Chapter published in:
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 This analysis also shows how linguists may retrieve early agricultural terminology that has been replaced by more advanced practices.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 rights@benjamins.nl.

Published online: 21 December 2017
https://doi.org/10.1075/z.215.04fra
References
Baxter, William H. and Lauren Sagart
2014 Baxter-Sagart Old Chinese Reconstruction, Version 1.1 (20 September 2014) <http://​ocbaxtersagart​.lsait​.lsa​.umich​.edu​/BaxterSagartOCbyMandarinMC2014​-09​-20​.pdf, accessed November, 2016. Crossref
Beckwith, Christopher
2007 Koguryo, the Language of Japan’s Continental Relatives: An Introduction to the Historical-Comparative Study of the Japanese-Koguryoic Languages with a Preliminary Description of Archaic Northeastern Middle Chinese. Leiden: Brill.Google Scholar
Francis-Ratte, Alexander
2016 Proto-Korean-Japanese: A New Reconstruction of the Common Origin of the Japanese and Korean Languages. PhD dissertation, The Ohio State University.Google Scholar
Guo, Longbiao et al.
2015 A host plant genome [Zizania latifolia] after a century-long endophyte infection. The Plant Journal 83(4): 600–9. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Jeremy, Michael & Robinson, Michael Ernest
1989 Ceremony and Symbolism in the Japanese Home. Manchester: Manchester University Press.Google Scholar
Lee, Jung Young
1981 Korean Shamanistic Rituals. The Hague: Mouton.Google Scholar
Martin, Samuel E.
1966 Lexical evidence relating Korean to Japanese. Language 42(2): 185–251. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
1987 The Japanese Language Through Time. New Haven CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Nam, Kwangwu
1997 Kwo’e sacen (Dictionary of Classical Korean). Seoul: Donga Publishing.Google Scholar
Omodaka, Hisataka et al.
1967 Jidaibetsu kokugo daijiten: Jōdai hen (Great Dictionary of Japanese by period: Ancient period). Tōkyō, Japan: Sanseidō.Google Scholar
Sagart, Laurent
2011 How many independent rice vocabularies in Asia? Rice 4: 121–133. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Simoons, Fredrick
1991 Food in China: A Cultural and Historical Inquiry. Boca Raton FL: CRC Press.Google Scholar
Unger, J. Marshall
2007 Dating the collapse of the kō-otu distinctions and the status of /mo/. In Current Issues in the History and Structure of Japanese, Bjarke Frellesvig, Masayoshi Shibatani & John Charles Smith (eds), 339–50. Tōkyō: Kuroshio.Google Scholar
2009 The Role of Contact in the Origins of the Japanese and Korean Languages. Honolulu HI: University of Hawaiʻi Press.Google Scholar
2014 No rush to judgment: The case against Japanese as an isolate. NINJAL Project Review 4(3): 211–230.Google Scholar
Vovin, Alexander
1998 Japanese rice agriculture terminology and linguistic affiliation of Yayoi culture. In Archaeology and Language II, Roger Blench & Matthew Spriggs (eds), 366–378. London: Routledge. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2010 Koreo-Japonica: A Re-Evaluation of a Common Genetic Origin. Honolulu HI: University of Hawaiʻi Press.Google Scholar
2015 On the etymology of Middle Korean psʌr ‘rice’. Türk Dilleri Araştırmaları 25: 229–238 (Festschrift für Uwe Bläsing).Google Scholar
Whitman, John
1985 The phonological basis for the comparison of Japanese and Korean. PhD Dissertation, Harvard University.Google Scholar
2011 Northeast Asian linguistic ecology and the advent of rice agriculture in Korea and Japan. Rice 4: 149–158. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2012 The relationship of Japanese and Korean. In The Languages of Japan and Korea, Nicholas Tranter (ed.), 24–38. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Winford, Donald
2003 An Introduction to Contact Linguistics. Malden MA: Blackwell.Google Scholar
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. Crossref logo
Hudson, Mark J. & Martine Robbeets
2020. Archaeolinguistic evidence for the farming/language dispersal of Koreanic. Evolutionary Human Sciences 2 Crossref logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 31 march 2022. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.