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

[John Armstrong]

Thanks, Bob, for the additional references and friendly encouragement.



I asked several US importers of Korean books and all informed me that the 1999 국립국어원 표준국어대사전 is out-of-print.  The same organization (National Institute of Korean Language in English) has recently launched their new online 우리말 샘 which is supposed to have 1,000,000 entries, double that of their earlier dictionary and probably too big to publish in printed form.  A very valuable feature of this online dictionary is that it has a fine-grained public API that allows registered users to do up to I think 25,000 lookups a day, which makes it great for certain kinds of automated lexicographic investigations.  It may have as much in the way of old forms as the 1999 dictionary.  I’ve seen a few from simple lookups; it may be necessary to special search queries to get at more than the most basic ones.



Thanks to the generous help of another KS group member I can now see the full set of readings in the Donguk Jeongun.   Since I’m mainly interested in the vowel parts of the readings and within them mostly in a few specific vowels, I think the total number of characters I’m particularly concerned with is small enough to deal with by hand.  Also now that I can see the readings of individual characters I can connect the Korean readings to the rime classes and reconstructed Middle Chinese pronunciations of the characters.



Is there a study of the Korean Sino-Xenic “reflexes” of Middle or earlier Chinese that you would recommend?  I see occasional remarks the along the lines of “the y onglide of the MC [or whatever] final was lost in Korean” but I’ve never seen a systematic set of phonological rules that specify the conventional (literary) mapping from Chinese to Korean.



-- John



________________________________
From: Koreanstudies <koreanstudies-bounces at koreanstudies.com> on behalf of Samuel Robert Ramsey <ramsey at umd.edu>
Sent: Saturday, April 8, 2017 12:13 PM
To: Korean Studies Discussion List
Subject: Re: [KS] Hangul question: original graphic distinction between eo (Yale e) and arae ae (Yale oy)

Gee, there may well be some good online source of that information now, and somebody on this discussion group list may know about it. But as for me, I still use hard-copy dictionaries originally given/provided to me by SNU people.

The best, most up-to-date Korean dictionary I personally know of right now is 표준국어대사전 in three volumes from the 국립국어연구원. Or, alternatively, you could use 한글학회's 우리말 큰 사전, which has historical forms in a separate, fourth volume.

But neither of those two dictionaries gives you an easy list of the Sino-Korean forms you ask about. That's why I suggested Nam Gwang-u's dictionary, which is explicitly that.

I suggest you ask some of the bright young linguistic and philological scholars in Korea, who could give you the best advice about where you might go for the latest in the way of online resources. --But maybe others in this discussion group could also do that!

Bob

On Sat, Apr 8, 2017 at 9:57 AM, John Armstrong <johna318 at hotmail.com<mailto:johna318 at hotmail.com>> wrote:


Thanks for the reference. As someone who did a lot of historical work in a non-East Asian language field in my younger days I am frustrated by my lack of a dictionary that covers Middle and Early Modern Korean and a detailed grammar for those periods.


I don't suppose there is an online version of Nam Gwang-u's dictionary or something like it?  I was hoping that the National Institute of Korean Language's new online Urimal Sem would include historical data.  It has some for sure but it's not very extensive.


-- John


________________________________
From: Koreanstudies <koreanstudies-bounces at koreanstudies.com<mailto:koreanstudies-bounces at koreanstudies.com>> on behalf of Samuel Robert Ramsey <ramsey at umd.edu<mailto:ramsey at umd.edu>>
Sent: Friday, April 7, 2017 10:57 PM
To: Korean Studies Discussion List
Subject: Re: [KS] Hangul question: original graphic distinction between eo (Yale e) and arae ae (Yale oy)

John,

Glad you're discovering the joy of reading Gari's thesis/book.

I don't know of a specific list of the kind you mention, but maybe you could find what you need in 남광우 (南廣祐編著), 古今漢韓字典, 인하대학교출판부, Seoul 1995. It's a fairly exhaustive dictionary of historical sources.

Bob



Do you have a sense of the history of the spellings of the readings of the characters in question?  In particular, after arae ae merged with ae, to what extent do you think the orthography continued to preserve their historical values and to what extent did it confuse or redistribute them (say, by preferring arae ae to ae independent of the historical value)?



Perhaps this is something that’s already been studied; I’m personally totally unfamiliar with the literature and can only guess that it has been.



Not a very important question but I’d be interested in any comments you have.



-- John




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