This article attempts to make a typological comparison between Mandarin Chinese and Modern Korean. It approaches two languages from phonological, morphological, syntactic, and rhetorical points of view. The criteria of comparison include the following...
This article attempts to make a typological comparison between Mandarin Chinese and Modern Korean. It approaches two languages from phonological, morphological, syntactic, and rhetorical points of view. The criteria of comparison include the followings: ① stop endings, ② tones, ③ consonant cluster initials, ④ monosyllabicity, ⑤ classifiers, ⑥ isolating language, ⑦ gender and number, ⑧ SOV order, ⑨ particles, ⑩ modifier+modified order, ⑪ topic+comments, and ⑫ honorific sentences. Table (50) presents how these criteria are applied to Old Chinese(OC), Modern Mandarin(MM), Middle Korean(MiK), and Modern Korean(MoK). Table (51) demonstrates the numbers of features that are shared with Modem Mandarin. This study concludes that Mandarin is similar to Korean in the degree of 25% based upon the fact that three out of twelve criteria are being shared between two languages.<br/>