History Mystery

Korean and Tamil have more than just konjam konjam in common. How come?

For many centuries, travelers noted the similarities between Korean and South Indian languages. In 1905, American missionary and journalist Homer Hulbert* decided to figure out just how much Dravidian and Korean languages had in common.

Hulbert sketched out similarities like vowel lengths, noun stems, and similar phrases. For example, in English we make the body an extension of personality, saying “I am ill,” 😷 but Hulbert noted that both Dravidian and Korean languages say “my body is ill” and “my body is in pain.”

However, Hulbert did not have a theory as to why these similarities existed.

That would come 80 years later when Morgan E Clippinger suggested that Korean and Dravidian emerged from the same ancestor language. She theorized that the two languages diverged millennia ago, but picked up new similarities as people criss-crossed borders and traded.

Unfortunately, her theory was debunked by later research. At that point, scholars just kind of abandoned the subject…

But twist‼️ Researchers recently found cold hard evidence of Tamil trading communities across East Asia...so was Clippinger on to something after all? 🙀

tl;dr it’s still a history mystery. For now, all we know is that onnu plus onnu, whether Tamil or Korean, always equals two.

*Side bar, Hulbert’s quite a character — he advocated for Korean independence and was the first foreigner to receive a public funeral in Korea in 1949