On Korean, Part 1 of what is surely to be a long series.

[gashin]

So, I suppose few people on LJ are aware of this, being on the other side of the continent and all, but it seems I've zoned in on (S.) Korea as being my "after I graduate, go spread the frustration that is the English language" place

Comments

[lightcastle]

That sounds delightful! (Except for the "OMG She'll be even FURTHER away!" part.)

[gashin]

If you think about it, the further I go west (because a move to the East would just be yet another westerly shift for me), the greater the likelihood that I'll eventually just loop around! :P

[lightcastle]

I bow to your superior "I prefer thinking of it this way" logic. :P

[domitian8]

So maybe you don't want to go here, but... synaesthesia? If you're having a hard time finding mainstream stuff I assume there isn't much "Synaesthetic aspects of Korean phonology" work out there... but that would be awesome.
Let me know if you want me ask anything of Sungyung. Or do you have access to reallive Koreans?

[gashin]

I'm actually not at all clear on how synaesthesia would help me out, here. You might be using the word to describe a phenomenon I'm not familiar with (well, almost certainly this; I'm not familiar with using it to qualify phonology

[lightcastle]

I think he's going for the "light, dark, etc" tones to the words. Since synaesthesia involves linking different senses, one could make an argument that the language is itself synaesthetic?

Do they do the thing Japanese does where spelling words in hangul vs hanja (or mixed) have different implications?

[gashin]

Yeah, using hanja connotes learnedness. Whether there is a further breaking-down/specialization of implications, I don't know. Though apparently ones sees hanja in use less and less frequently; far less than kanji in Japanese, I believe.

And that makes sense. I thought perhaps B. was aiming at something related to my paper. I'm not sure to what degree I'd feel comfortable linking the light/dark vowel characters to synaesthesia. It's less linking senses and yet more connoting, really. Directly related to, if not descended of, yin/yang.

[domitian8]

"But it is an empiric fact that high oral resonance is apt to be accompanied by high tension of the vocal cords, low resonance by their relaxation, so that resonance and vocal pitch generally, though not necessarily, coincide. This can easily be tested by asking persons without phonetic or musical training to pronounce 'high' and 'low' vowels. While interpreting these terms as preferring to vocal pitch, not to oral resonance, they almost invariably select i or e (very rarely a) for the former, u or o for the latter, although physiologically it is quite as easy to articulate i in a low voice and u in a high voice. Now, muscle tension implies interest, and in speech this holds true especially for the tension of the vocal cords. It would seem, then, that the IE 'present tense' is fundamentally the expression of interest in an action going on and is expressed by articulation with tense vocal cords, favoring the selection of a front vowel. Inversely, forms of rather abstract, remote meaning, such as verbal nouns, tend towards relaxation of

[gashin]

This is indeed interesting, but yeah, neither here nor there. You'd have to ask someone versed in Altaic languages how this stuff manifests

[lightcastle]

This is all really fascinating/