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What % of Korean vocab comes from Chinese | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| kimchicurry Super Polyglot Newbie United States Joined 5995 days ago 12 posts - 29 votes Speaks: English, Cantonese*, Mandarin, Japanese, Korean, Hindi, Spanish, Nepali, Urdu, Taiwanese, Shanghainese, Kannada, Gujarati Studies: Biblical Hebrew, Arabic (Egyptian), Sinhalese, Swahili, Vietnamese, Modern Hebrew, Arabic (Written), French, Persian, Bengali, Malay | Message 9 of 9 08 April 2009 at 6:28am | IP Logged |
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I believe that Cantonese or Taiwanese (Minnan) and probably Hakka are the most useful to know when trying to sponge up large dosages of Sino-Korean vocabulary. Cantonese is probably the most directly useful, as the sound changes between the two are quite regular. As a Cantonese/Mandarin speaker, using that "Handbook of Korean Vocabulary" book was one of the best things I have ever done; because I am already familiar with how to write Chinese characters and pronounce them in Cantonese, I was able to go through that book very quickly yet thoroughly, focusing on the regular sound changes between Cantonese (which is very close to Middle Chinese) and Sino-Korean.
Taiwanese Minnan is a rather complicated language when it comes to phonology, because there are basically two strata in the language- an older one which is known as the 白讀 'Plain/Vernacular Reading' and a second one borrowed from Middle Chinese pronunciation known as 文讀 'Literary Reading,' a good analogy to the different usages of the two readings would be the Japanese kun'yomi and on'yomi, where more "technical/refined" words tend to use on'yomi/literary reading and words that are part of the core everyday vocab tend to use kun'yomi/plain reading. The 'literary reading' of Chinese characters in Taiwanese is the one which is very close to Sino-Korean (and also Cantonese and Hakka), in some cases even closer to Sino-Korean than Cantonese, although the plain readings are quite different. If a Taiwanese speaker is well-educated in the literary reading, he or she will also find Sino-Korean readings a piece of cake. One must also take note of the Korean manner in using Chinese roots to create words, as sometimes these are not necessarily formed in the same way in Chinese languages. I place these words which are different from their Chinese equivalents into two groups- one is the same in character usage as in Japanese, and the other, a smaller group, is special to Korean. For example, 'airplane' uses the characters 飛機 in Chinese languages- Cantonese fei1gei1, Mandarin fei1ji1, Shanghainese fi1ci, Minnan hui1ki1. Korean and Japanese use 飛行機 (bihaenggi, hikouki), and an alternative word in TAIWANESE Minnan (not mainland) would be poe1heng5ki1, which uses the same characters as the Korean and Japanese (this is due to Japanese influence on Taiwanese Minnan in the past). So there are a lot of instances where knowledge of Sino-Japanese words will help with the "discount" in Korean. Other Korean words (small minority) are, as far as I know, more or less special to Korean, such as 親舊 for 'friend.' So anyway, learning Korean is a time when knowledge of Cantonese turns out to be quite useful! 1 person has voted this message useful |
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