[KS] A Question about the term hanbando

Andriy Ryzhkov andy_kim at ukr.net
Tue May 9 12:28:40 EDT 2006


Dear Christopher!
First of all, it seems to me that it is not necessarily the Japanese who among the other nations of the same cultural and historical Far East area were first to derive the word [bando]. And not necessarily it was a semantic borrowing from English - what if Japanese (or Chinese, for example) didn`t borrow it from English or any other languages at all? Do you have any evidence that it was a loan-word? This question needs more etymological investigation.
Well, if to speak about Korean and Japanese languages, it is widely known that both of them have numerous words of Chinese origin. Thus, the word-formation rules and models used to derive new words in Sino-Korean or Sino-Japanese part of vocabulary of each of the mentioned language would be the same, if not to take into consideration several exceptions. And, of course, they will be acceptable for Chinese language as well. For this reason, if a Chinese character-based word is derived, say, in Japanese, it can be easily recognized by Koreans or Chinese. 
In case it was derived by the Japanese, it is not Japan-centric translation due to Japanese worldview, since it was derived using the Sino-Japanese lexical material, which the Japanese came to use since the adoptation of Chinese characters. Thus, the word should be considered as a phenomenon of lexical re-export to Chinese, since in China they also use the word 半岛. 
If to assume that the word "peninsula" was borrowed from English (but it wasn`t necessarily so, I believe), then we should refer to its etymology. English, in its turn, borrowed it from Latin [pæninsula], lit. "almost an island" -  from [pæne] "almost" + [insula] "island." Earlier it was translated as "demie island". 
If you need alternative ways of naming "peninsula", you should find an synonimic variant for the word`s first formant ban- (since "-do", meaning "island" can not be altered). If you want a pure Korean variant, I see it as a hybrid-word "bansom" ("-som" meaning island in native Korean), since I see no alternative for the "ban-".
Sorry if my remarks didn`t shed any light on your question
Andriy Ryzhkov







More information about the Koreanstudies mailing list