Page:The passing of Korea.djvu/400

 or not you say simply kana, it means, " What in the world would I be going for ? Absurd ! "

Another thing which differentiates Korean from the languages of the West is the difference between " book language " and " spoken language." Many grammatical forms are common to both, but there are also many in each that are not found in the other. The result is extremely unfortunate, for no conversation can be written down verbatim; it must all be changed into book language. This fact is probably due to Chinese influence, and it is but one of the ways in which that influence acted as a drag upon Korean intellectual development. I would not belittle the enormous debt that Korea owes to China, but some of her gifts had been better ungiven. None of these endings are borrowed from the Chinese language, but as Korea had practically no literature before Chinese influence led up to it, it was inevitable that certain endings should be reserved for the formal language of books, while others were considered good enough only to be bandied from mouth to mouth. It is of course impossible to say what sort of a literature Korea would have evolved had she been left to herself, but one thing is sure; it would have been much more spontaneous and lifelike than that which now obtains. Korean has no dialects. There are different brogues, and a Seoul man can generally detect by a man's speech from what province he comes; but it would be wide of the truth to assert that Koreans from any part of the country could not readily understand each other. There are some few words that are peculiar to particular provinces, but for the most part thes'e are mutually known, just as the four words " guess," " reckon," " allow " and " calculate," while peculiar in a certain sense to particular sections of America, are universally understood.

No people have followed more implicitly nature's law in the matter of euphony. The remarkable law of the convertibility of surds and sonants has been worked out to its ultimate results in this language. The nice adjustment of the organs of speech, whereby conflicting sounds are so modified as to blend harmoni-