Author: Dylan
Date: 07-14-04 02:19
Norma, you're quite right. Korean pronunciations of Chinese characters differ because they have a different set of sounds (phonemes - the sounds of vowels and consonants) than Hakka.
What I'm saying is that modern Korean pronunciations of Chinese characters whilst old may have little to do with Hakka, and such a comparison is in my mind meaningless.
There are various stages of the evolution of Chinese sounds. The earliest fully comprehensive categorisation of characters according to their sounds occurs in the milestone rime dictionary called Qieyun of 601AD. This is in the Sui Dynasty, compiled by a number of scholars from northern and southern capitals of the era. It embodies the widest differentiation of rimes and initial consonats between the dialect of the scholars. This book survives, as one was found in the last century, but it comes down mainly in a later book called Guangyun which also is a rime dictionary.
The sound system of the time as embodies by such rime dictionaries is fairly well understood, and modern linguists have given each category of pronunciation, and we can write down how the sounds may have been pronounced. This system is refered to as Middle Chinese (MC).
When you delve back further, no single source as useful as Qieyun exists to fix the pronunciation of Chinese characters so everything we derive is called a reconstruction. Before MC, linguists today use a convenient name of Old Chinese (OC) to refer to the pronunciation of the early Han and pre-Qin dynasty pronunciations which also go back to the early Zhou dynasty.
These (MC and OC) are just convenient lables.
With regard to Korean pronunciation of Chinese characters, you must compare like with like. So you have to compare the estimated pronunciation at the time of borrowing. However, Korean was written in Chinese characters until 1444 onwards when a type of alphabet was invented in Korea, so how do we know how Chinese characters were pronounced in Korea centuries before that?
That is the crux of the question. How will he compare Middle Korean sounds of 1444 with modern korean sounds today, and how will he compare modern sounds to borrowings centuries ago. Since the creation of the Korean alphabet called Hangeul, a number of the letters have fallen out of use. Even the tone mark is no longer used. This is phonological change in the language.
Dyl.
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