My native languages are English and Korean, and one thing I noticed is how both Japanese and Korean use “ga” to point to something.
e.g.
さくらがああるく。
사쿠라가 걸었다.
“사쿠라” is just さくら written in korean, 가 is pronounced as ga, and 걸었다 means walked. The sentence structure the same (I get this, with us being neighboring countries and all), so I was just wondering if perhaps the Ga was from the same root as well.
Edit: Another similarity is 다 and だ, pronounced the same and used like so.
さくらが日本人だ。
사쿠라가 일본인이다.
Normally we would say 는 instead of 가 but I didn’t for convenience, 일본인 means Japanese person, and 다 is pronounced as da (the 이 is just something we put in-between sometimes idk why, some words like 사쿠라다 we don’t put it in)
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According to Wiktionary, Korean 가 is a very modern development and is first attested only around the 16th-18th century. A borrowing from Japanese が is one of several inconclusive theories about its origin.
It’s worth noting generally that while some kind of genetic relation between the Koreanic and Japonic languages has been long proposed, attempts to find systematic sound correspondences have consistently failed so it remains a fringe theory.
Any genetic relation between Korean and Japanese is pretty much unprovable. If there is it was so long ago that the link is lost.
だ in Japanese is pretty solidly not related to the Korean one, being a relatively recent contraction of である, though. As for が, I have no idea.
There are only a limited number of human sounds, and common particles tend to use simple sounds which makes them even more likely to sound similar. If you look at a larger slice of basic vocabulary, Japanese and Korean are different enough that they don’t seem to have a common ancestor.
It can be hard to tell if specific words were borrowed or if they are just coincidences. だ is young enough that there is evidence of how it developed in Japanese (である getting simplified and replacing なり) – and it doesn’t look like a borrowing from 다 since there wasn’t enough Korean influence at the time.
が is really old but it was previously used more like の is used today. Apparently there’s a theory that Korean borrowed from Japanese, but it happened so long ago that it’s not possible to test.
It is possible for very common grammar words to be borrowed from neighbors. The oldest core of English vocabulary comes from the western branch of Germanic languages, (Netherlands, coastal Germany), but words like “the” and “this” come from northern branch (Norway, Iceland).
The overall similarity of Japanese and Korean grammar and intonation are the result of long-term language contact, though. Those things spread more easily than the word for “mother.”
Subject particles の and が in Japanese probably originated from their genitive meanings.
As for 다 and だ, they aren’t comparable. Korean -다 is the declarative mood of the suffix, more comparable in function to the 終止形. The actual root of the Korean copula is -이-.
Korean is mostly a product of Chinese and Japanese influences over the years.
We’re all familiar with loan words, but grammar can also be loaned across languages. Sometimes languages just borrow grammar features from their neighbors. That’s one possible explanation for all the similarities between Japanese and Korean grammar.
It’s tempting to think that they might be in the same language family. In order for that to be a plausible theory though, we have to have some sort of evidence for a proto language that they both descended from. As of now, we don’t have any evidence for that sort of proto language for Japanese and Korean, which is why linguists consider them to be completely separate languages