Sarah Nelson's book surveys Korean prehistory from the earliest paleolithic settlers, perhaps half a million years ago, through the formation of the Three Kingdoms and on to the creation of United Silla in AD 668, when the peninsula was largely united for the first time. The author treats the development of state-level societies and their relationship to polities in Japan and China, and the development of a Korean ethnic identity. Emphasizing the particular features of the region, the author dispels the notion that the culture and traditions of Korea are pale imitations of those of its neighbors, China and Japan.
And I'm reading about the Korean language. As I understand it so far, and that's not saying a lot (holy crap, that's a really good pun) Korean is in the Altaic language family. Meaning that, going back to its far distant roots, it's more closely related to Finnish than to Mandarin Chinese. Which makes sense.
Can I be smarter now?
Oh look, I just found a very cool Web site. Ethnologue. Languages of the World: "An encyclopedic reference work cataloging all of the world’s 6,912 known living languages."
Enough already.
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