earticle

영어

Finnish linguist Ramstedt claimed for the first time that Korean belongs to the Altaic language family. And in order to prove this claim, he published a study called “Studies in Korean Etymology” comparing it with Altai words. Due to the inaccuracy of comparative vocabulary and the reason that Chinese characters are included, systematic research has not been conducted until now, 70 years after the publication of this study. In this situation, for the first time in this study, the author collected 542 words compared with Mongolian and analyzed 40 nouns out of 106 words that were found to be certain with Mongolian. As a result of the analysis, 29(73%) words were matched, and 11(27%) words were not. Although erroneously compared vocabularies appear quite a bit, I think that it has great significance in confirming that Korean is related to the Altai language. Therefore, in the future, it is necessary to evaluate this “Studies in Korean Etymology” academic value through comparative studies with 436 Mongolian languages, other Turkish and Manchu-Tungus languages, which have not been dealt with this time.