Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Moon-Ryul Jung" <moon AT saint.soongsil.ac.kr>]

Dear Doug,

Peter wrote:
> 
> I don't know any Korean. But I do know that it is structurally very 
> similar to Turkic languages. Turkish has no relative pronoun, and thus 
> I can believe that Korean has none either. Instead, Turkish has a 
> variety of constructions using embedded phrases with non-finite or 
> participle verb forms. These can be used to do almost everything you 
> can do with relative clauses in Indo-European languages, though 
> because of the head-last structure it gets very confusing for us 
> westerners. (Koreans learn Turkish incredibly fast! Everything is the 
> right way round for them.)

I do not know Turkish. But Peter's description fits Korean exactly.
It has "relative clauses" modifying nouns, but relative clauses are formed 
simply by changing the ending of the verb. The fact that a language does 
not
have relative pronouns does not mean that there is no relativization (?) 
in
that language.

Moon

Moon-Ryul Jung
Assistant Professor
Dept of Computer Science
Soongsil University, Seoul, Korea