Duality in Korean Morphology

It is well known that some 60 percent of the entries found in any dictionary of the Korean language are Han-Ja-eo 漢字語("words of Chinese Characters") in Korean, or Sino-Korean in English, as they have been named by western scholars. In the dictionaries the Sino-Korean (henceforth "SK") entries are usually accompaned by Chinese characters by which they are easily distinguished from those of Non-Sino-Korean (henceforth "NSK"), which include Native Korean and borrowings from other languages in the historical periods as well as modern times. \n\nSK is obviously a major constituent of the Korean language. However, it has been rarely mentioned, or, rather, has been avoided to mention as much as possible, in the grammars of Korean. The reaseon seems to quite simple. That is, a number of features of SK are difficult to describe systematically in the same terms defined for those of NSK. For this reason the grammarians have preferred to confine themselves to NSK, while largely ignoreing SK.\n\nAlthough an SK form and an NSK form may be semantically compared each other, their morphological functions are fundamentally different. Accordingly, it can be properly argues that there are two distinctive sub-systems at work in the morphological parts of the Korean grammar one for NSK and another for SK. In the present study some of the outstanding differences between the two are to be discussed.