Inforbiomatica

More random foreign language trivia, this time of an etymological nature: the Italian word, sicario, means “hired assassin”. The Latin root is sicarius, which means “wielder of the knife”. By contrast, the Italian word assassino just means murderer.

The Korean word for “meteorite” is 별똥 (roughly, pyeol-ddong), which literally means “star droppings”, as in feces. A quick Google search confirms this word is commonly used. Other words containing the word for “droppings” indicate that I am being gentle in my translation here. I wonder if it’s similar to the German word, Dreck, which means “animal droppings” but is also used for “crap” and “dirt” in the nasty sense of that word.

Let me also mention where I learned these fun facts. I subscribe to Acquerello Italiano, an Italian langauge audio magazine that sends you a CD and transcript of the recording, filled with interesting facts about the vocabulary of the program. They also offer German, French and Spanish versions (all with different, country-specific content).

The “meteorite” derivation came from the Handbook of Korean Vocabulary, another great Korean language book by Miho Choo and Wiliam O’Grady. The book contains two sections, one on Chinese roots and the other on Korean roots common in Korean words. I have found the book very useful when learning vocabulary, because otherwise Korean words are just a bunch of meaningless syllables to me and are therefore difficult to remember.

Korean pronunciation is pretty difficult. Here is a not atypical example of the kinds of craziness that can occur.

The word for “how many” in Korean is 몇. For the uninitiated, that character is a Hangul syllable composed of three “letters”, ㅁ = “m”, ㅕ= “yuh” (a vowel) and ㅊ = “ch” (sort of). So you’d think it might be pronounced: “myuch”. However, when the “ch” occurs at the end of a word (in a “final” position), it changes sound to a final “t” sound. So, this word, pronounced alone, sounds like “myut”.

However, If you want to ask the date, you use this word plus the word for day, “eel” (일). Putting these two words together, you’d think you’d get “myut eel”, but not so. Because the “ch” sound now precedes a word beginning in a vowel, the “ch” is pronounced as the beginning of the following word and goes back to having its “ch” sound. Thus, you get “myuh cheel”.

This, however, is not the end of the story. If you want to ask how many people (are in someone’s family, for example), you append 몇 in front of one of the counter words for people, 명 (”myung”). Because “myung” starts with a nasalized consonant, “m”, the preceding syllable’s final consonant (our “ch”) undergoes a nasalization. You determine this nasalization from the consonant’s normal final sound, that final “t” sound I discussed earlier. “t” nasalizes to become “n”, so in formal speech you’d pronounce “how many people” as “myun myung”. However, colloquially, quite often people change nasalized final ns to ms if the following word begins with an m. Thus, you shouldn’t be surprised if you hear someone say “myum myung”.

Whew. And like I said, that isn’t an unusual example at all. There are lots and lots of contextual pronunciation rules, and of course plenty of exceptions to those rules. This makes speaking Korean correctly and understanding Korean speech kind of difficult. I guess I can say I’m lucky it’s not as bad as English, though. I also have discovered a great resource for learning about these rules and their exceptions, a book out of the impressive and prolific Korean language department at the University of Hawaii: The Sounds of Korean: A Pronunciation Guide by Miho Choo and William O’Grady.