Korean Loanwords Research Articles

New Word-formation Processes

The goal of this paper is to investigate how new words are produced in Korean and to analyze two word-formation processes, truncation and blending within the framework of Correspondence Theory. Two word-formation processes have common characteristics: first, they have the minimal requirement that new words have at least two syllables. Second, in the word-formation process, exceptional cases can be dealt within the core-periphery structure suggested by Ito and Mester (1995). Finally, the word-formation processes in Korean show much more simplistic patterns than in English or even English loanwords in Korean. In the truncation analysis, all morphemes should be involved in the process and in case of loanword truncation, it matters whether truncated words are listed in the English lexicon. Unlike English blending, the existence of sharing segments or the role as a switch point of feet or sub-syllables do not play a crucial role in the analysis. Some other words are created by wrong analogies, typos, and other social reasons.

Strategy of Connecting Loanwords to Original Words of Korean Language Learners

This study is for investigating strategy of associating loanwords to original words of Korean language learners. Loanwords have often been thought as easily learnable because the knowledge of the original word is assumed to be helpful in discovering the meaning. But there is much phonological, morphological and semantic transforming in accepting original words in Korean, and therefore, it is not easy to connect Korean loanwords to the original words. In this study, the awareness of loanwords and competence of associating Korean loanwords to the original words of advanced Korean language learners from China are investigated. As a result, the awareness of loanwords is remarkably lower than the awareness of non-loanwords. And, the competence of association also was very low with 17.9% of successful association. This means the learners have difficulty in inferring the meaning of loanwords by connecting that to original words. (Wonkwang Digital University)

Contour Tone Avoidance in Pitch Accent Systems

This paper proposes a new typology of ‘mora-counting’ pitch accent systems by considering how contour tones are avoided(or not avoided) in Japanese. Japanese dialects greatly differ from one another in the roles of the syllable and the mora, ranging from an entirely syllable-counting system as found in Kagoshima Japanese, to an entirely mora-counting system as found in Nagasaki Japanese. Most other dialects are largely mora-based, but show different degrees of dependence on the syllable. The most crucial difference can be found in the ways they avoid or tolerate the two types of contour tones, rising and falling. The rising contour tone involves a lexical accent —or H tone equivalent to it— on the non-head mora of heavy syllables, e.g. puU.ru ‘swimming pool’. This structure is disfavored by most Japanese dialects, which falls into two sub-groups depending on whether the marked structure is remedied by accent (H tone) shift, e.g. puU.ru → PUu.ru, or by accent spreading, e.g. puU.ru → PUU.ru. On the other hand, the falling contour tone is more prevalent, avoided only in some pitch accent systems. When it is avoided, this marked structure is remedied by accent(H tone) spreading where the prominence placed on the head mora, i.e. first mora, of heavy syllables spreads to the entire syllables. The final part of the paper expands the discussion on contour tone avoidance to the loanword accent of Kyungsang Korean. Building on the moraic analysis proposed by Kubozono(forthcoming), it will be argued that the so-called syllable weight effects found in Korean loanwords from English can be reinterpreted as a case where rising contour tones are avoided in word-initial position.

Tensification of English Loanwords in Korean

There have been no satisfactory analyses of tensification phenomena in explaining the behavior of word-initial tensification of English loanwords in Korean. The purpose of this paper is to examine tensification phenomena of English loanwords used by Korean speakers focusing on word-initial stop consonants. For this purpose, we propose the notion of strong and weak vowels, and argue that English /b, d, g/ are perceived by Korean speakers as the tense stops /p’, t’, k’/ before the strong vowels, /a, ae, ʌ, o/. Meanwhile, they become the lenis stops /p, t, k/ before the weak vowels, /i, e, ɯ, u/. This tendency can be interpreted as a hyperbolic perceptual strategy to enhance the distinctiveness of Korean stop consonants from English in the word-initial position. This matching of strong with strong and weak with weak between consonants and vowels constitutes another kind of co-articulation process. Thus we suggest a new vowel classification (i.e. strong and weak) is necessary in Korean phonology in addition to the Light and Dark vowel classification used for explaining vowel harmony and ideophones.

