Thanks to one of my followers
@s12chung
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I'll be concurrently posting new posts on both platforms for the time being, but also some corrections of my past tweets on there exclusively.
Let's talk about the seemingly puzzling romanization of the South Korean conglomerate "현대 / Hyundai", focusing on the second syllable "dai".
This has been the source of a lot of controversy over the years. (Thread)
Warning: a lot of side notes!
During the 36 years of Japanese occupation (1910-1945), there is no doubt that Japanese heavily influenced the Korean language. But now, it is difficult to find any Japanese-sounding words in Korean, outside of niche registers such as vulgar slang or job-specific jargon. Thread🧵
Many Korean learners point out the irony of "(live) fish" being called 물고기 in Korean, which looks like 물 "water" + 고기 "meat", whereas "fish (as food)" is called 생선(生鮮), which looks like "live fish" if you dissect the Hanja. But why is this? Was it always this way? 🧵
Crown Prince Hyomyeong(1809-1830) fixes his married little sister's poem in Classical Chinese and adds its translation and explanations in Hangul for her.
At the end, he adds:
이 글이 고친 글이니 보아라 "This is the fixed version, have a look!"
(Translation in Thread 🧵)
"Teacher! Please come back.
We know how to read Japanese but not Korean writing."
"Teachers, go back to your school." (bottom left)
This poster from South Korea in the 1950s is ordering teachers to come back and teach kids who are illiterate in Hangul.
In Korea, the symbol "@" is colloquially called '골뱅이' (sea snail). Aside from its usual usages on the internet, it is also sometimes used as an abbreviation for '아파트' (apartment), as shown in the subway signage in the second image.
Ticket for one ride on the Seoul Tram (1904). It is written in English, Hanja, and Hangul. The tram line in Seoul first started operating in 1899 until it closed in the late 1960s.
"Teacher! Please come back.
We know how to read Japanese but not Korean writing."
"Teachers, go back to your school." (bottom left)
This poster from South Korea in the 1950s is ordering teachers to come back and teach kids who are illiterate in Hangul.
In 1801-1805, a Korean merchant named Mun Sun-deuk 문순득 got shipwrecked and spent time in the Ryukyu Kingdom and in Luzon Island, Philippines before eventually returning home.
He recorded the vocabulary of the local languages at the end of the records of his travels in Hangul:
Why do we say 'feet' and 'mice' instead of *foots and *mouses?
'Feet' and 'mice' are relics of ancient plural forms.
They used to have endings, but these disappeared after altering the preceding vowel.
This is called i-umlaut.
Here's a video 🔊 on 'feet'.
See below for 'mice'.
"조선말을 자유대로 쓰도록 요구하자"
"Let us demand to be allowed use the Korean language freely!"
This graffiti was written in the 1940s by the Korean Volunteer Corps, who faught for Korea's independence from Japan.
From their former base in Yuntoudicun(雲頭底村), Shanxi, China.
Some Korean abbreviated Gugyeol (구결) characters and their origins.
These characters were used mainly to add Korean grammatical endings and particles to Chinese text, before and after the invention of Hangul.
One of the first phonograph recording of the Korean language, from 1896. Can you hear differences in some of the vowel qualities?
Thanks to Mr Jeong Chang-gwan for obtaining the audio from the US library of Congress.
Wow! I didn't know so many people were interested in learning Middle Korean in-depth!
Because of your interest, I'll be starting a new series, starting today: Let's read Middle Korean, one sentence at a time.
I will use the book "속삼강행실도(續三綱行實圖)" (1514) by 신용개.
The etymology of "기와" (roof tile) is particularly interesting. It comes from an analogy: "thatched roof, but with ceramic instead of thatch"!
It is a word with indigenous Korean roots, but likely contaminated by Sino-Korean 와(瓦) "roof tile" somewhere along the way.
The meanings of words constantly change. This is called semantic drift.
