[KS] two formal questions - Japanese/Korean

[Robert Carrubba]

Dear Frank,

OK, once more, on-list, re: Korean word spacing -

Please check this link for Korean spacing and other standard rules:
http://www.korean.go.kr/09_new/dic/rule/rule01.jsp

For the book title you asked about go to > 5장 뛰어쓰기 > 제4절 고유 명사 및 전문 용어

The rule in contemporary Korean is that case particles _must_ append to
the end of the NP they modify, then a space _must_ be put between that NP
and the next sentence constituent. The construction you mention is NP의 NP,
thus not putting in a space is a ‘spacing error’, in contemporary Korean
and in middle-Korean.

This information aside, in a book title, one way to sort things out is to
consider if the spacing or lack of spacing would conflict with another
grammatical element.

In the case of the genitive case particle –의, which can indicate either
possession or attribution, there is no other grammatical element that it
could be mistaken for, so while in normal prose writing not spacing the
NP의 NP is by rule incorrect, in a title it may be perceived as only a
matter of stylistics (maybe coming down to saving a space). (Although not
something I would choose to do, personally.)

For other constructions spacing can entail spelling, such as with
connectives vs attributives + dependent nouns like -는데 vs –는 데 and –ㄴ지 vs
–ㄴ 지, which use the same letters but indicate different meanings,
depending on the spacing. Omitting the space or including it changes the
meaning. (Although these, especially the former, are a common source of
native-speaker spelling errors and they are usually simply parsed over and
understood as what was meant not what was spelled, in real-world contexts.)

On your title again, wholly subjectively, when I went to university in
Korea none of my course textbook titles were written with no spacing after
pure Korean grammatical elements, rather you may see the omission of the
particle altogether in either 'sino' or 'pure', ‘漢字研究’ and '한자연구',
especially if the emphasis is on thinking of both words as a whole single
concept.

Additionally, the history of ‘사이 시옷’ and noun lexicalization (덧니, 햇빛,
etc.) makes the genitive case and word spacing slightly more murky when it
comes to ‘native-speaker intuition’, but that is another topic..(which you
can check out in an 李朝語辭典 under ㅅ).

I'm sure others will have interesting historical info and opinions about
-의, possible word spacing connotations, academic / political schools of
thought, colonialism etc.


Hope this helps.


Best,

Robert





-----Original Message-----
From: Frank Hoffmann <hoffmann at koreanstudies.com>
Reply-To: Frank Hoffmann <hoffmann at koreanstudies.com>, Korean Studies
Discussion List <koreanstudies at koreanstudies.com>
Date: 2014년 4월 15일 화요일 오후 8:23
To: <koreanstudies at koreanstudies.com>
Subject: [KS] two formal questions - Japanese/Korean

Dear All:

These are two very minor small questions, and I hesitated posting it.
But then, where else to ask?

(a) 
Is there any rule among Japanologists (in the U.S., that is, in Europe
all are anarchists anyway), for the word (name) division of Japanese
names in Kanji?
Example:
  Hidemichi Tanaka 田中英道
  Murai Osamu 村井紀
or:
  Hidemichi Tanaka 田中 英道
  Murai Osamu 村井 紀
I see both variations. Always wondered about that, never asked.


(b)
A similar formal question, this time for both Japanese and Korean:
In titles of articles or books, when I have something like this ...
 (J)  Kanji no kenkyū_ 漢字の研究
 (K)  Hanjaŭi yŏn'gu (or: Hanja ŭi yŏn'gu) 漢字의研究
... I see that more and more Korean publishers do insert a space there (
漢字의 研究) while Japanese still do not. My question (again, this is
about the rendering of the original script, not the transcription): do
we ignore however this appears in books or magazines and just insert a
space in any case, and is this done the same way for Japanese and
Korean (this is what I did so far), or are there any rules for this.
Are there any such "spacing rules" for Korean and for Japanese in Japan
and South Korea?

As I warned -- these are just minor questions. Nothing exciting.


Thanks,
Frank