Number Taboos in Sino-Korean
This post is an exploration into a bit of Sino-Korean etymology and usage of certain vocabulary.
On the 22nd I wrote about the use of F in place of 4 on elevator keypads, even when it comes to Braille. Zrv made a good point about the pronunciation of 四 and 死, both 사 (sa) in Korean. From his comment:
I think it’s really not accurate to say that the homophones in this case are in a “foreign language”. Sino-Korean words are as much Korean as Latin-English words (like “very”) or Franco-English words (like “enter”) are English.
That’s absolutely true. While a Cantonese speaker would likely understand much of what was said around them while in Seoul, it’s all still Korean.
However, aware of the 죽다 verb form that’s most commonly used for “to die”, I wanted to look into the homophones. The question I left in the comments is this: By modern standards, can we consider ‘death’ and ‘four’ homophonous in Korean if 죽다 is the preferred word?
I contacted a couple friends — native Korean speakers who are also fluent in Mandarin and English — to get their take. I asked whether they ever use 사거 (sagǒ 死去), the one word i could find meaning ‘death’ that uses 死, in regular conversation. Neither friend had ever heard that particular word, but both were able to confirm it in dictionaries. Usually, the “polite” or “formal” way to say an elder relative has passed is with 서거 (sǒgǒ), a Sino-Korean word for which the corresponding hanja is 逝去, while the informal uses the native-Korean 죽다 verb forms. Here’s one dictionary’s entry for 서거:
국어사전 서거 (逝去) [서ː거]
[명사] ‘사거¹(죽어서 세상을 떠남)'(死去)의 높임말.
Translated:
国语辞典 sǒgǒ (逝去) [sʌːkʌ]
[noun] form of death¹ used in honorific speech.
Of course the definition* of 서거 includes the 死 root.
In fact there are a few compounds that use 死, one being 사망증명서, death certificate, for which the first two syllables are 死亡. Another is 사후의, 死后的. A quick search on zkorean.com for “death” brings up a number of examples.
That’s enough of an answer to my own earlier question. Clearly 死/사 is quite common. One of the reasons this had interested me as much as it did is that over the past year, I’ve probably asked a couple dozen people why the number 4 was considered taboo. I obviously knew this from my time in China, but it’s always interesting to hear differences in explanations between regions/countries. The answer I got was always the same. “They sound the same in Chinese,” instead of just “they sound the same”. It looks like the “…in Chinese” was really used to mean “…in words of Sinitic origin”.
Fair enough.
– – –
* That superscript 1 is marking that this is one of many words spelled sǒgǒ (all using different hanja). It links to a definition of sagǒ which reads
[명사] 죽어서 세상을 떠남.
[noun] death, leaving the world.
I think the key point of interest for me here is that Koreans still draw a clear distinction between native and Sino-Korean words even though they’ve used them for hundreds of years. For the most part, we don’t do that in English, especially when the words were taken into the language a long time ago as most of the French-based vocabulary is. ᴹ
off topic, that ᴹ that snuck into the end of your comment may make you the first reader to ‘use’ the IPA keyboard. a gold star for you.
ajpie ɪz so mətʃ fən!
I think for the most part they don’t distinguish it too clearly. For counting things, Korean numbers are used. For times, the hour is the Korean number and the minute is the Sinitic number. Dates are Sinitic. Aside from all that, I don’t think any Korean I know really considers the countless Sinitic words to be anything other than Korean, which is what Zrv said in the previous related post.
To make matters more confusing when it comes to etymology, 시청 is 市廳, as a subway stop, but a kilometre or two west is 아현역, for which the hanzi is 阿峴驛. 驛 is obviously an actual Chinese word. 아현 is not. Some of the hanzi is because it’s a Sinitic word. A lot of it isn’t. A great many place names which had native Korean names adopted hanzi to go along, just like Seoul 서울 adopted 首爾 as the official hanzi based on what the Chinese call the city. Seoul used to be Hanseong 漢城, the city on the 漢江, but later reverted to a native Korean name.
A hobby of mine is to ask people for the hanja writing of their names. A fair number of people these days don’t have hanja names aside from the surname, their parents opting to use native Korean words instead. That’s one of the few cases that a distinction is clearly made. However a number of people who do have a character-based name might not be aware of the characters as much as you’d expect.
A great many place names which had native Korean names adopted hanzi to go along, just like Seoul 서울 adopted 首爾 as the official hanzi based on what the Chinese call the city.
I think instead of adopting “首爾” from what the Chinese allegedly call the city, what really happened was that Sinitic speakers everywhere until a few years ago used only “漢城”, when Seoul’s administration decided to replace that name with something closer to the modern Korean pronunciation. “首爾” was chosen, all state-affiliated communication aimed at Mandarin speakers started using it, and perhaps some even tried to push its official adoption in Mandarin-speaking countries, much like Korea is pushing the change of a name of a certain body of water in a foreign language.
