We are back after some life-induced stop-and-go, including 2/3 of our household getting COVID among several other stressful life things - thank you for your patience (and thanks especially to our guest for his patience!).

---

Guest: Dr. Andrew Cheng

Background:

Andrew had a Fulbright teaching position in South Korea for two years after college as a native English teacher.

He then went to grad school at Berkeley, studying under Dr. Keith Johnson, and got interested in sociophonetics. He wrote a dissertation on Korean Americans and bilingualism.

After a postdoc at UC Irvine, he is now at Simon Fraser University. He has branched out from Korean and also studies other areas.

Research: Fundamental frequency and bilingualism

How do languages fundamentally differ? There’s been a lot of research on this. To some extent, it’s easy to see - e.g., Korean and English have different sounds. But what about fundamental frequency (vocal fold vibration rate - commonly thought of as pitch). How do languages differ along this axis? The study by linguist Andrew Cheng that we're talking about today looked at this aspect.

Most studies compare two separate groups of people who speak each language, but what about if you look at the same people speaking two different languages - i.e., the same exact bodies (same vocal apparatus)?

Pitch is the perception of the fundamental frequency.

Andrew worked with 2nd- and 1.5-generation Korean Americans who learned both Korean and English simultaneously or nearly so. Korean Americans and other overseas Koreans are commonly known in Korean as gyopo.

Today’s word: Gyopo 교포

People of Korean ethnicity who live in other countries - Jaymin has always conceptualized it in opposition to yuhaksaeng 유학생, study abroad students.

There are stereotypes about how gyopos speak Korean (accent) in Korea, but Andrew emphasizes that the Korean they speak is totally valid and is definitely real Korean.

Methods:

Andrew’s paper: He interviewed the same people in both English and Korean, with an activity that served as a buffer between the two parts - just basic conversation, really.

Then, he used a specific software to analyze the recordings and find which was higher/lower in fundamental frequency.

There were theoretical reasons why he wanted to recruit from both 2nd and 1.5-generation Koreans, but in the end, there was no significant difference in pitch between the two groups as adults.

But for all, the fundamental frequency was higher when they spoke Korean than when they spoke English.

Analyzing Jaymin's Korean and English.

Andrew analyzed Jaymin speaking in Korean and in English. They found that, contrary to Sara's personal perceptions, he followed the pattern of Korean being higher in pitch than English. (Jaymin didn't have exactly the same language learning profile as the participants in Andrew's research, having learned English mostly in his late teens, but it was interesting to see the pattern continue in this casual analysis.)

Raising bilingual kids

Jaymin and Sara discuss their experience trying (failing?) to raise a bilingual Korean-English kid, and Andrew discusses his newer work on French/English bilingualism, bilingualism and pragmatic cues, etc.

Find Andrew Cheng online:

@LinguistAndrew

Website: http://www.sfu.ca/~aca301/

---

Follow us on social media:

@HanmadiKorean on Twitter

hanmadikorean@gmail.com with any comments, questions, or requests

Website:

Keuriseumaseu: Syllable structure in Korean

Word and meaning:

크리스마스 Keuriseumaseu means Christmas

Origin:

It comes from the English word Christmas

Cultural Contexts:

Dating etc. (see the Hanmadi post on Christmas at https://hanmadikorean.com/christmas/)

Linguistic element: Syllable structure of Korean (Young-Mee Yu Cho)

General syllable structure: Aslam, M., & Kak, A. (2007). English Syllable Structure. In Introduction to English Phonetics and Phonology (pp. 60-68). Foundation Books. doi:10.1017/UPO9788175968653.005

“Every language manifests a particular way of combining its sounds to form meaningful words or parts of words, called syllables. Each language puts certain restrictions on these possible combinations. For example, in English we can't have a word which begins with a consonant sequence bfj, zbf or tzp. When we analyse what restrictions (and regularities) are found in the language under study, we are studying the syllable structure of that language. We can divide words into one or more syllables. For example, tin has one syllable, brother has two, important has three and computer has four syllables each.

