[KS] A Question about pukkando

[Yong-ho Choe]

On the etymology of "Kando," the following is what I heard from several professors at Yanbian University several years ago when I questioned them:

Kando originally referred to an islet in Tumen River.  In the early and mid 19th century, a number of Koreans in the Korea-China border in the Tumen River region crossed the river into Manchuria to cultivate land.  Some crossed the river in the morning and returned in the evening after work, and some went there in spring and returned in fall.  Their crossing into China, however, was illegal at the time.  So when they were questioned by the authorities, they would simply reply that they had been to Kando--the islet on Tumen River.  Later as the number of Koreans settling down in the present Yanbian region increased, Kando came to to refer to the entire area where Koreans inhabited in the Korea-China border.

On "Bando" (peninsular), I am intrigued to find that neither the famed Morohashi dictionary nor  "Ciyuan" (Chinese dictionary) gives any historical reference to that word.  It might just be possible that Japanese coined this word after Western term Peninsular.


At 06:59 PM 5/9/2006, Mark Peterson wrote:
>Greetings islanders and half-islanders,
>
>All this chatter about bando brings another question to my mind, and that is the etymology of Pukkando -- the term for Manchuria.  It's is "north" "space" "island" -- and how did that come about?  There is nothing of an island in that northern space.
>
>This is probably a simple question the answer to which many of you know, and maybe I just ought to go look it up; but I think it might contribute to this discussion on "half-islands".
>
>best,
>Mark
>
>On May 9, 2006, at 10:28 AM, Andriy Ryzhkov wrote:
>
>>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
>>
>>
>>
>>
>

Yong-ho Choe, Professor Emeritus
Department of History
University of Hawaii at Manoa
Honolulu, HI  96822

Tel: 808 956-6762
Fax: 808 956-9600
E-mail: choeyh at hawaii.edu