“首爾” does not illustrate your point well because there are a few differences to (almost?) all other character placenames that make it an oddity: As said above, it is not used by Korean speakers writing/speaking to other Korean speakers; “수이” is not Korean, so “首爾” is not hanja. Obviously, the characters were chosen with a Mandarin pronunciation in mind rather than a Korean one. Also, this particular Chinese name is only a few years old. I think administratively relevant placenames were sinicized for official documents centuries ago, and non-hanja names for any such places of decent size then somehow fell into disuse (many villages and geographic features such as island names may never have gotten hanja, or they never gained currency), perhaps with the exception of “Seoul” which I guess inofficially co-existed with its official names until its restoration, but I don’t know about that.
Sorry. Imagine the first part as a quote, I didn’t know how to do that.
Would that be the Sea of Japan by any chance? I hear there are some lovely little islands there. What were they called again? Tak… Takishi… well anyway I hear they’re beautiful.
You’re right regarding 首尔, as I mentioned above. But a fair point that it doesn’t quite support. I’ll fall back on 阿峴 then. Thanks for the comment.
[…] Sinoglot – Kellen writes about number taboos in Sino-Korean. […]
On the original topic, it seems that the avoidance of 4th floors was adopted part and parcel with Chinese vocabulary items and culture in a way that was not systematically thought out. There is no way that 4 as in 4th floor can sound like or be mistaken to represent anything near any of the many, many, many Korean words referring to death, including sinitic loanwords. But everyone knows that 四 sounds the same as 死, and that they are avoided as (near) homophones in China. So the taboo was somehow imported along with the culture/language in cloak mode. Chinese are very fond of X sounds like Y, and so we must avoid X to avoid Y. For Koreans this tendency is less strong, and I believe most of the examples that can be found are imports from China. Thus the “give a willow when parting, (because it sounds like 留),” can be found in classical poetry, and bat motives can be found at the palaces or in classical architecture (蝠 sounds like 福), but these are from more China-influenced spheres of life and not readily apparent in the daily life of your average Korean.
As for 阿峴, it certainly is a sino-Korean construction and not a pure Korean one, with 현 standing in pretty clearly for 고개. Specifically, it’s a sinitic translation for a Korean word (with various explanations as to what the original Korean word meant, see http://ask.nate.com/qna/view.html?n=4032183), much like the famous example of the city 한밭. In fact, in old records, this can frequently be found in old documents in the translation (part translation, part transliteration) of names. For place names and also for the names (for example) of slaves, that originally have no corresponding 한자.
Finally, on the topic of sino-korean loan words, all native speakers know that there are a large number of words in the dictionary that have been borrowed from Chinese. In fact, many of these words were newly coined by the Japanese as translations of Western concepts that were absorbed back into Chinese, but most native speakers do not know this. It is similar to the way that all English speakers know that many words have their roots in Latin or Greek, but non-specialists cannot tell if a given word is Greek or Latin in origin, let alone whether it is an original Greek/Latin word or whether it belongs to the class of invented latinate words called neo-latin. The average Korean has also memorized the party line that 한자 are wonderful because they allow us to distinguish between homophones in the language that would otherwise be indistinguishable. But the average language user does not have a very nuanced grasp of this precise corpus of borrowed words. For example, they will not be able to tell with any level of surety whether such words as 생각하다 and/or 수고했다 are Chinese loanwords or pure Korean.
But Korean society on the whole is more interested in pure Korean words these days. So we go back and dig up the pure Korean equivalents to sinitic words, like 미르. Or we use pure Korean words to represent new concepts, like 누리꾼. The other option is to accept English loanwords. 넷티즌, anyone? And we must eradicate any traces of Japanese influence on the language. So words like 닭도리탕 come under attack.
This series of posts has opened a fascinating thread of ideas…
“While a Cantonese speaker would likely understand much of what was said around them while in Seoul, it’s all still Korean.”
Really? A Cantonese speaker would understand Korean? Is this a typo? Or just a little exaggeration?
A Cantonese speaker would likely understand much of what was said around them. Neither a typo nor an exaggeration. I didn’t say they’d understand Korean like a Korean person does. Just that they’d understand a lot of what was said.
Thanks for the reply! I didn’t realize there were so many similarities. (Of course, with my crappy skill level it is hard enough to understand the natives in HK and GZ, so I wouldn’t expect much to happen in Korea.)