A syllable is a group of one or more sounds. The essential part of a syllable is a vowel sound (V) which may be preceded and/or followed by a consonant (C) or a cluster of consonants (CC or CCC) (see below). Some syllables consist of just one vowel sound (V) as in I and eye/aI/, owe/ə/. In English, a syllable can consist of a vowel preceded by one consonant (CV) as in pie/paI/, or by two consonants (CCV) as in try/traI/, or by three consonants (CCCV) as in spry/spraI/. The vowel of the syllable may also be followed by one consonant (VC) as in at/æt/, or by two consonants (VCC) as in its/Its/, or by three consonants (CVCCC) as in text/tekst/or by four consonants (CVCCCC) as in texts/teksts/.”

Maximal syllable shape is the syllable type that contains the most possible segments in onset and coda positions, for instance CCCVCCCC in an English word like strengths (https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/el_centro_research/5/) 

Spanish: CCVC

Japanese: CV

Hawaiian: CV

Really different from English.

CGVC (onset consonant glide vowel coda consonant)

Note how the syllabic structure is actually embedded in the writing system.

값, 삶, 없[다]: alone, only one consonant surfaces, but in certain environments, the other does as well.

And additionally, some sounds can’t come at the beginning or end of a syllable. E.g., “sh” ; “ng” (as in English).

And some diphthongs don’t work in Korean as single syllables. E.g., “I”

Christmas: How many syllables? In English, 2. In Korean, 5.

Other examples:

프렌드 friend - clusters not allowed

콩글리쉬 Konglish

arbeit

ice cream

Sandwich

Wine

—

Sources:

Young-Mee Yu Cho. Syllable-based Phonological Processes. Lucien Brown and Jaehoon Yeon, eds. The Handbook of Korean Linguistics. Wiley; 2015. 22-40.

Follow us on social media:

@HanmadiKorean on Twitter

hanmadikorean@gmail.com with any comments, questions, or requests

Website: hanmadikorean.com

---

Theme music:

Words for talking about COVID-19 in Korean

As with other languages, a lot of new words have entered Korean during the pandemic, and other older words have come into wider use.

New words (neologisms) can be borrowed (i.e., a word used in another language is brought into the language you’re speaking, with a similar or sometimes a somewhat different meaning); or created from “scratch” or by combining parts of other words.

Some COVID-related words in Korean:

코로나 - korona - COVID-19

Korean word for quarantine:

자가격리 - jaga gyeongni - quarantining at one’s own house - literally, own house quarantining.

Sino-Korean word; not newly coined, but in more frequent use. Doesn’t actually have to be at one’s own house.

Korean word for mask scofflaws:

턱스크 - teokseukeu - when someone wears a mask down on their chin instead of over their mouth. Yes, these people exist everywhere! From native Korean teok 턱 + last two Koreanized syllables of 마스크, English mask

Korean word for social distancing:

사회적 거리두기 - sahoejeok georidugi - social distancing - Sino-Korean + Native Korean. Essentially a literal translation 

Korean words for contactless/virtual things during COVID-19:

언택트 - eontaekteu - probably a new coinage for COVID - un as in English un-, tact from English contact. So no contact, basically - people used to use it a lot from things happening over Zoom rather than real life; contactless deliveries; etc.

비대면 - not face to face (literal translation) - a Sino-Korean word that has been replacing (or has replaced) 언택트 

랜선여행 - laen-seon yeohaeng - virtual travel - 랜 from LAN as in the English abbreviation LAN for those really fast Internet cables (랜) + 선 line (which together mean ethernet cable in Korean) + 여행 travel

Korean word for preventive measures during COVID-19:

K-방역 - K-bangyeok - Korean preventive measures - K as in Korea/Korean (e.g., K-pop); the things Korea did to keep COVID from getting to crazy levels the way it did in the US and many other countries that didn’t implement such strong measures.

Korean words for a future with endemic COVID-19:

위드 코로나 - wideu korona - from English, “with Corona,” as in “living with Corona” - adapting to a life in which COVID-19 is endemic

단계별 일상 회복 - dangyebol (stage by stage) 일상 (everyday life) 회복 recovery  the word the government is pushing to replace 위드 코로나, essentially meaning the same thing.

Do you know any other COVID-related Korean words? We’d love to hear them if so!

---

Follow us on social media:

@HanmadiKorean on Twitter

hanmadikorean@gmail.com with any comments, questions, or requests

Website: hanmadikorean.com

---

Theme music: The Boating Trip by LATG Music.

