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The Oldest Cookbook in Korean

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Re: The Oldest Cookbook in Korean

#21

Post by lehi »

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…

> It does sound similar to Mongolian and Manchurian.

Mongolian phonology doesn't sound like any other East Asian language I've heard: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkU9Zd0LQjg

Re: The Oldest Cookbook in Korean

#22

Post by moltar »

9nGQluzmnq3M wrote: post #18
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.

The Mongolian Cyrillic one is quite a trip. As a native Russian speaker, it just looks so odd. Like a broken website encoding from early days of the internet.

Re: The Oldest Cookbook in Korean

#23

Post by hungryhobo »

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 Chinese characters in Korean are absolutely just Chinese, the old Korean dynasties modeled many things after the chinese imperial court, including the writing system. However chinese letters are largely inaccessible to the common folks, that's why Sejong invented Hangul, a phonetic writing system that's easier to learn.

Re: The Oldest Cookbook in Korean

#25

Post by hnaln »

9nGQluzmnq3M wrote: post #18
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.

That's not completely true. Hangul characters are based off of Chinese characters.

Re: The Oldest Cookbook in Korean

#26

Post by xenihn »

>In one of Lady Jo’s many anecdotes about Lady Jang, she describes how the noblewoman would look down at the village during dinnertime, to see which homes did not have smoke rising from the kitchen, meaning the household had no rice to cook. She would then invite families in need to work on her land so she could feed them. “Even the term ‘superwoman’ is not enough to describe Grandma Jang,” Lady Jo says.

I'm extremely confused by this take. Nobles have an obligation to not let their cattle starve to death. This excerpt makes it sound like she's being charitable by letting her peasants plant, grow, and harvest the food that is then used to compensate them for their labor.

Re: The Oldest Cookbook in Korean

#28

Post by solidsnack9000 »

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…

Although there are a tremendous number of borrowings out of Chinese into both languages, there aren't many structural similarities between Chinese and Korean or Chinese and Japanese.

For example, Chinese has no system of verb conjugation, whereas Korean and Japanese both do, conjugating for the past and present, among other aspects. Chinese also does not have a system of adjective inflection, whereas Korean and Japanese do. Adjectives in these languages inflect to indicate speech level as well as to indicate tense (which is to say, adjectives have a "past form", kind of like verbs).

There are many other structural differences of note.

Beware of arguments based on things we don't know, technically "argument from ignorance". That we don't know which one they might have split from is no reason to believe that this is actually happened! What we don't know didn't happen can't go in place of what we do know did happen.

Re: The Oldest Cookbook in Korean

#29

Post by lasagnaphil »

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 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.
Although for Korea, you need to understand that women had much better treatment in the Goryeo Dynasty than in the Joseon Dynasty (which came after it, and is perhaps the most well-known because of its proximity to modern Korea and the cultural effects it has on today). Women had equal inheritance rights with men, and brothers/sisters had almost equal status within families. It is the Confucian ideals that came with the leaders of the Joseon dynasty that kinda ruined all this. This will probably blow your mind: women had more inheritance rights in the 10th century than in 1990 (until, the laws were amended in 1991)
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