Kellen, that’s a rather astonishing claim. Do you have any anecdotal evidence to back it up? Have you ever heard a Cantonese speaker claim to understand significant portions of spoken Korean? I can imagine a Cantonese speaker occasionally recognizing a Sino-Korean word here and there, but it’s hard for me to imagine a Cantonese speaker understanding even the simplest of Korean sentences without having studies the language.
On another point in this thread, I think it is true that educated Koreans have a strong sense of the distinction between Sino-Korean and native Korean vocabulary. There are a number of reasons for this. One, part of their education is to learn to recognize Sino-Korean morphemes and (although there is great variation in educational policy) the Chinese characters that can write those morphemes. Two, many Sino-Korean morphemes have distinctive syllable shapes that are rare or absent in native Korean, so that speakers can unconsciously develop a feel for the different layers. Three, there are certain morphological patterns that are more common to one layer than the other. Four, Sino-Korean vocabulary tends to be more formal.
However, this doesn’t mean that Korean intuition is infallible. High-frequency Sino-Korean vocabulary that is of one syllable is not often recognized as such. An example is bang 방 ‘room’. And, as Taemin noted, some native two-syllable nouns that combine with hada 하다 ‘to do’ may be mistaken for Sino-Korean compounds.
But I would argue that none of this is really different from English. Educated English speakers have a good feel for Latinate (i.e. borrowed from French) vocabulary. One, because they consciously learn Latin roots in school (e.g. ‘invert’, ‘revert’, ‘divert’, ‘subvert’). Two, because they subconsciously learn to recognize morphological differences (e.g. Germanic roots generally take un- to form negatives, while Latin roots take in-/il-/im-/ir-). Three, there are patterns of spelling differences that educated speakers unconsciously recognize (like “k” in Germanic roots but “c” in Latinate roots). Four, because Latinate vocabulary tends to be more formal. Think about pairs of words like “unthinkable” vs. “inconceivable”, “lawful” vs. “legal”, “get” vs. “acquire”.
But English speakers also sometimes guess wrong, just as Korean speakers do. Most English speakers would probably think of “very” as a basic English word, not a Latin borrowing.
Zrv,
Indeed a good friend of mine from Guangzhou who now resides in Korea and who I met shortly after her arrival in the country made the claim a number of times that they could make out a good portion of the vocabulary in conversations, even early on. She said months later, after studying the language for that time, that she thought it gave her a big advantage over her compatriot classmates. Another mutual friend is from a Mandarin-speaking part of Jiangsu and said she felt no such advantage in listening. Of course the only evidence I have is anecdotal, but I have heard a handful of Cantonese speakers make the claim.
The bold-type “much” in my comment was meant to emphasise that they’d understand much but not all. Re-reading it now that may have been lost somewhere between how it sounded in my head and how it came out to anyone else reading it. Sorry for the confusion I may have caused.
A good point that, as you said, “many Sino-Korean morphemes have distinctive syllable shapes that are rare or absent in native Korean”. Obviously I lack this intuition. However I’ve been able to guess a few times if a person’s name were based on Sinitic characters or if it were a native Korean name. Granted they’re usually things like 여름 (‘summer’), 미소 (‘smile’), 하늘(‘sky’) and so on, though I have a couple friends with slightly more obscure meanings in their names (e.g. my good friend ‘Gift from Jesus’).
Kellen, like ZRV, I find the claim you make about the transfer from Cantonese to Korean hard to believe, even with the ‘much but not all’ addition. Is the problem our different senses of what ‘much’ represents? Here’s my own anecdote for comparison.
I also have a friend who is from Guangzhou and lives in Korea. Early on she commented on how Cantonese regularly helped her figure out new words, and that Mandarin was not nearly so helpful. However, it didn’t sound like she was understanding more than isolated words or phrases. The way she described it, while she took great pleasure in occasionally being able to tease out words in context, more often she was noticing the connections (with regard to Cantonese) between the Korean she heard and what she was studying. In other words, early on she sometimes understood some fraction, but not much, of what she heard. It was enough to make her excited, but it didn’t sound like she was walking the streets of Seoul having non-stop language epiphanies. Naturally, the longer she studied, the more she recognized the connections between phonetic systems. She did feel it was a real advantage for her- – but this was from studying, not just listening.
I think the problem here is definitely differing interpretations of ‘much’. I’m given a million dollars. I then turn around and lose 5,000. I would say I still lost “much” money. Perhaps “a fair amount” would be better?
I think a big factor is the person as well. I for one sure felt like I was having language epiphanies on a regular basis, and that’s just from Mandarin and a tiny bit of Wu. The friend I mentioned above is from Guangzhou but her parents are from different places up north, and she tends to be somewhat language-aware and fairly curious. Personality probably plays a role in how much someone sees those connections.