Introduction: Guest Professor Jeff Holliday of Korea University

Jeff Holliday is an assistant professor of linguistics at Korea University in Seoul, South Korea. He began learning Korean from friends he met as an undergraduate at Ohio State University, then studied the language more formally, learned about the field of linguistics, and became fascinated by Korean language acquisition, especially how people (including himself) learned to make a language’s sounds without being explicitly told how by a teacher. He pursued a doctorate in linguistics from Ohio State University and, following graduation, completed a postdoc at Indiana University Bloomington.

You can find Jeff on Twitter at @jeffyholliday and read more about him on his website. Many thanks to Jeff for being our first guest - it was great fun to talk to you!

---

Today’s word: Sal 살

Meaning: Sal. flesh, meat, skin

Related words: 

salgogi 살고기 - lean meat (as opposed to fatty meat)

salsaek 살색 - former word for the color usually described as peach in English - means “skin color” - now salgusaek (apricot color) is used

samgyeopsal 삼겹살 - delicious sliced pork belly grilled before your very eyes. Try it with wasabi, it's the new cool thing!

---

Linguistic element: Perception and production of the fricative /s/ in Korean

Jeff’s research on L1 and L2 Korean speakers’ perception and production of ㅅ/ㅆ - that is, lax s /s(h)/ (that h should be superscript to indicate aspiration but can't do it in this text box) and tense s /s*/

2014 article: "The perception of Seoul Korean fricatives by listeners from five different native dialect and language groups"

Can speakers distinguish between ㅅ (si-ot) and ㅆ (ssang si-ot)? (pronounced something like shee-ote)

This article looked at L1 Seoul Korean speakers, L1 Gyeongsang Korean speakers, L1 Jeju Korean speakers, L1 Mandarin Korean learners, L1 Japanese Korean learners. (L1 = first/native language. L2 = second language)

How do Gyeongsang speakers compare with nonnative Korean speakers?

Stereotype: Gyeongsang Korean lacks differentiation between ㅅ and ㅆ (both realized as ㅅ)

But actually - No one is completely sure if Gyeongsang speakers neutralize the s(h)/s* contrast - or at lest which ones do

Fricatives: near closures - the air doesn’t stop flowing while you’re making the sound. As opposed to m and p, or t and k, where there’s a complete closure and a release. S, ch, h are fricatives in Korean - near closures.

Participants:

5 groups: Seoul KL1, Jeju KL1, Daegu KL1, Mandarin KL2, Japanese KL2 - 20 each

Methods:

Non-words made from words recorded by Seoul speakers

Minimal pair test and CV test

Minimal pairs: native listeners nearly at ceiling, nonnative near chance, very little variation within each group

CV test: Also a clear difference between native/nonnative speakers

Vowel context was a main effect, with native language also making a difference when combined with vowel context. No significant difference between Mandarin and Japanese.

No meaningful difference between dialect groups.

Young listeners from Daegu can differentiate the two sounds just as accurately as Seoul can. 

Mandarin and native Japanese novice learners both unskilled at differentiating.

Vowel heights: ALL groups were more accurate in low vowels like /a/ than in high vowels like /i/ - acoustic cues like aspiration weaker in the /u/ and /i/ contexts. Because L1 listeners

Main word:

바바리: Trenchcoat. Comes from the brand, Burberry, of English coats and other such items. Spin-off word, babari maen ("Burberry Man"): A flasher

Linguistic element: Proprietary eponyms/genericized trademarks

Brand names that become widely used by people to mean any of that type of product. (Sometimes still legally protected, sometimes they lose legal protection due to genericization.)

Eg in English: Kleenex (actually still protected legally), Bandaid (also still legally trademarked), Aspirin

Dry ice, escalator, laundromat - also genericized trademarks, which I didn't even realize because they're so common now and I guess this happened before our time.

Other genericized trademarks in Korean. There are many more and I think it’s kind of interesting, so I’ve already named this part 1 and will do part 2 down the road.

매직 (permanent marker)? Sidney Rosenthal in the 50s, felt or other pressed fibers with own ink source, now used for all kinds of markers from highlighters to sharpies for permanent erase markers. I think in the US this was identified with crayola to me.

요플레: Yoplait. Yoghurt. This is a brand name in the US but it’s not a genericized trademark here I don’t think.

지프 (SUV): Jeep. An SUV, but any SUV. Again, a brand name in the US but not genericized trademark here, at least, not for SUVs. They’ve had to take specific action to protect it though. In Ireland, all SUVs also called jeeps.