Some Problems and Solutions of the Korean Loanword Orthography

Some Problems and Solutions of the Korean Loanword Orthography

Study on Building Educational Mobile Application Contents Focusing on Korean Loanwords for North Korean Refugees

Objectives: Due to the advance in mobile computing technologies, mobile assisted language learning is being developed. In this study, build a mobile education application regarding loanwords for North Korean Refugees. Methods/Statistical Analysis: This study covers the necessity and practical cases of loanword selection and building application contents in advance to forming educational application contents regarding loanwords for North Korean refugees. For this, this study has extracted vocabulary based on the living environments, which refugees will encounter in their processes of adapting to life in South Korea. The vocabularies are presented in different categories, divided by situations and places. Findings: An effective and practical approach to vocabulary teaching is needed for North Korean refugees whose ultimate goal is to settle down in Korean society. It would help them adjust to their Korean lives to link their daily lives closely to loan words that pose a challenge to communication. Presenting loanwords through mobile devices that are relatively more accessible and easier to prepare will be helpful for the refugees to search, understand, and utilize the necessary vocabularies. This kind of information provision makes full use of the expandability of mobile devices, and further enables more diverse and bountiful materials for vocabulary learning. Improvements/Applications: Compiling a list of useful loan words in the future based on this study would serve as a more practical help for North Korean refugees.

The reinterpretation of Korean Loanword Orthography through Optimality Theory :Focusing on the syllable-final nasal of Japanese

The reinterpretation of Korean Loanword Orthography through Optimality Theory :Focusing on the syllable-final nasal of Japanese

한국어 차용어의 자유변이 고찰: ‘ɨ’모음 삽입을 중심으로

한국어 차용어의 자유변이 고찰: ‘ɨ’모음 삽입을 중심으로

A Constraint-based Analysis of English Loanwords in Korean with a Word-initial Consonant-Glide Sequence

The purpose of this paper is to provide a formal analysis of word-initial consonant-glide (CG) sequences in English loanword adaptation in Korean, within the framework of Optimality Theory (OT; Prince and Smolensky 1993, McCarthy and Prince 1995). The process brings some challenging aspects in that an alveolar consonant and labial-velar glide (/tw/) sequence induces vowel-epenthesis in loanword adaptation, while the other CG sequences are perfectly acceptable in both loanwords and native words in Korean, The discrepancy of /tw/ sequences in loanwords and native words has been accounted for by perceptional and acoustic experiments in many works. This study exhibits the asymmetric behavior between English /tw-/ and /kw-/ with respect to vowel epenthesis found in loanwords in Korean can best be formalized by postulating fixed input for loan phonology from the perceptual basis without any special constraints and ranking only for loan phonology.

A Study on English Loanwords in Korean

Most of verbal languages have many loanwords from other languages. Especially, in this global period, here are more loanwords in verbal languages because of frequent contacts among the peoples of different countries. Generally, a loanword means “a word borrowed from a donor language and incorporated into a recipient language without translation. It is distinguished from a calque, or loan translation, where a meaning or an idiom from another language is translated into existing words or roots of the host language.” In Korean, there are many loanwords from Chinese, Japanese, and English owing to some special reasons. This paper aims to study two questions: (1) How are English loanwords formed in Korean and what are their examples? and (2) What kinds of English loanwords can be found in fieldwork and which word formations do they belong to? (Hanbat National University)

Conditional Entropy and Deflected Contrast for Epenthetic Vowels in Korean Loanwords

