A language may adopt many loanwords from foreign languages as the two languages come into contact with each other. This inflow of words occurs in two kinds of borrowing : direct and indirect.
The vocabulary of a language is enriched by bringing in lo...
A language may adopt many loanwords from foreign languages as the two languages come into contact with each other. This inflow of words occurs in two kinds of borrowing : direct and indirect.
The vocabulary of a language is enriched by bringing in loanwords, Korean is including among such languages. Korean is a language which has adopted many words from other languages. One of these is Arabic which belongs to the Semitic languages.
Arabic provides Korean with many words mostly by the indirect borrowing, of which this paper examines 109 words.
The loanwords from Arabic in Korean are arranged according to various fields, such as units, plants, politics, religion, astronomy, chemistry and the others. And the words are arranged in order of Korean and the historical order of the word into Korean. Here we can find that the Arabic loan words came into Korean directly in lesser portion than indirectly through other languages; for example, through English, German, Spanish, Latin, Italian, Greek, Chinese, Turkish and so forth.
Nowadays, many Arabic loanwords came into Korean directly due to the direct relationship between Korea and Arab World.