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The Oldest Cookbook in Korean

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Re: The Oldest Cookbook in Korean

#11

Post by frutiger »

lehi wrote: post #5

It's interesting to see what Old World cuisine looked like before the spread of New World ingredients. Editing in a quote from the article for repliers: 'Notably, there’s no mention of gochugaru, the staple spice of Korean cuisine. Although gochugaru, made from New World chile peppers, became available during Lady Jang’s lifetime, “the book is really about the royal cuisine of her ancestors, when gochugaru was not av…

As per ginko, this is post Columbian Exchange. However there are older cookbooks, e.g. from 1390[1].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forme_of_Cury.

Re: The Oldest Cookbook in Korean

#12

Post by gerdesj »

frutiger wrote: post #11
lehi wrote: post #5

It's interesting to see what Old World cuisine looked like before the spread of New World ingredients. Editing in a quote from the article for repliers: 'Notably, there’s no mention of gochugaru, the staple spice of Korean cuisine. Although gochugaru, made from New World chile peppers, became available during Lady Jang’s lifetime, “the book is really about the royal cuisine of her ancestors, when gochugaru was not av…

As per ginko, this is post Columbian Exchange. However there are older cookbooks, e.g. from 1390[1]. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forme_of_Cury .

Perhaps, but this article is celebrating an ancient cookbook from Korea and not England.

Not only that but: "Some historians even believe it could be the first cookbook written by a woman in all of East Asia."

I am not familiar with the sexual politics/subtleties surrounding food, let alone writing about it, in East Asia. I suspect, given what I know from these parts (England), that women in East Asia had few opportunities to express themselves in any form, let alone a book that comes down through the centuries to today.

I suggest that Jang Gye-hyang did remarkably well and ought to be thought of as one of the fore-founders of a part of modern food. Here in the UK we have Mrs Beeton as a similar example (albeit rather later.)

Re: The Oldest Cookbook in Korean

#13

Post by supernova87a »

I think it took me a while to understand (after being told by native speakers) that Korean and Japanese are a bit of a linguistic evolutionary puzzle, especially if you thought that because their characters look like Chinese, their spoken languages are related to Chinese.

They are not. The languages must have come first / evolved independent of China, and then a wave of foreign commerce / scholarly / government influence over centuries propagated Chinese writing to them.

So the spoken language uses Chinese based characters to record the sounds in writing, but it may not necessarily have relation to what the sounds are in Chinese if someone were to read the characters as if Chinese. And the spoken language is not at all related to Chinese (aside from some imported words). As if someone encountered English alphabet words being spoken with totally different sounds assigned to them.

That was very interesting to finally understand -- if I've even gotten it all correct...

Re: The Oldest Cookbook in Korean

#14

Post by gibolt »

supernova87a wrote: post #13

I think it took me a while to understand (after being told by native speakers) that Korean and Japanese are a bit of a linguistic evolutionary puzzle, especially if you thought that because their characters look like Chinese, their spoken languages are related to Chinese. They are not. The languages must have come first / evolved independent of China, and then a wave of foreign commerce / scholarly / government influ…

I'm not sure how you came to that conclusion. Words can independently change and evolve over time, while still using the same base.

As a Chinese speaker, Korean very much sounds closeish and Japanese is often similar enough to realize a distant split.

It is important to remember that all branches of a tree grow. China has thousands of dialects all co-evolving and we don't know which the others could have split from and how far either has changed

Re: The Oldest Cookbook in Korean

#15

Post by [deleted] »

supernova87a wrote: post #13

I think it took me a while to understand (after being told by native speakers) that Korean and Japanese are a bit of a linguistic evolutionary puzzle, especially if you thought that because their characters look like Chinese, their spoken languages are related to Chinese. They are not. The languages must have come first / evolved independent of China, and then a wave of foreign commerce / scholarly / government influ…

[deleted]

