Here's one for the linguaphiles: I'm now into the second book of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, The Subtle Knife, and I've encountered an interesting name: Cittàgazze.
The name is obviously Italian; the alternate Earth in which the name is relevant seems to be dominated by Italian culture (even though this world still features that trans-universal American standard, Coca Cola). One character informs another that the city's name means "City of Magpies," because magpies steal, and most of the citizens have been reduced to such behavior in the aftermath of a cosmic disruption.
In Korean, the word for "magpie" is ggach'i, which sounds an awful lot like the Italian gazze. This might simply be a phonetic coincidence, or it might be an old loan-word, borrowed from Italian or from another language that refers to magpies as something like gazze or ggach'i.
This isn't as crazy as it sounds. Korean contains plenty of loan words from all sorts of languages. Ddakgwang (sweet-pickled turnip, now called danmuji) and doshirak (bento-style lunchbox meal) are Japanese-derived, for example. The word bakkangseu is a Korean rendering of the French word vacances, i.e., vacation. Areubaiteu comes from the German word Arbeit, meaning "work." Perhaps the most well-known loan-word is bbang, which means "bread" and obviously has Latinate roots-- pain in French, pan in Spanish, etc.
So it's at least possible that ggach'i derives from Italian. Anyone got an etymological dictionary?
Meanwhile, my thanks to Philip Pullman for keeping my mental gears turning.
_
Marathon
12 years ago
3 comments:
Although I haven't done any in-depth research on kkachi (that's the new Romanization version of it), I'm fairly sure that it is not derived from Italian. The litmus test is fairly simple: did the thing or concept exist in Korea before first contact with the language/culture in question? For your examples above, it was not just the words that were introduced into Korea, but the ideas (ppang, by the way, derives from the Portuguese). Magpies were in Korea long before Korea had any contact with the Italian language, either directly or indirectly. There would be no reason to give up a perfectly good Korean word to use a foreign one*, so I'm going to go with "phonetic coincidence" on this one.
*The story is different today, of course, when English in particular is in fashion and people give up perfectly capable Korean words for English words that they believe make them sound more learned or cosmopolitan. This is a relatively recent phenomenon, though.
(By the way, I also did a quick Yahoo! Korea search on "kkachi eowon" (kkachi etymology) and came up with no obvious hits.)
(PPS. No word from that guy about that thing yet?)
oooh, i didnt know that ggatchi were called magpies! we heard ggatchi in seoul (or it might have been in the countryside but i dont remember. but it was korea). i just assumed that they were only found there... magpies! and now i even know what magpies look like (cos i know what ggatchi look like).
and to me ggatchi make a "ggat-ggat-ggat" sori when they cry.
Post a Comment