In either Korean loanword phonology or second language acquisition, the affricate consonant system is quite notable in its behavior of invoking vowel epenthesis. Contra our expectation that as default or unmarked vowel, a mid-high vowel /□/ emerges as usual, a high front vowel /i/ arises in this specific context. In this article, we try to prove that this type of divergence comes from Korean-specific dependency between preceding affricates and accompanying vowels. In other words, for the bigrams consisting of affricates-vowels, a certain degree of conditional entropy therein is believed to make a difference in Korean. The transfer effect of the L1 sound patterns proves to be valid under the condition that a threshold level of probability or entropy for the concerned sequence in L1 should be met. Another factor contributes to the nature of anti-homonymy by differentiating the /z/-ending stimuli from the affricate-ending as part of deflected contrast. (Daejeon University)

On the Regulation for Pronunciation of Loanwords in Korean

On the Regulation for Pronunciation of Loanwords in Korean

An unsupervised method for identifying loanwords in Korean

This paper presents an unsupervised method for developing a character-based n-gram classifier that identifies loanwords or transliterated foreign words in Korean text. The classifier is trained on an unlabeled corpus using the Expectation Maximization algorithm, building on seed words extracted from the corpus. Words with high token frequency serve as native seed words. Words with seeming traces of vowel insertion to repair consonant clusters serve as foreign seed words. What counts as a trace of insertion is determined using phoneme co-occurrence statistics in conjunction with ideas and findings in phonology. Experiments show that the method can produce an unsupervised classifier that performs at a level comparable to that of a supervised classifier. In a cross-validation experiment using a corpus of about 9.2 million words and a lexicon of about 71,000 words, mean F-scores of the best unsupervised classifier and the corresponding supervised classifier were 94.77 and 96.67 %, respectively. Experiments also suggest that the method can be readily applied to other languages with similar phonotactics such as Japanese.

The Duration-based Analysis of English /s/ in Korean Loanword Phonology

The Duration-based Analysis of English /s/ in Korean Loanword Phonology

Modeling phonetic perception vis-à-vis L2 phonological structures in Korean loanword adaptation and transmission

Modeling phonetic perception vis-à-vis L2 phonological structures in Korean loanword adaptation and transmission

From Koguryǒ to T’amna

This article recapitulates some old evidence for the Japonic linguistic substratum in Silla and Paekche in and for the lack of thereof in Koguryǒ. It also introduces some new evidence for the same linguistic distribution. The new evidence for Koguryǒ comes mainly from words recorded in Chinese dynastic histories and from additional Korean loanwords identified in Manchu, the new evidence for Paekche from Liang shu, while the new evidence for Silla is based on the analysis of Silla placenames recorded in the Samguk sagi, which are traditionally considered to be opaque. The present article identifies a number of them as Japonic. Finally, I present the Japonic etymology for the former name of Chejudo island, T’amna.

Some remarks on Modern Korean loan words in Modern Khalkha Mongolian

Some remarks on Modern Korean loan words in Modern Khalkha Mongolian

Prescriptive adaptation of English stops in initial S-clusters into Korean

This study investigates the role of prescriptivism and the influence of orthographic conventions on the adaptation of English loanwords in Korean. An experiment is conducted in which native speakers of Korean produce on-line adaptations of English nonce words with word-initial clusters of s-plus-stop (/sp-, st-, sk-/). The results show that Korean listeners categorize English voiceless unaspirated stops as Korean tense stops in the absence of corresponding English graphemes, whereas they select Korean aspirated stops when presented with their English spellings (p, t, c/k). This reveals a prominent bias in borrowing toward substitution by the phonetically closest sounds in the recipient language, albeit only when the role of source language orthography is suppressed.

Morpho-Phonology of Abbreviated English Loanwords in Korean: Bases and Posited Source-Language Representations

Morpho-Phonology of Abbreviated English Loanwords in Korean: Bases and Posited Source-Language Representations

Realization of English Stops of Coda Positions in Korean Loanwords and an Analysis of Korean Adapted forms

Realization of English Stops of Coda Positions in Korean Loanwords and an Analysis of Korean Adapted forms