Talk:Dravido-Korean languages

Ohno Susumu The Origin of the Japanese Language (1970) as a source

Miller's review of this translation in the 1970 edition of Monumenta Nipponica called it careless and outdated in light of Ohno's writings in the intervening 13 years. (The original Nihongo no Kigen was published in 1957.) Is it still a reliable source for his view as cited in this article? Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 09:46, 16 February 2015 (UTC)

NPOV

TaivoLinguist — I do understand that the Altaic hypothesis does not have majority support among linguists. I know that. But there ARE professional linguists, albeit a minority, who support it. Discredited is a loaded POV word; Wikipedia demands a neutral point of view. You are welcome to state that many/most linguists SEE it as discredited — and to source that claim, but you cannot say that it IS discredited. I am reverting. David Cannon (talk) 00:21, 30 November 2015 (UTC)

Wrong. Davidcannon. "Widely discredited" is quite adequately sourced and is an accurate description. Just because a few linguists still cling to it like a piece of flotsam from the Titanic doesn't change the fact that historical linguists in general have discredited it. --Taivo (talk) 01:44, 30 November 2015 (UTC)

"Widely discredited" is acceptable. "Discredited" without the qualifier is not. It makes it appear to be a unanimous view, which it isn't. But I can go with the "widely". David Cannon (talk) 02:08, 30 November 2015 (UTC)

"Widely" in this instance means about 98%. Altaic is dead, dead, dead.104.169.28.48 (talk) 02:19, 20 March 2017 (UTC)

Clarified some terms

...I don't know a word of Tamil, but frankly it seems ridiculous that one would compare naneun 나는 ("I"+topic marker) with Tamil nānu and nega 네가 ("you"+subject marker) with Ninga, when -neun and -ga are both case suffixes. But I guess comparing naega 내가 with nānu and neoneun 너는 with ninga would have made it obvious that they aren't very similar after all?

Similarly for wa, where the verb root is o-, and olla, where the root is oreu- (or oru-, depending on Romanization scheme). eoneu 어느 doesn't mean number "one", it means "what", and by extension, also "some" or "one" as in "some unspecified" (e.g., "There was one person who came to me and said this..."). 24.5.249.55 (talk) 22:47, 5 December 2016 (UTC)

Do you have a Reliable Source to propose for some sort of improvement to the article?104.169.28.48 (talk) 02:20, 20 March 2017 (UTC)

My Tamil knowledge is scanty, but I know that the word for "what" is "enne", which actually sounds like a better possible cognate for eoneu 어느. I don't know Korean, but from what you said, in "naneun" and "neoneun", -neun is some sort of suffix. So a fair comparison would be between Tamil ni and Korean neo, and between Tamil nā[n] and Korean na (I usually hear Tamil speakers say "nā", but "nān" might be the formal pronunciation) .207.253.244.210 (talk) 22:46, 2 April 2018 (UTC)

Also, it is interesting that Korean wa 와 and Tamil "vā" are both informal non-polite imperatives. The polite form in Tamil is "vāngo", c.f. Korean wayo 와요. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 207.253.244.210 (talk) 23:15, 2 April 2018 (UTC)

Just to add to the comparative mention of 'naan' and 'na. Na is very commonly used in Tamil where naan would be the formal interpretation of the word. I'm billingual with Tamil being my Mother Tongue. Having a close Korean childhood friend I'm looking into this topic and trying to have discussions to see where the cognates mentioned seem to resonate. There is definetly a striking resemblance in many things. Nonetheless this is all anecdotal. Thought to chime in. Thanks.Keepokeep 12:27, 20 April 2019 (UTC)

(chiming in)

There are various interesting points brought up by the anon(s) above regarding the possibility of a relation between Tamil and Korean. I'd like to address some of these points.

• Re: Korean wa- and Tamil va-, it's worth pointing out that the -a- in the Korean is part of the inflection, and not part of the verb stem. The wa- realization is an artifact of pronunciation and romanization, it could be more strictly romanized as oa-. The verb stem is just o-, which we see in the plain non-past declarative form (also used as the lemma form for dictionaries) -- see also the Wiktionary entry at wikt:오다 (oda), particularly wikt:오다#Conjugation where you can see that the o- is the key unchanging part of the verb.
• Re: pronoun similarities, while interesting, this isn't all that compelling. Chance similarities between languages are not that uncommon. You may wish to read the article "How likely are chance resemblances between languages?" over on the Zompist blog. This addresses the pattern of correspondences you describe here, including even mathematical models to predict the discovery of similar terms depending on various parameters.

For instance, I note that Chinese and Navajo both roughly share the singular second-person pronoun (i.e. "you" singular), nǐ (low tone) in Chinese and ní (high tone) in Navajo. This appears to overlap with the Tamil ni that you mention above. Old Japanese also had na (no apparent tone), matching Tamil na and Korean neo. Meanwhile, I see that Tamil verbs inflect for person, with the first-person verb ending being -en, which corresponds to Hungarian first-person pronoun én ("I"). However, I would not try to use this to build an argument that all of these languages share the same root: there are simply too many other aspects of each individual language that cannot be shown conclusively to correlate with any of the others, let alone all of them together.

• As a separate example of divergence that is hard to account for, Tamil has grammatical person and number built right into the verb conjugation paradigms, and nouns also inflect for number and grammatical case. Korean has neither grammatical person nor number. If we are to build a case for Tamil and Korean being related, how would we explain this profound difference?
• In addition, Korean has vowel harmony, a key feature of the language, while Tamil does not. How would we explain this difference?
• Re: the possibility of Tamil vocabulary showing up in Korean, I don't discount this entirely. However, there's a difference between a small set of words entering a language's lexicon via borrowing, as compared to two languages evolving from a shared root. English and Japanese are a good example of this: the presence of Japanese-derived words in English, like skosh or honcho or tempura, or of English-derived words in Japanese, like supūn ("spoon") or sararīman ("salaryman") or bukkumēkā ("bookmaker"), is by no means evidence that English and Japanese are related languages -- rather, this is evidence of contact between English speakers and Japanese speakers, and words shared between those two linguistic communities.

If it can be demonstrated convincingly that the Tamil ↔ Korean word correspondences are not due to mere chance, then I suspect a borrowing scenario is much more likely than any shared derivation of the entire languages.

I do encourage you to explore similarities you see between languages. Please also read up on the comparative method, and (where possible) dig into the histories and derivations of words that appear to be similar -- sometimes the derivations show that any modern resemblance is accidental, and that the roots are not all that close (like Korean o- and Tamil va- above).

Cheers, ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 19:28, 7 July 2022 (UTC)

Listing proposed cognates

The whole proposal has not achieved much traction, but Clippinger is probably the best-regarded form of it. Including some of his examples would give a flavour of the proposal. Sohn (Korean, Cambridge Language Surveys, pp 28–29) quotes 35 of them.

But if it is done, separate glosses should be attached to each of the cited forms instead of combined in a single column. Both Clippinger and Sohn do the former, which is necessary because the semantic matches vary in closeness. Also, the Dravidian forms should specify which language they are cited from. This would be feasible, as Clippinger gives this detail in an appendix. Kanguole 20:45, 2 April 2024 (UTC)