earticle

영어

The Japanese language has a verb construction that consists of Kango, which are words of Chinese origin, plus the verb “suru”, which is often translated as “to do” in English. This formation of words is exceptionally similar to a verb construction in the Korean language that combines a word of Chinese origin with the word “hada”. In the case of both languages, when another part of speech, such as a noun or an adverb, is turned into a verb a construction with suru or hada presents the most efficient option. This paper explores the similarities and differences between Kango verbs in the Japanese and Korean languages from 1950 through 2000. Taking the local news sections of newspapers as its focus for examining kango verbs, this study presents an analysis based on the proportion of kango verbs to all verbs in each language.
The result of the examination shows that the Korean has a higher proportion of kango verbs than the Japanese language. It is also proved that the percentage of these verbs in both languages has been increasing in recent years. The chronological change of the ratio of native origin verbs and kango verbs in Korean is very big in contrast to Japanese. It is related to the national language policy of Korea. One character kango verbs occupy top ranks of the frequency of examples in both languages. One character kango verbs also account for the half of common examples of kango verbs in these two languages.