Sometimes, a meaning radically changes over time.
For example, a girl used to be a child of any gender, a hussy used to be a housewife, and a knight used to be a boy.
Here are four types of semantic drift:
"Door" is "문(門)" in Korean. It is a Sino-Korean word, so does that mean Koreans did not have doors before borrowing the word?
The answer is no: "오래" is an older word for "door", found in the gloss for 門 "door" in this old wordbook (Thousand Character Classic):
Why did King Sejong do this? (specifically, the blue question mark)
I will follow this up with a more detailed view of the problem in a future post. In the meantime, feel free to pose your own hypotheses!
Korean, like French, Italian, and Mandarin, is a syllable-timed language, which means every syllable in a sentence is perceived as taking up roughly the same amount of time.
English is stress-timed, which means the time between every stressed syllable is roughly the same.
Hangul was used as a phonetic alphabet for various languages. Below is a page from 방언유석(方言類釋), an 18th-century dictionary of 5,000 Classical Chinese words with translations in 5 different languages (Mandarin, Korean, Manchu, Mongolian, Japanese), all written in Hangul.
In this frustrated letter written by King Jeongjo in 1797 to his closest political ally Sim Hwan-ji (沈煥之), Jeongjo fails to find an apt Chinese word to describe the state his political enemy (僻派) is in and writes "뒤쥭박쥭" (hodgepodge) in Hangul instead.
What do "따뜻하다", "뜨뜻하다", "따듯하다", "뜨듯하다", "따스하다", "다스하다", "뜨스하다", "드스하다", "따사롭다", "다사롭다", "따습다", "다습다", "뜨습다", "드습다", "따끈하다", "뜨끈하다", "뜨겁다" have in common?
They all mean "warm" and are derived from MK ᄃᆞᆺ다 "warm".
Sweet potatoes (고구마) and regular potatoes (감자), originally from the Americas, were introduced to Korea in the 18th and the 19th century, respectively.
Where do the words for them come from?
"얼굴" means "face" in Contemporary Korean.
However, before the 18th century, the word '얼굴' meant "shape; figure", and ᄂᆞᆾ (> 낯) was the main word for "face" instead. Today, 낯 is mostly only used in set phrases such as 낯을 가리다 "to be shy", 낯이 익다 "to be familiar".
"우마양저염역병치료방(牛馬羊猪染疫病治療方)" ('How to cure infectious diseases in cows, horses, sheep, and pigs') is a veterinary book from 1541.
Each passage is written three times: in Classical Chinese, Idu, and Hangul, showing the triglossia in Korean society at the time.
Why does Korean have two distinct tense paradigms for main clauses and relative clauses?
How did Korean develop a new past & future tense and replace the old ones?
Look out for the interesting parallels with the Romance languages.
The endings of the future tense in many Romance languages look suspiciously like forms of their verb meaning 'to have':
French 'ils finiront' & 'ils ont'
Spanish 'harás' & 'has'
Italian 'farò' & 'ho'
Well, that's actually what they are! Here's how this future tense originated:
풀어쓰기 is a way of writing Hangul not by grouping the letters into blocks, but rather writing them side-by-side. There has been a number of attempts, Ju Si-gyeong's being the first in 1914. Choe Hyeon-bae proposed upper and lowercase letters, and also cursive and print styles.
고맙다 "to be thankful" used to mean "to be respectable, high class" in Middle Korean, and it comes from MK 고마ᄒᆞ다 "to respect" + -압-.
고마온 손 앏ᄑᆡᄂᆞᆫ 가히도 구짓디 말며
"In front of an respectable guest, do not even scold a dog."
사랑하다 "to love" comes from Middle Korean ᄉᆞ라ᇰᄒᆞ다, which originally meant "to think (about)", "to consider". It is ultimately from Sino-Korean 思量(ᄉᆞ랴ᇰ)ᄒᆞ다 "to consider".