맨투맨 (crewneck sweater/sweatshirt)

대일밴드 (band aid) sometimes just 밴드

-------

Follow us on social media:

@HanmadiKorean on Twitter

hanmadikorean@gmail.com with any comments, questions, or requests

Website: hanmadikorean.com

-------

Theme music: The Boating Trip by LATG Music.

Hada: Light verbs, heavy lifting

Today's word: 하다

Meaning: to do

But it can also be used in a lot of other ways, and I kind of think of it as the verb that does everything

Origins:

Native Korean word, from middle korean h(backward c)da https://www.ipachart.com/

Linguistic element: Korean verb basics and light verbs

The basics on Korean verbs

SOV word order (generally) - the verb MUST come last.

Hada - infinitive, like “to do” in English. Some debate over whether the ha- or the hada- version is the “basic” version of a verb in Korean, it seems.

More common forms:

Haeyo, hamnida, haesseoyo, heaesseumnida

Light verbs:

This verb is also what’s called a light verb, a verb that has little meaning of its own and works with another word, usually an adjective, as a sort of complete lexical unit. “The term light verb was coined by Jesperson (1965) to signify a group of verbs that are distinguished from lexical verbsverbs6 or auxiliaries in English e.g., take in take a walk , give in give a groan , and make in make an offer )).” (Bak Jaehee 2011)

Examples in English:

Have, as in “have a party”

Take, as in “take a break”

And “do” as in “do your homework”

In Korean, 하다 is also like this and in fact you can use it to in some of the same constructions, for example, 학생이 숙제를 했어요 , The student did homework.

But it’s a lot more useful in Korean than in English and can be used in a lot more ways, that might seem even less related to “doing” something to an English speaker at least.

For example, you can also use it to make the vast majority of nouns into verbs or even an adjective - compared with English, there’s sort of a thin line between verbs and adjectives in Korean, and in many cases they work the same way.

In particularly, Sino-Korean words, which make up 60-65% of the lexicon, can become verbs (or adjectives) this way:

Adjectives: 소중하다, to be precious or dear; 대단하다, to be amazing or awesome

Verbs: 수용하다, to swim; 결혼하다, to marry/get married

But also words from English or other languages that make up that “5%” that’s not Sino-Korean:

샤워하다, to take a shower; 헌팅하다, to go out and try to pick up

And finally even though a lot of verbs without hada are Native Korean verbs - possibly all of them - you can use it with Native Korean nouns to make other verbs:

밥하다 - to eat rice

You can’t just put any type of verb, has to be generally activity or state (feature: eventuality)

“The LVs are limited to primitive predicates such as do, become, etc.” Bak

Sociocultural contexts/related words:

Another light verb in Korean is 되다, which means to become.

Sources:

Lee, E., Madigan, S., & Park, M.-J. (2015). An Introduction to Korean Linguistics (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315678016.

Bak Jaehee (2011). The Light Verb Construction in Korean. PhD Dissertation, University of Toronto. https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/bitstream/1807/31684/1/Bak_Jaehee_201111_PhD_thesis.pdf

(now at chungnam dae)

----

Follow us on social media:

@HanmadiKorean on Twitter

hanmadikorean@gmail.com with any...

Follow us on social media:

@HanmadiKorean on Twitter

hanmadikorean@gmail.com with any comments, questions, or requests

Website: hanmadikorean.com

---

Notes:

1. Story about looking for honey in Homeplus when I had a cold - brings us to today’s world
2. Kkul - means honey. Sorry all our episodes are about food so far, will change next week!
3. Sociocultural context: 꿀 as in a “sweet gig” like when you get an easy army posting; 
4. Related words: 꿀벌 honeybee, 꿀맛 leaving a sweet taste in one’s mouth (literally or metaphorically)
5. Origin - Native Korean
6. Linguistic element: Tense consonants in Korean, as in 빵 last episode (쌍 비읍)
7. Explain what they are - vocal folds tense? 
8. They are produced with a partially constricted glottis and additional subglottal pressure in addition to tense vocal tract walls, laryngeal lowering, or other expansion of the larynx
9. All the stuff in the back of your mouth is kind of tense (my explanation)
10. Minimal pairs in Korean: In English, bad vs bbad, no meaning diff - might think it was a different mood or something but not meaning. But bad vs pad, yes meaning diff. They are minimal pairs in English. That one sound is enough to differentiate them from one another
11. In Korean, difference between bad and bbad would be enough to make those completely different words just as much as bad and pad are in English. Same in every other way, just that one sound makes them different. Thus they’d be minimal pairs in Korean
12. However, they aren’t real words (bad/bbad). Let’s look at some real Korean minimal pairs with tense and plain or lax consonants
13. ㄱ/ㄲ: first letter of 한글: 굴 vs 꿀
14. 달/딸
15. 방/빵
16. ㅅ/ㅆ
17. ㅈ/ㅉ
18. I think other consonants can be tense sometimes when spoken based on the other sounds around them but they don’t have a difference in meaning - not minimal pairs. E.g., 엄마 but maybe sometimes they do? 들어요/들러요
19. Most words with double/tense consonants are Native Korean. Double consonants didn’t come into Korean until later - they were rare in 15th century korean written with ssang - not fully developed until early modern korean, which starts after Imjin War

