Korean words, like those of every other language, fall into several different kinds or classes; the words are classified according to the way they are used in sentences.
Korean VERBS (the words at the end of nearly every Basic Sentence in this lesson) are INFLECTED WORDS: they consist of a basic part, the BASE, to which various ENDINGS are attached in order to make them mean different things.
For example, we have already had the following three sentences:
- ์ค๋กํฉ๋๋ค.[silyle[h]amnida]
Excuse me (for what I am doing).
์ค๋กํ์ต๋๋ค.[silyle[h]รฆssumnida]
Excuse me (for what I did).
์ค๋กํ๊ฒ ์ต๋๋ค.[silyle[h]agessumnida]
Excuse me (for what I’m about to do).
The verb in each case is the same – here, it means do – and its basic part is ํ- [= ha-]. Only the endings are different, and it is these that give the changes in meaning.
Here are a few sentences of another type (you are not meant to learn those you haven’t seen, just look at them):
- ์ฉ์ํ์ธ์[yogsuhhaseyo]
Please forgive me. - ์๋
ํ ๊ฐ์ธ์[annyuhng[h]i gase yo]
Good-bye [= Go in peace] - ์๋
ํ ๊ณ์ธ์[annyuhng[h]i gese yo]
Good-bye [= Stay in peace] - ์ฑ
์ ๋ณด์ธ์[chรฆgul bose yo]
Please look at your books
These sentences all have different verbs, but the verbs all end the same way: -์ธ์ [= -seyo]. This ending (a combination of suffixes) makes each verb express a polite request.
Korean NOUNS, on the other hand, are not inflected; they can be used with no endings attached to them. Instead, PARTICLES are optionally added to show the relationship between the noun and the rest of the sentence, much as prepositions are used in English. The great majority of Korean nouns correspond to English words which are also nouns – ์ฑ [= chรฆk] book, ์ง๋ฌธ [= chilmun] question, ์์ด [= yuhnguh] English, etc. This is not always the case, however!
As a vocabulary item, ์ฒต [= chรฆk] means book. In sentences, however, we translate it variously: book, a book, the book, some books, any books, the books, books. This is another way of saying that Korean has no words corresponding to a(n), the, some, any, and that Korean nouns may have a plural meaning without any explicit sign that they are plural. To be sure, it is possible to make Korean nouns unambiguously plural, as we will learn later; but it is not imperative to do so as it is with most English nouns. In English, book, for example, is specifically singular, whereas books is specifically plural, and this applies every time they are used.