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The Oldest Cookbook in Korean

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Re: The Oldest Cookbook in Korean

#41

Post by bane »

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…

A close analog to the place Chinese has with Koreans and Japanese speakers is the place ancient Latin and Greek have today with English speakers. Lots of loan words, many of which aren't even recognized as such by native speakers, and uses in prestige modes like philosophy, science, etc.

One difference is that Rome fell and the Normans brought a highly changed Romance language with them into England. While Korea and China had an ongoing relationship going back millennia. As Chinese changed over time different words from different eras also crept in to the language.

On top of that, Korean itself also changed, harmonized dialects, dropped and added sounds and features and other things. The Korean written in the first book on Hangul by King Sejong the Great is both not only not pronounceable by modern Koreans, but less understandable than Chaucer might be to modern English speakers.

Re: The Oldest Cookbook in Korean

#42

Post by magicsmoke »

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…

Take all the west European languages and how they're littered with loan words from Roman Latin or from French/Spanish/Italian which are descended from Latin. Now imagine if French/Spanish/Italian were all still called Latin and the Roman empire existed into the modern era. That's the influence Sinitic has on East Asian languages.

European, Language, Littered, Roman, Latin, French, Spanish, Italian, Descended, Imagine, Empire, Existed, Modern, Era, Influence, Sinitic, Asian

"Roman" terms in modern day English.

Re: The Oldest Cookbook in Korean

#43

Post by magicsmoke »

samatman wrote: post #34
awl130 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In fact, Greek and English, being both Indo-European languages, are more closely related than Korean and the various Chinese languages. There is a controversial theory that Korean, Mongolian, and Machurian, are all a part of an Altaic superfamily — along with Japanese, Turkish, and a number of others. This was broadly accepted fifty years ago, and less so today.

Given that we have writings from Indo-European speaking empires since 1000 BC that we can mine for phonological clues and trace evolutionary changes with while the languages of supposed Altaic only began to be written after 700 AD, it's not surprising that there's less evidence to be found and not enough for a hypothesis bold enough to link those disparate cultures together. The idea that Hindi, Persian, Latin, Russian, and English are linked together is already very surprising.

Re: The Oldest Cookbook in Korean

#44

Post by bane »

Something of note, Hangul was generally rejected among the literate elites in Korean society for centuries, which were mostly men. However, it found unexpected life as a written language for women, who otherwise didn't have opportunities to learn Chinese script. While some written material exists of Hangul being used to communicate between a man and a woman (usually a husband and wife), evidencing that men could read and write Hangul as well -- which is not surprising as it's fascinatingly easy to learn to read -- most ancient Hangul documents we find were written by some for women.

It wasn't until the 20th century, partially as a counter occupation rise of national and ethnic identity against the Japanese colonizers that Hangul became modernized and accepted as the general script for Koreans.

In North Korea, as further assertions of national identity, all remnants of Chinese characters were purged and many loan words were provided with "preferred" native Korean words. In the South, Chinese characters were/are still seen as a prestige study and was even commonly mixed in with Hangul in newspapers but the use of Hanja is rapidly declining in print.

Re: The Oldest Cookbook in Korean

#45

Post by kazagistar »

hnaln wrote: post #25
9nGQluzmnq3M wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hangul is a syllibary where each character is formed from a consonant and a vowel symbol being merged in a consistent way. Even if a few of those symbol fragments are similar to chineese, the structural differences are stark enough that calling the whole thing based on chineese is misleading and deceptive.

Re: The Oldest Cookbook in Korean

#46

Post by kazagistar »

gibolt wrote: post #20
awl130 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure, but according to linguistic research still wrong. The ancestor seems so far back you might as well include english in your language family.

Re: The Oldest Cookbook in Korean

#47

Post by vugffuivuf »

smallnamespace wrote: post #38
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…

> but it may not necessarily have relation to what the sounds are in Chinese if someone were to read the characters as if Chinese But they are quite similar for this example: Korean: Eumsik dimibang (like 'Eyumsik dimeebong') Mandarin pronunciation: Yinshi Zhiweifang (sort of like 'Yinshur Jurwayfong') Cantonese pronunciation: Yamsik Jimeifong (like 'Yumsik jimayfong') Korean Hanja (chinese character - 汉子) words most…

Only similar with Chinese loan words. Native Korean and Japanese words are not similar. Although the grammar is somewhat similar

Re: The Oldest Cookbook in Korean

#48

Post by James_Henry »

gibolt wrote: post #20
awl130 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Korean gets about 60% of its vocabulary from Chinese: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Korean_vocabulary

This is why many of the words sound Chinese (and a particularly old version of Chinese).

Re: The Oldest Cookbook in Korean

#50

Post by xenihn »

jinwoo68 wrote: post #36
xenihn wrote: post #26

>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 extremel…

You're assuming that Korean political/economic system was the same as the one of Europe. It was not. Nobles didn't own all the lands or people around them. Some of non-noble people owned their own lands, others didn't and had to rent lands from landlords. So the story that you quoted means that Grandma Jang was generous to poor people who have neither lands nor money to rent lands, and allowed them to work on her lan…

How is that generosity and not exploitation?
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