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Part of
Language Dispersal Beyond Farming
Edited by Martine Robbeets and Alexander Savelyev
[Not in series 215] 2017
► pp. 75–92

Chapter 4
Lexical recycling as a lens onto shared Japano-Koreanic agriculture

| Furman University

Despite the existence of strong cognates in other realms of basic vocabulary, it remains unclear why Korean and Japanese share so few words for grain and agriculture. This paper proposes that pre-rice vocabulary has undergone a process of lexical recycling in Korean to refer to later rice-related practices. The observation that Korean words for ‘rice’ contain initial p suggests common derivations from pre-MK *po ‘rice(?)’ that is relatable to Old Japanese po ‘a grain’. This paper uncovers important Japano-Koreanic cognates, including ‘buckwheat,’ ‘millet,’ and ‘rice plant’. This analysis also shows how linguists may retrieve early agricultural terminology that has been replaced by more advanced practices.

Keywords: Japano-Koreanic, proto-Korean-Japanese, rice, lexical recycling, historical linguistics
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Analysis of OJ ine ‘rice plant’ and yone ‘hulled, uncooked rice’
  • 3.Analysis of Korean rice vocabulary
    • 3.1Pre-MK *yé ~ OJ yone
    • 3.2Pre-MK *ap ~ OJ apa
    • 3.3Pre-MK *sól ~ OJ wase
    • 3.4Pre-MK *po: Conclusions
  • 4.Analysis of OJ swoba and MK cwoh
    • 4.1Agricultural vocabulary: Conclusions
  • 5.Discussion
    • 5.1Borrowing of agricultural terminology?
    • 5.2The chronology of Proto-Korean-Japanese
    • 5.3Lexical recycling as a general pattern in Korean
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 21 December 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/z.215.04fra
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Cited by

Cited by 2 other publications

Francis-Ratte, Alexander
2021. On the etymology of the Japanese plural suffix and its possible connection to Korean. Asian Languages and Linguistics 2:1 ► pp. 24 ff. DOI logo
Hudson, Mark J. & Martine Robbeets
2020. Archaeolinguistic evidence for the farming/language dispersal of Koreanic. Evolutionary Human Sciences 2 DOI logo

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