from the Romance dialects for purposes of embellishment and precision. The same holds true of Korean. She has never surrendered a single point to Chinese grammar, and yet has borrowed largely from the Chinese glossary as convenience or necessity has required. Chinese may be called the Latin of the Far East. For, just as Rome through her higher civilisation lent thousands of words to the semi-savages hovering along her borders, so China has furnished all the surrounding peoples with their scientific, legal, philosophical and religious terminology. The development of Chinese grammar was early checked by the influence of the ideograph, and so she never has had anything to lend her neighbours in the way of superior grammatical inflection.

The grammars of Korea and Japan are practically identical, and yet, strange to say, with the exception of the words they have both borrowed from China, their glossaries are remarkably dissimilar. This forms one of the most obscure philological problems of the Far East. The identity in grammatical structure, however, stamps them as sister languages.