Beyond Surface Similarities: A Corpus-Based Comparison of Tamil and Korean

Abstract

Tamil and Korean share several typological characteristics, including predominantly subject–object–verb (SOV) word order, agglutinative morphology, and the use of grammatical markers to express relationships between sentence constituents. Nevertheless, similarities in linguistic structure do not necessarily indicate common historical ancestry. This study examines lexical, morphological, syntactic, and semantic relationships between Tamil and Korean through a comparative corpus-based framework. The analysis focuses on lexical correspondence, constituent order, case marking, verbal morphology, negation, and honorific expressions. Levenshtein similarity, morphological annotation, syntactic coding, and comparisons with control languages provide complementary approaches to evaluating linguistic similarities. The comparative analysis demonstrates the importance of distinguishing shared grammatical functions from identical linguistic forms. Although both languages employ suffixation and frequently place verbs at the end of clauses, their lexical systems and grammatical constructions exhibit important differences. The study further establishes that lexical resemblance must be evaluated through semantic correspondence, regular phonological patterns, and historical evidence rather than superficial similarity alone. By integrating quantitative linguistic measures with qualitative grammatical interpretation, this research provides a systematic framework for investigating linguistic similarities while avoiding unsupported assumptions about language origins. The findings emphasize that typological comparison can reveal meaningful structural parallels without independently establishing a genealogical relationship between Tamil and Korean.