Page:The passing of Korea.djvu/396

 The study of Korean grammar is rendered interesting by the fact that in the surrounding of China by Turanian peoples Korea forms the place where the two surrounding branches met and completed the circuit. Northern Korea was settled from the north by Turanian people, and southern Korea was settled from the south by Turanian people. It was not until 193 that each became definitely aware of the presence of the other. At first they refused to acknowledge the relationship, but the fact that, when in 690 the southern kingdom of Silla assumed control of the whole peninsula, there remained no such line of social cleavage as that which obtained between the English and Normans after 1066, shows that an intrinsic similarity of language and a similar racial aptitude quickly closed the breach and made Korea the unit that she is to-day.

Korean is an agglutinative, polysyllabic language whose development is marvellously complete and symmetrical. We find no such long lists of exceptions as those which entangle the student of the Indo-European languages. In Korean as in most of the Turanian languages the idea of gender is very imperfectly developed, which argues perhaps a lack of imagination. The ideas of person and number are largely left to the context for determination, but in the matter of logical sequence the Korean verb is carried to the extreme of development.

The Korean's keen sense of social distinctions has given rise to a complete system of honorifics whose proper application is essential to a right use of the language. And yet numerous as these may be, their use is so regulated by unwritten law, and there are so few exceptions that they are far easier to master than the personal terminations of Indo-European verbs. The grammatical superiority of Korean over many of the Western languages is that while, in the latter, differences of gender, number and person which would usually be perfectly clear from the context are carefully noted, in the Korean these are left to the speaker's and the hearer's perspicacity, and attention is concentrated upon a terse and luminous collocation of