[KS] Hangul question: original graphic distinction between eo (Yale e) and arae ae (Yale oy)

John Armstrong johna318 at hotmail.com
Mon Apr 3 10:38:14 EDT 2017


Thanks for the comments Werner.  Your reference to seemingly archaic pronunciations in modern sijo and muga singing is very intriguing.  Is there an accessible reference you could give me?



Re my notation, I generally use either hangul or Revised Romanization in my own work (which is focused on Modern Korean, and is aimed at a general as opposed to a linguistic audience) and I use arae a and arae ae (a usage I have seen elsewhere though it is less common) as the names for the vowels that Yale transliteration writes as o and oy simply because the RR provides no way to represent those vowels.  (Nor, as far as I know, does McCune–Reischauer.)  When I need to I use RR for morphophonemic representations– practically equivalent to hangul and Yale - as permitted by the standard.



Re terminology, I used diphthong in the basic sense of “two sounds” to denote vowels that have different sounds in different parts of the syllable without implying anything about the exact articulatory or acoustic phonetic characteristics of the sounds.   I do not have a strong opinion about the exact phonetic realization of the final element in vowels of form Vi ~ Vj.   The one thing I would note though it is that, to the best of my knowledge, it does not participate in resyllabification before a vowel i.e. Vj-V does not -> V-jV (for example na+i-da ‘bring forth’ old formation causative of na-da ‘come forth’ becomes nae-da with monosyllabic stem nae- but the uncontracted infinitive is nae-(y)eo with the causative marking retained in the stem and not *na-yeo with it shifted to the following syllable and the underlying root vowel restored).



Re the Haerye, another member of the group informed me off-list that Gari Ledyard’s thesis includes a complete translation of the text.  I believe it at least lists all the Vi ~ Vj vowels.  Hopefully I can get access to the thesis and see how the text describes them and positions them in the overall vowel inventory.



As to the occurrence of (what I call) arae a and arae ae in Korean readings of Chinese character in the Donguk jeongun, I just noticed that Martin includes a very convenient summary in his Reference Grammar, pp. 126-.  It is in the form of a grid (horizontal = initial x vertical = final) and is ordered on the final dimension by book volumes 1-6, sections 1-26 (effectively rime groups), and within the sections section by segmental finals and tones (four for segmental finals ending in a consonant, three for finals ending in a vowel), presumably in the order they appear in in the original.  Not the same as having the actual document, but still very useful.



Thanks again for your comments.


-- John



________________________________
From: Koreanstudies <koreanstudies-bounces at koreanstudies.com> on behalf of Werner Sasse <werner_sasse at hotmail.com>
Sent: Sunday, April 2, 2017 2:04 AM
To: Korean Studies Discussion List
Subject: Re: [KS] Hangul question: original graphic distinction between eo (Yale e) and arae ae (Yale oy)


Dear John,

in your text you touch upon a couple of questions, which at the moment I am too busy to go into.

But your headline question is easy enough.. The dot in [eo] was in the middle of the [I], while the area-a was lower and a bit further apart.

By the way, when you wrote "arae ae", it looked to me as if you were seeing it as a diphthong. Diphtongisation was later, in the early stages the [I] was an off-glide, so [ai  / eI / oi...] would be more correct. (and in sijo singing this is still used, also in many muga)

Another by the way: [eo] was actually an [e] in the earlier stages (so Yale romanisation is like the pronunciation in early sources. And in [oy] the [y] is the off-glide...)

Welcome to the club

Werner


________________________________
From: Koreanstudies <koreanstudies-bounces at koreanstudies.com> on behalf of John Armstrong <johna318 at hotmail.com>
Sent: Friday, March 31, 2017 11:26 PM
To: koreanstudies at koreanstudies.com
Subject: [KS] Hangul question: original graphic distinction between eo (Yale e) and arae ae (Yale oy)


I just discovered this list and having looked at a couple years of archives I’m not sure it’s a good place to ask my question.  If there’s a more appropriate list please let me know.

I recently became interested in the question of the occurrence of the obsolete diphthongal vowel arae ae (arae a + i, Yale transliteration oy) in medieval Korean readings of Chinese characters.  Although I have never seen the full text of Dongguk Jeongun, my understanding from descriptions of it is that it specifies readings with this vowel for characters in some rime classes involving i-final diphthongs in Middle Chinese.  I also understand that Hunmin Jeongeum Haerye includes this vowel in its list of Korean diphthongs.   Further, I’ve seen examples of the vowel in native Korean words in late 15th century texts.  (Clear examples, not necessarily quite this old, include (all Yale transliteration) poy (modern pay) in several meanings, payyam (modern pay-am or paym) ‘snake’, -oy beside –uy possessive marker, and –toy (modern –tay) ‘time when’.)

So here is my question.  According to the doctrine of Hunmin Jeongeum Haerye, three vowels were primary, arae a (Heaven), eu (Earth) and i (Man), and all other vowels were compounds of these three – particularly a = i + arae a, eo =  arae a + i,  o = arae a + eu, and u = eu + arae a.  Later on arae a on its own came to be written as a short upper left-lower right stroke and the arae a component of compound vowels came to be written as a short stroke perpendicular to the long stroke; but it was originally written as a dot in both cases, and with the dot in the compound vowels close to but not touching the other vowel component.

But diphthongal arae ae was also written as a dot + a vertical stroke. So how did it differ from the same combination representing eo?  Greater space?  Different (maybe lower) positioning of the dot?

Also, having never seen the full text of the Haerye or even a complete translation of it, I wonder how it describes the diphthongs (both w-initial and y-final) and how it represents the difference between the two combinations of arae a + i, compound eo and diphthongal arae ae.  As far as I can see this is the only case in the whole vowel inventory where such a distinction needs to be made.

John Armstrong
Cambridge, MA
johna318 at hotmail.com

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