Sino-Korean Pronunciation

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Satsuma
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Sino-Korean Pronunciation

Postby Satsuma » 2011-07-09, 0:38

A Chinese person that I know who studies Korean told me that if you know the Chinese pronunciation of a character, you'd be able to systematically figure out how it would be pronounced in Korean. If this is true, can someone either describe the sound changes or supply a link? I found something akin to what I'm looking for, but it's for Japanese.

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Re: Sino-Korean Pronunciation

Postby linguoboy » 2011-07-09, 1:34

Satsuma wrote:A Chinese person that I know who studies Korean told me that if you know the Chinese pronunciation of a character, you'd be able to systematically figure out how it would be pronounced in Korean. If this is true, can someone either describe the sound changes or supply a link? I found something akin to what I'm looking for, but it's for Japanese.

The modern Chinese pronunciation (i.e. Standard Mandarin)? Nope--it's lost too many distinctions. To grab just one quick example:

十 십
石 식
時 시
實 실
射 사

All five of these characters have the the identical Standard Mandarin pronunciation (i.e. shí). You might do better starting from Cantonese, since it preserves the finals, but the only foolproof starting point would be reconstructed Early Chinese.
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Re: Sino-Korean Pronunciation

Postby Satsuma » 2011-07-09, 2:04

linguoboy wrote:You might do better starting from Cantonese, since it preserves the finals, but the only foolproof starting point would be reconstructed Early Chinese.
中古汉语呢?
What about Middle Chinese?
Or is that what you meant by Early Chinese?

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Re: Sino-Korean Pronunciation

Postby linguoboy » 2011-07-09, 3:19

Satsuma wrote:
linguoboy wrote:You might do better starting from Cantonese, since it preserves the finals, but the only foolproof starting point would be reconstructed Early Chinese.
中古汉语呢?
What about Middle Chinese?

I mean Early Middle Chinese as defined by Pulleyblank. Late Middle Chinese might work, but I couldn't swear by it.
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Re: Sino-Korean Pronunciation

Postby Tenebrarum » 2011-07-09, 4:55

The most glaring rule: Middle Chinese /t/ is mapped to Korean /l/ in coda position.

And there's consonantal sandhi, which also involves /l/ a lot. The thousand mile horse, for example, is *then liə ma in MC but 천리마 (cheollima) in Korean.
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Re: Sino-Korean Pronunciation

Postby モモンガ » 2011-07-13, 16:42

You will have to remember the most of the pronunciations one by one.
Fortunately Korean has no multiple readings like Japanese (there re some, but these are rare).

As a tip, if Chinese say ming, Japanese say mei or myou, Korean pronunciation will be 명

Chinese jing and japanese kei or kyou will give 경
zheng and sei is 정
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Re: Sino-Korean Pronunciation

Postby linguoboy » 2011-07-13, 17:05

モモンガ wrote:You will have to remember the most of the pronunciations one by one.
Fortunately Korean has no multiple readings like Japanese (there re some, but these are rare).

As a tip, if Chinese say ming, Japanese say mei or myou, Korean pronunciation will be 명

Chinese jing and japanese kei or kyou will give 경
zheng and sei is 정

Yeah, if you know both the modern Chinese and the Japanese on'yomi, you can pretty much always predict the Korean reading. For instance, 證 is also zhèng in Pinyin but in Japanese it's shou, which indicates that the Korean version will be 증 rather than 정.
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Re: Sino-Korean Pronunciation

Postby モモンガ » 2011-07-16, 11:49

linguoboy wrote:
モモンガ wrote:You will have to remember the most of the pronunciations one by one.
Fortunately Korean has no multiple readings like Japanese (there re some, but these are rare).

As a tip, if Chinese say ming, Japanese say mei or myou, Korean pronunciation will be 명

Chinese jing and japanese kei or kyou will give 경
zheng and sei is 정

Yeah, if you know both the modern Chinese and the Japanese on'yomi, you can pretty much always predict the Korean reading. For instance, 證 is also zhèng in Pinyin but in Japanese it's shou, which indicates that the Korean version will be 증 rather than 정.

Hm, yes it's quite complicated, I think the best way is simply learn compound words, and then you can be sure that each new word with knows characters will have regular pronunciation

학교 學校 School
대학 大學 University
중국 中國 China

한국 韓國 Korea

일본 日本 Japan

경제 經濟 economy





우유 牛乳 milk


입국 入國 enter a country

유방 乳房 breast

월남 越南 Vietnam(obsolete)/ to trespass to South (used in reference to North Koreans, so they are basically "doing Vietnam"

태국 泰國 Thailand

노어 露語 Russian language (obsolete)

일어 日語 Japanese language

영어 英語 English language

영화 映畫 Movie

도서관 圖書館 Library
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