Below, you can see Chinese "思量飯喫"(consider eating) translated with MK "ᄉᆞ라ᇰᄒᆞ다".
In Middle Korean 하다 meant "to be big/to be a lot", while ᄒᆞ다 meant "to do".
하다 "to be big" fell out of use, leaving fossilized forms such as 하도 "too much", 하찮다 "to be insignificant" (lit. to be not big), and 한강 "The Han river" (lit. the big river).
"There still exist some people who know how to say these words in Japanese, but have difficulty choosing which word to use in Korean, so I added some Japanese words here." — 이태영 (1958), 『한글공문바로쓰기』("Writing Official Documents in Hangul Effectively")
Korean has no true 3rd person pronoun. 그 "he/she/they" and 그녀 "she" were coined in the early 20th Century by multiple translators who were seeking the right word for 3rd person pronouns in European languages. They are still strictly limited to literary use.
"O dog, do not bark,
Would all night people be thieves?
[...]
That dog must be from Korea too;
Hearing me, it has calmed down."
This teacup with a sijo (Korean poem) from Japan in the 1600s was made by a Korean potter, who was kidnapped to Japan during the Imjin War.
Did you know that Hangul was used not only for recording human languages, but also for musical notation? (Thread)
Below is <양금신보(梁琴新譜)>(1610) "Yang's new Geomungo scores". It consists of an introductory part on how to play Geomungo, and a compilation of Geomungo songs.
There's so many, but one would be:
The Mongols forcibly took so many young Korean girls into servitude that child marriage became very popular in Korea around this time, because they avoided taking married women.
Child marriage in Korea persisted well into the early 20th century.
It's funny how at one point the Mongolian Empire stretched from the Baltics to the south of China yet had such little cultural impact on the world afterwards
Learners, do you struggle with those verb endings that are different depending on the type of the previous verb (action vs stative/descriptive) in present tense?
I hope you find solace in the fact that there used to be a lot more of them.
High school "Chinese Language" textbook from South Korea, 1991. It was the last public school Chinese textbook using Zhuyin and Traditional Chinese characters.
Since August 2016, South Korea has two official languages: Korean and the Korean Sign Language (KSL). KSL is a part of the Japanese Sign Language Family. Because of this, KSL users can interact with deaf Japanese and Taiwanese people with little difficulty.
#dailykoreanfacts
언니 "big sister" used to refer to any elder family member (or older close friend) in the same generation. Now it is only used by females, for females. In the 1st picture, 언니 means '선배'. In the 2nd, it means '형'. Both of the authors are male.
#dailykoreanfact
What do "따뜻하다", "뜨뜻하다", "따듯하다", "뜨듯하다", "따스하다", "다스하다", "뜨스하다", "드스하다", "따사롭다", "다사롭다", "따습다", "다습다", "뜨습다", "드습다", "따끈하다", "뜨끈하다", "뜨겁다" have in common?
They all mean "warm" and are derived from MK ᄃᆞᆺ다 "warm".
"A prediction of the future"
"Any modern person can freely use a foreign word and incorporate it in their Korean speech. Therefore, in an extreme case, you could say that there is a possibility that all foreign words have a potential "risk" of becoming a loanword into Korean."
This is a letter by Lady Kim, whose husband and son was executed for treason, pleading to the King to spare her entire family's life by taking her own life instead, in 1727.
What's interesting about this letter, apart from its amazing calligraphy, historical significance and ...
Interesting, an "Easter egg" in Sejong's book 訓民正音 (1447):
The Chinese characters used to demonstrate the sounds of ㄱ [k], ㄲ [g], ㅋ [kʰ], and ㆁ [ŋ], the first four letters of the new alphabet, spell:
君虯快業 "The King and the young dragon's gratifying work"
In colloquial Korean, the plural of question words are formed by reduplication:
누가 왔어요? "Who arrived?"
누가누가 왔어요? "Who (plural) arrived?"
