[KS] FRANK_baektueso hannakkaji

[Otfried Cheong]

Ruediger Frank wrote:
> THANK YOU! At least one. Indeed, that was what I was talking about.
> I meant the spelling in HANGEUL. The NKs write: han-na-san. No
> kidding. Check your nearest NK dictionary.So, what is the solution?

Samuel Martin's "A reference grammar of Korean" has a discussion of the 
spelling of initial L and N in Hangul in the various spellings of both 
the South and the North (Section 1.6, page 15).   Generally speaking, SK 
follows the pronounciation, whileas NK tries to follows the "basic 
and/or historical shape of the morpheme".   But it's a complicated 
topic, Martin lists plenty of special cases and exceptions to the rules.

My guess is that the historical spelling of NA/RA in Halla is NA, and NK 
spelling retains this in spite of the pronounciation.

The Chinese character for NA/LA in Halla (Unicode U+62cf, see 
http://www.unicode.org/cgi-bin/GetUnihanData.pl?codepoint=62CF&useutf8=true) 
is actually extremely rare - there is not a single occurrence in my 
electronic Korean dictionary, it seems to be only used in Korean for 
place names, and even in Chinese it seems to be uncommon.
The Empas Hanja dictionary lists not a single use 
(http://handic.empas.com/dicsearch/view.html?i=721&o=1).

Some evidence for the historical shape NA is the current Cantonese 
pronounciation (Cantonese is generally a good indicator for historical 
Korean pronounciations).

Best wishes,
  Otfried