Most linguists have historically categorized the Japonic languages and the Korean language as isolates. But, even though the technical elements between the two

Most linguists have historically categorized the Japonic languages and the Korean language as isolates. But, even though the technical elements between the two languages may bear no relationship with each other, the phonetic similarities between the two languages are pretty interesting. Also, at times, the grammatical features and structures between Japanese and Korean are more similar to each other than Japanese is to Chinese or Korean is to Chinese (e.g. Japanese and Korean are SOV word order [1] languages whereas Chinese is an SVO word order [2] language). Of course, there's debate as to whether these similarities between the Japanese and Korean languages are a result of language convergence or divergence. But considering how close the two countries are (historically and geographically), it's probably a mix of both. [1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subject%E2%80%93object%E2%80%93verb http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subject%E2%80%93object%E2%80%93... [2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subject%E2%80%93verb%E2%80%93object http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subject%E2%80%93verb%E2%80%93ob...