뭐 먹고 싶어? "What do you want to eat?"
뭐뭐 먹고 싶어? "Which things do you want to eat?"
밤ᄉᆡ엇더시오 (How did you sleep (=Good morning!)), everyone?
Korean greeting phrases from the early 20th century, from the language learning book "일선어신회화(日鮮語新會話)" (1937).
These are Hangul types included in Eulhaeja, a bronze movable typeface designed in 1455. It is the oldest Hangul type that still exists.
#dailykoreanfact
The romanization scheme presented in the chart below is the (informally dubbed) "missionary scheme", popularized by the French missionaries to Korea in the mid-19th century.
The romanization of 서울 "Seoul" originates from this scheme:
ㅅ → S
ㅓ → E
ㅜ → OU
ㄹ → L
"효뎨례의" (孝悌禮義 "Filial piety and brotherly love, and courtesy") is a commemorative/decorative coin (別錢) made in the Sejong Era in order to promote Confucian values.
It is the only coin that has Hangul on it from the Joseon dynasty.
「들온말 적는 법」 (1948) was the official set of rules on how to write foreign words in Hangul in South Korea from 1952-1958.
It incorporates letters not used in Modern Hangul, ㅸ/ᅄᅠ, ㆄ/ᅋᅠ, ᄙᅠ, and ㅿ to transcribe the sounds /v/, /f/, /l/, and /z/ respectively.
"(I) want to" is expressed using the construction "-고 싶다" in Korean. Many learners assume that "싶다" indicates "want", and "-고" is just a connector like "to".
However, etymologically, it is the exact opposite: "-고" indicates "want", whereas "싶다" has almost no meaning.
싶다(<식브다) "to feel like", 시키다(<식이다) "to order", 고지식하다(<고디식다<*곧-+-이+식다) "to be stubborn", are hypothesized to have come from an unattested word, *식다. We can't be sure what this word meant, but it was probably similar to 하다.
#dailykoreanfacts
서울 is spelled "Seoul" in English because it borrowed the French spelling 'Séoul' (Sé = 서 and oul =울).
"Seoul" only became the standard romanization of the word '서울' (Seo = 서 and ul = 울) in 2000, when the SK gov't changed its romanization scheme to RR.
#dailykoreanfact
ㅿ was a letter that represented the sound /z/. At the end of a syllable, it reduced to /s/. During the 16th century this sound was lost. 무ᅀᅮ /muzu/ became 무 "daikon", and 그ᅀᅥ became 그어 "Draw!". This is the origin of the ㅅ-irregular verbs (긋다, 낫다, 붓다, etc).
"The world hasn't forgotten you yet"
A leaflet made by the US & the Allied forces during WWII, giving hope to the enslaved Koreans of a brighter future.
The first modern prescriptive rule in Korean?
"Also, people use '의' and '에' without distinction, which comes from ignorance. If they were to be used equivalently, why would they have made those letters separately in the first place?
The pages are from "됴션말 독본 첫책" ("Korean Reader Vol. I") (1927) by 박용만. It was intended as a Korean textbook for Korean children in the US.
There are a lot of interesting orthographic innovations created by the author in this book, which I will cover in the future.
New (and revived old) Hangul consonant letters made by 박용만 (1881-1928) in 1927 for transcribing sounds in foreign languages:
力 - /g/. "'g' of English, が of Japanese"
匕 - /ɲ/ "'ñ' of English"
コ - /d/ "'d' of English"
ㅿ - /ʐ/ "日, 瑞 of Beijing Mandarin, 'ж' of Russian"
This book <전보각국구(電報各國歐)>, from around 1900, is a dictionary of telegraph codes, mapping each Hangul syllable, Chinese character, and word to an English word. Why does this exist? (Thread 🧵)
여보세요, used commonly as a greeting in a phone call, is a contraction of 여기 보세요 "look at here (me)". Similarly, 여보 "honey, darling" comes from the contraction of 여기 보오 "look at here". Compare with 여봐라, 여보게, and 여보시오 "Hey there!".
