Korean language

Korean (한국어/조선말, see below) is the official language of both South Korea and North Korea, as well as one of the two official languages in China's Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture. About 80 million people speak Korean worldwide.

Historical linguists classify Korean as a language isolate. The idea that Korean belongs to a putative Altaic language family has been generally discredited. The Korean language is agglutinative in its morphology and SOV in its syntax.

For over a millennium, Korean was written with adapted Chinese characters called hanja, complemented by phonetic systems such as hyangchal, gugyeol, and idu. In the 15th century, Sejong the Great commissioned a national writing system called Hangul, but it did not become a legal script to write Korean until the 20th century when the Japanese government in Korea was established. This happened because of the yangban aristocracy's preference for hanja.

History

Korean is descended from Proto-Korean, Old Korean, Middle Korean, and Modern Korean. Since the Korean War, through 70 year's of seperations North–South differences have developed in standard Korean, including variance in pronunciation, verb inflection, and vocabulary chosen.

Infinite Challenge

Infinite Challenge (a.k.a. Muhan Dojeon; Hangul: 무한도전; hanja: 無限挑戰; abbreviated as 무도 Mudo) is a Korean television entertainment program, distributed and syndicated by MBC. As of January 2013, it still has the largest market share for its timeslot; roughly between 13 to 17 percent of Korean television viewers watch Infinite Challenge at 6:30 PM every Saturday night. This makes it the top free-to-air television program on Saturday evening, and it's also the most viewed non-drama program in South Korea every week (excluding special sporting events, since November 2006, with the exception of January 2009, April and May 2010). It has kept the same scheduled time, since first airing in 2005. Since 2009, it lasts for roughly 75 minutes, excluding ten minutes of advertising. Episodes are also frequently rerun on several Korean cable broadcasting channels. Since February 19, 2011 (episode 237), the program has been aired in high-definition.Infinite Challenge have been called the nation's variety and Korea's real first variety for having been successful for over ten years.