Where do Korean and Japanese language originate from?

The classification of the Korean and Japanese language is debated. Some linguists place them in the Altaic language family, but most linguists consider them to be language isolates.

However, I personally believe there are no true "language isolates" in the world. Since we are all one human species, every language in the world is related either directly or indirectly to some other language.

Where do you think Korean and Japanese language originates from?

I'm inclined to agree, but I can't say for certain. I prefer a "Tower of Babel" explanation that there were originally a handful (and by "handful" I mean it could be anything from 2-50 languages, or maybe more) of languages. So it's possible that Basque or Korean could be language isolates, in the sense these languages did not break off into mutually unintelligible dialects, or that members of one branch always ended up being overcome politically, linguistically, etc. by a more widely spoken dialect (or other languages in the area, as was the case of Basque with French and Spanish).

<<Some linguists place them in the Altaic language family>>

Most of contemporary linguists consider Altaic to be rather a Sprachbund than a true language family.

<<Since we are all one human species, every language in the world is related either directly or indirectly to some other language. >>

I don't think so. Common origin of humans doesn't mean common origin of language.

If humans have the same origin also has the language they speak.

Not necessarily. Many linguists believe that children are capable of generating entirely novel languages on their own.

I believe that Korean is Altaic, or closely related to the ancestor of that group. I still maintain that it is a language family.

Japanese, however, I am unsure of. It has Eastern Altaic features--sometimes even seems closer to Altaic than Korean, but it's distant.

We went through this last year, maybe twice last year. There is something familiar about Korean grammar for me. Additionally I keep coming across words in Korean that are very similar to Japanese words. Perhaps some of this is from the fact that both Korean and Japanese people have used Chinese characters, but I don't know.

Off the top of my head, I recall that "city" "breifcase" and "milk" seem similar to me in both Korean and Japanese.

It seems that proto-Japanese was spoken in Korea.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buyeo_languages

Quote:

"Being strongly skeptical of the Buyeo-Japonic hypothesis, they emphasize that the so-called Japanese-like toponymes or pseudo-Goguryeo words were mostly found in the central part of Korean peninsula, which don’t reflect the Goguryeo language but previous substratum spoken by indigenous people of the central and southern part of Korean peninsula. Since it has been shown that a considerable number of Japanese-like toponymes (such as a Japanese-like numeral found in the historical homeland of Silla) were also distributed in southern part of Korean peninsula, the linguists propose that there was once a Japonic language spoken on the prehistoric Korean peninsula as the substratum language of Old Korean"

It's been proven that children are able to develop their own languages that aren't related to their own. Twins develop 'secret languages' all the time.

Haha do some people actually believe languages come from the Tower of Babel? LOL! That's worse than a 6 000 year old Earth!

Skippy es un buen tipo, no hay que burlarnos solo por que dijo una idiotez, usualmente dice buenos comentarios.

Uhm... reread my post... I didn't say the story of the Tower of Babel is what I believe, but an explanation along the lines of it, in that I don't think the world's langauges can necessarily be traced back to a single answer. Hence, the quotation marks.

If I really believed that story for given fact, I would have said so; sorry if I didn't make that clear enough for ya.

Some of your people (to be precise, history scholars) say the towel of Babel was Korean, and everything - Confucius, Qu Yuan (and Duan Wu Festival), Hanzi/Kanji/Hanja, tofu, karate, and probably humanity, the Homo sapiens - originated from your country. It's become a vicious cultural stereotype among my people and the Japanese. So, if you'd bother to, please do tell Chinese and Japanese learners of Korean about the reality, when they ask you why.

What I know is, the Japanese and Korean originates from Chinese characters, but they have developped a lot, so they look so different from Chinese characters.

Some arrogant and ignorant Korean think the Korea is the cradle of Asian civilization, so funny！please wake up!!

<Off the top of my head, I recall that "city" "breifcase" and "milk" seem similar to me in both Korean and Japanese.>
Nearly 60~70% of Korean and Japanese words are Chinese-origin and most of them sound pretty similar.
There are thousands of examples I can give; not just city, briefcase or milk.

However, their core vocabularies(native Korean words and native Japanese words) are quite different and so are the pronunciations.