#dailykoreanfacts
I made a visualization!
(The distance between two points roughly corresponds to how similar the initial sounds of the numerals 1-10 are between the two languages)
옥수수 "corn" comes from 옥(玉) "jade" + 수수 (< 슈슈) "sorghum". 슈슈 is a loan from Chinese 蜀黍 shǔshǔ (cf. Sino-Korean 촉서) "sorghum".
Another word for "corn" is 강냉이, which is likely from 강남 (江南) "China" (originally "South of the Yangtze") + -이 (suffix).
Before the late 19th century, "소인(小人)" or "쇤(네)" lit. "little person" was used instead of "저" as a 1st person pronoun. "저" arose from the recursive pronoun '저' "themselves", and wasn't in widespread use until the early 20th century.
#dailykoreanfacts
Dialect map for '옥수수 / 강냉이' (corn, maize).
Corn originally comes from the Americas, and it entered Korea though China by trade in the 16th century.
Image from <한국언어지도>(2008)
옥수수 "corn" comes from 옥(玉) "jade" + 수수 (< 슈슈) "sorghum". 슈슈 is a loan from Chinese 蜀黍 shǔshǔ (cf. Sino-Korean 촉서) "sorghum".
Another word for "corn" is 강냉이, which is likely from 강남 (江南) "China" (originally "South of the Yangtze") + -이 (suffix).
“I’ve also heard from Jeong Jang:
“My great-great-grandfather's elder and younger brothers were each named ‘디화(知和)’ and ‘지화(至和)’, but at the time there were still no confusion over them.”
The confusion between ‘디’ and ‘지’ must not be old.”
—〈諺文志〉(1820) by 정동유
In Middle Korean, "nostril" was called "곳구무/곳구ᇚ". If it had followed regular sound changes till the present day, it would have been something like "*고꾸무". Instead, we have "콧구멍".
This is due to a process called "Recomposition".
The term "(formal) contamination" in the study of etymology refers to the phenomenon where an unrelated word with a similar meaning and a similar form (sound) alters the form of a word to be closer to it.
I've used this term consistently for years, e.g.:
저녁 "evening" only appears with the meaning "evening" from the 17th century (져녁~뎌녁 "evening").
Before that, 뎌녁 appears with the meaning "that direction over there", from 뎌 "that over there" + 녁 "direction".
How did "that direction over there" become "evening"?
New (and revived old) Hangul consonant letters made by 박용만 (1881-1928) in 1927 for transcribing sounds in foreign languages:
力 - /g/. "'g' of English, が of Japanese"
匕 - /ɲ/ "'ñ' of English"
コ - /d/ "'d' of English"
ㅿ - /ʐ/ "日, 瑞 of Beijing Mandarin, 'ж' of Russian"
Age is inextricably linked to the new year's day in the Korean language.
The word "살", usually used for counting someone's age, like English "years old", is related to 설 "new year's day" by ablaut.
Koreans express aging as "한 살을 먹다", literally, "to eat one 살".🧵
The character "這" (这) is used very commonly in Mandarin Chinese, read "zhè", meaning "this".
But did you know that "這" used to have a completely different usage in Korea, as a phonetic transcription of the syllable(s) /kʌt~kas/?
A book using '뒤' (backward), '앏' (forward), '왼역' (left), and '올온역' (right) to denote the meaning of Chinese characters representing North(北), South(南), East(東), and West(西), respectively. Does this mean ancient Koreans saw the world as facing South?
#dailykoreanfacts
There are two Hangul Days. South Korea celebrates it (한글날) on October 9th, the day on which Sejong officially announced the alphabet. North Korea celebrates it (조선글날) on January 15th, the day on which Sejong finished the creation of the alphabet.
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