Sources:

Shin, Ji-young. “Vowels and Consonants.” In The Handbook of Korean Linguistics, edited by Lucien Brown and Jaehoon Yeon, 1-21. Wiley, 2015. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118371008.ch1. 

Sohn, Ho-min. “Middle Korean and Pre-Modern Korean.” In The Handbook of Korean Linguistics, edited by Lucien Brown and Jaehoon Yeon, 438-458. Wiley, 2015. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118371008.ch25. 

Lee, Eunhee, Sean Madigan, and Mee-Jeong Park. An Introduction to Korean Linguistics. Routledge, 2016.

---

Theme music: The Boating Trip by LATG Music.

Follow us on social media:

@HanmadiKorean on Twitter

hanmadikorean@gmail.com with any comments, questions, or requests

Website: hanmadikorean.com

-----------

Notes:

Ppang (or Bbang) 빵

Meaning

Bread

Sociocultural contexts

Bread in Korea, is it popular, where/when do people eat it, buy it, etc. Do you call croissants etc. ppang? Or only certain products?

Origins

Portuguese pão

However, bread first came to Korea before this with Western missionaries in the 1880s. 

It was also made in a Western-style hotel from 1902, where it was called myŏnp’o (면포)–a word still used in China as miàn bāo (麵包/面包).

But, bread became more widely known in Korea from the beginning of the Japanese colonization, when it got its current Korean name

Linguistic elements

Pronunciation: tense consonants, represented by double or “twin” (쌍) consonants. So like in this case, 비읍, which roughly corresponds to the the sound that b makes in English, would be written twice, and pronounced differently

방 vs 빵 

We’ll talk about this in depth in a later episode

Main linguistic element today: Non-Asian loanwords through Japanese

A lot of words we think of as being loanwords from a European language into Korean actually came in through Japanese

Pão didn’t become ppang in one step, though–it appears to have entered the Korean lexicon through Japanese during the colonial period (1910-1945).

Jaymin discusses some history behind this - Portuguese exploration and contact with Japan, then Japanese contact with Korea

Other such words?

• 아르바이트 (often contracted to 알바) 
• Burberry (pabari) came into Korean through Japanese as a word for trench coat (Ramsey 2006),

2008 article by Yoonjung Kang at University of Toronto and her coauthors: Study that showed that among English loanwords in Korean, those borrowed through Japanese have different phonological traits than those borrowed directly from English

“In direct English borrowings into Contemporary Korean, English [f] is in general adapted as the aspirated bilabial stop [ph], as in fashion ! [phes*j8n], Ford ! [phodi], coffee ! [kh8phi], golf ! [k*olphi], etc. In English borrowings transmitted through Japanese, on the other hand, [f] appears as [h(w)] in Korean, because English [f] is adapted as Japanese [H], an allophone of /h/

and Japanese /h/ is consistently adapted as Korean [h(w)],”

For example

F -> ph/h(w) (aspirated bilabial stop (p)) vs more of an h sound, that’s consistently adapted as hw from Japanese to Korean

Direct from English: 골프 , 패션, 커피

Through Japanese: 흐라이 

Doublets: 환타지/판타지 

Bibliography

Kang, Y., Kenstowicz, M. & Ito, C. Hybrid loans: a study of English loanwords transmitted to Korean via Japanese. J East Asian Linguist 17, 299–316 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10831-008-9029-5

Theme music: The Boating Trip by LATG Music.