Homer Hulbert something something Korean language something something good.

I know very little about Homer Hulbert, but googling around shows me that he was a man who cared deeply about Korea and the Korean language. Matter of fact his tombstone reads "I would rather be buried in Korea than in Westminster Abbey," and as it turns out he is. I did have to scratch my head at the Korea Times article titled "Hulbert Extolled Superiority of Korean Language." The evidence?

The document showed that Hulbert called Korean superior to English as a medium for public speaking.

``So far as we can see, there is nothing in Korean speech that makes it less adapted to oratory than English or any other Western tongues. In common with the language of Cicero and Demosthenes, Korean is composed of periodic sentences. Each sentence reaches its climax in the verb, which comes at the end; and there are no weakening addenda that often makes the English sentence an anticlimax,'' Hulbert wrote in the report.

He also spoke highly of the grammatical superiority of Korean.

``In Western languages, differences in sex, number and person, are carefully noted. But in the Korean language, these are left to the speaker's and the hearer's perspicacity and attention is concentrated upon a terse and luminous collocation of ideas. This is often secured in the West only by a tedious circumstance,'' Hulbert said.

Um . . . not exactly a slam dunk. The article talks about the Hulbert Memorial Society, but their webpage doesn't seem to have the publication in question. The KT article says it was originally in the 1903 annual report by the Smithsonian Institute, though I'm not sure what makes it particularly newsworthy now, or why the Memorial Society is re-releasing it. No sign of it online as of yet, even though other annual reports seem to be available via Google Books.