Dillerarası Benzerliklerin Ölçülmesi Üzerine Bir Çalışma: Türkçe - Korece Örneği

Measuring of Language Similarity: a case study of Turkish-Korean

The World Atlas of Linguistic Structures (WALS) is the largest database that presents encyclopedic information on the linguistic features exhibited by thousands of languages in hundreds of linguistic aspects. It is widely used in numerous studies on language typology. In this regard, there are also studies that measure the linguistic distances between languages through similarities. Comrie (2010) compares English and Japanese to determine how ‘typologically typical’ languages are, while Orgun (2011) adds Turkish to these two languages to determine how ‘consistent’ languages are. Both studies propose suggestions that measure cross-linguistic similarities. On the other hand, Holman et al. (2007) introduce a scale that measures dissimilarities rather than similarities to demonstrate the correlation between language relatedness and geographic distance. Uzun (2012) suggests a scale that determines linguistic distance not only based on similarities or dissimilarities but also by considering both. In this study, it will be demonstrated that determining cross-linguistic similarities and dissimilarities based on ratios (Comrie, 2010) and scores (Orgun, 2011; Uzun, 2012) can be misleading and that the number of languages should be taken into consideration, using the mutual similarity and dissimilarity values of Turkish and Korean.