Although North Korean prefers using pure Korean words instead of foreign loanwords, it does have a number of loanwords, as all languages do. However, they are spelled differently from South Korean loanwords. While South Korean loanwords are spelled in accordance with English pronunciation, North Korean loanwords tend to imitate the Russian versions. In addition, North Korean uses a lot of Japanese or Japanese-style loan words (빤쯔, 딸라, 삐라..)
foreign word > south korean > north korean
This is FASCINATING
I’m so glad there are other people who find these things as interesting as I do!!
Learning Chinese, there is a certain kind of word that drives me nuts. There’s some Chinese concept or thing. There’s a word in English for it, that one might naively assume was borrowed from Chinese. Except, no, it’s not, fuck you, it’s probably Malay. The actual Chinese word has nothing to do with that word. Two non-English words for the price of one.
Some examples:
“Congee” is 粥 (“zhōu” in Mandarin, “zuk1”/“juk1”/“jook”[1] in Cantonese). “Congee” is via a Tamil word “kañci”[2], presumably due to the Portuguese or something.
The traditional units of weight “catty” and “tael” are 斤 (jīn) and 两 (liǎng) respectively. “Catty” and “tael” are from the Malay “kati” and “tahil”. Again, trade in the east indies, so the words in English are randomly selected from Malay, Tamil, and southern Chinese languages.[3]
A “gong” is a 锣 (luó). “Gong”[4] is Javanese.
“Mandarin” in the sense of an official is 官 (guān)[5]. “Mandarin” is from Malay “menteri”, which indirectly derives from Sanskrit[6].
“Cheongsam” is 旗袍 (qípáo). This one is really hilarious, because “cheongsam” is the Cantonese for 长衫 (chángshān in Mandarin), except that that’s a different kind of garment in China. But I guess in Shanghainese, a 旗袍 is called a 长衫, and then a bunch of Shanghainese tailors went to HK and now the English world knows the Cantonese pronunciation of a Shanghainese word for 旗袍 dresses. Whatever.
“Joss” (as in “joss”, “joss stick”, or “joss paper”) is… nothing at all? Like there are Chinese words for the incense and for the paper you burn at funerals and for images of deities, but they don’t share any common components. “Joss” is bizarrely from fucking Portuguese(“deus”), filtered through… Javanese? Chinese pidgin English? Both? I guess it makes sense, since this is not a Chinese concept at all; it’s a grouping of stuff that only made sense to Europeans (i.e., weird idolatrous folk-religion shit).
Was looking for examples of Proto-Germanic *nw and I ran into *linwaz ‘soft, mild, gentle’ … Could this be the origin of Proto-Finnic *lempedä 'lovely, mild’, *lempi 'love’? There was no PF **-nv- so the most probable substitute of *-nw- would be indeed *-mp- (and we have also other examples of *-w- → *-p-). The noun would likely have to be a back-derivation from the adjective though, which might moreover itself be a later remodelling of an initially loaned *lembäs (unattested as such).
Wiktionary claims an etymology from PIE *leyh₂-, which would be some trouble for explaining *e in PF (maybe not impossible, could date from an A-umlauted form like in much of West Germanic); but even WT still links also *linþaz 'soft’ as a related term, which is however instead normally (including by WT) traced to PIE *léntos (cf. Latin lentus 'pliable, slow, etc.’). Kroonen in his PG dictionary does not have *linwaz, but segments *lentos as *len-to-, not as simple thematic *lent-o-. If this is right, it seems to me that also *linwaz could be then *lén-wos, and the Finnic root simply loaned before the raising *eN > *iN (as also in various other cases).
This is a series about Dutch and Flemish pronunciation in collaboration with @join-the-dutch-clan. She posts the Dutch ones, I post the Flemish ones :)
(I had to do it via Soundcloud, because the files wouldn’t upload to Tumblr for some reason. But you can find all of the Flemish recordings in the series on my soundcloud!)
