Dravido-Korean languages

Koreanic-Dravidian or Dravido-Koreanic is a very disputed^[1] language family proposal which links the living or proto-Dravidian language to the Korean language. The hypothesis was originally proposed by Morgan E. Clippinger in his "Korean and Dravidian: lexical evidence for an old theory" published in 1984. This proposal was widely discredited when the Korean language was hypothetically linked to the now also widely discredited Altaic languages. In 2011, President Jung Nam Kim of the Korean Society of Tamil Studies mentioned that the similarities between Korean and Dravidian are stronger than with any Altaic language. But he also say that this do not prove a genetic link between Dravidian and Korean.

History

Similarities between Tamil and Korean were first noted by French missionaries in Korea.^[2] Susumu Ōno caused a stir in Japan with his theory that Tamil constituted a lexical strata of both Korean and Japanese, which was widely publicized in the 1980s but quickly abandoned. However, Cliffinger's method was professional and his data reliable; hence, Ki-Moon Lee, Professor Emeritus at Seoul National University, opines that his conclusion could not be ignored and that it should be revisited.^[3] According to Homer B. Hulbert, many of the names of ancient colonies of southern Korea were the exact counterpart of Dravidian words. The Karak Kingdom of King Suro was named after the proto-Dravidian meaning 'fish'.^[4][5]

Arguments

Susumu Ōno,^[6] and Homer B. Hulbert^[7] propose that early Tamil people migrated to the Korean peninsula. Clippinger presents 408 cognates and about 60 phonological correspondence pairs. Cliffinger found that some cognates were closer than others leading him to speculate a genetic link which was reinforced by a later migration.^[8] This view was confirmed by the Centre for Korean Studies at the University of Hawaii.^[9] Both languages are agglutinative, follow the SOV order, nominal and adjectives follow the same syntax, particles are post positional, modifiers always precede modified words are some of the common features.^[10]

However, typological similarities can happen by chance; for instance, if two languages were agglutinative by random chance most of the other typological features like SOV order, post-positional particles, modifiers preceding modified words might also be similar (this is the general trend seen in most known agglutinative languages). The lack of statistically significant number of cognates, the lack of anthropological and genetic links, and the fact that both regions are geographically isolated can be used to dismiss this proposal.^[11]

List of potential cognates

Personal pronouns

Kinship

Others

Some more cognates Min-Sohn, Ho (2001). The Korean Language. Cambridge University Press. p. 28. 

References