Re: The Oldest Cookbook in Korean

#17

Post by awl130 »

gibolt wrote: post #14
supernova87a wrote: post #13

I think it took me a while to understand (after being told by native speakers) that Korean and Japanese are a bit of a linguistic evolutionary puzzle, especially if you thought that because their characters look like Chinese, their spoken languages are related to Chinese. They are not. The languages must have come first / evolved independent of China, and then a wave of foreign commerce / scholarly / government influ…

I'm not sure how you came to that conclusion. Words can independently change and evolve over time, while still using the same base. As a Chinese speaker, Korean very much sounds closeish and Japanese is often similar enough to realize a distant split. It is important to remember that all branches of a tree grow. China has thousands of dialects all co-evolving and we don't know which the others could have split from a…

His conclusion is sound while yours is not. Korean is not a dialect of Chinese, which seems to be your implication. Neither is it a "branch" of a tree of which Chinese is the trunk. In linguistic terms it is called a "language isolate". In the past, linguists tended to group Korean and Japanese together; I believe largely for political reasons they have been separated--but that's another topic.

Korean uses many Chinese loan words (in the same way that English uses Greek loan words) but the sentence structure, pronunciation and grammar are totally different. You would not say English is a dialect or branch of Greek for the same reason.

I speak both Korean, Japanese and am currently studying Chinese. Korean does not sound like Mandarin at all because it is not a tonal language. It does sound similar to Mongolian and Manchurian. That is not surprising because the roots of Koreans (and probably their current language) come from the area north of Korea near Manchuria.

Re: The Oldest Cookbook in Korean

#18

Post by 9nGQluzmnq3M »

supernova87a wrote: post #13

I think it took me a while to understand (after being told by native speakers) that Korean and Japanese are a bit of a linguistic evolutionary puzzle, especially if you thought that because their characters look like Chinese, their spoken languages are related to Chinese. They are not. The languages must have come first / evolved independent of China, and then a wave of foreign commerce / scholarly / government influ…

The modern Korean writing system (hangul) is unrelated to Chinese.

Also, it's quite common for languages to be written in scripts originally developed for completely unrelated languages. Maltese is related to Arabic but written in the Latin (English) alphabet, Mongolian uses Cyrillic (Russian), Thai/Lao/Khmer derive from South Indian scripts, etc.

Re: The Oldest Cookbook in Korean

#19

Post by frutiger »

gerdesj wrote: post #12
frutiger wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As per ginko, this is post Columbian Exchange. However there are older cookbooks, e.g. from 1390[1]. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forme_of_Cury .

Perhaps, but this article is celebrating an ancient cookbook from Korea and not England. Not only that but: "Some historians even believe it could be the first cookbook written by a woman in all of East Asia." I am not familiar with the sexual politics/subtleties surrounding food, let alone writing about it, in East Asia. I suspect, given what I know from these parts (England), that women in East Asia had few opportu…

I was replying to lehi’s comment about food pre-Columbian exchange. I’m not disparaging the author of this cookbook.

Re: The Oldest Cookbook in Korean

#20

Post by gibolt »

awl130 wrote: post #17
gibolt wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure how you came to that conclusion. Words can independently change and evolve over time, while still using the same base. As a Chinese speaker, Korean very much sounds closeish and Japanese is often similar enough to realize a distant split. It is important to remember that all branches of a tree grow. China has thousands of dialects all co-evolving and we don't know which the others could have split from a…

His conclusion is sound while yours is not. Korean is not a dialect of Chinese, which seems to be your implication. Neither is it a "branch" of a tree of which Chinese is the trunk. In linguistic terms it is called a "language isolate". In the past, linguists tended to group Korean and Japanese together; I believe largely for political reasons they have been separated--but that's another topic. Korean uses many Chine…

That is not my implication, just as humans are not evolved from gorillas. The likely share a common base.

That may have been 500, 1000, or more years ago and each continuously absorbed neighboring language features from trade or due to local social structures.

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