Re: Blue grass and skies

On Wed, Aug 09, 2000 at 11:02:37PM -0400, Yoon Ha Lee wrote:
[snip]
> pparkang: red
> dahong: red-orange
> juhang: orange
> kyursaek: light orange (literally "tangerine-colored")
> norang: yellow
> yeondu: pale green
> noksaek: green
This is interesting... "noksaek" sounds like a derivation from the
Cantonese "lok" or perhaps from "lek" in my mothertongue, Hokkien (I'm not
sure that's the right transliteration... AFAIK there isn't a consistent
orthographic system for my mothertongue yet).

I've been noticing a strangely close correlation between certain Hokkien
and Korean words, esp. in the pronunciation. Often, it's even closer than
Mandarin to Korean. I suspect there is a deep connection here, but can't
make much sense of it, since Korea is in the north and Fukien is in the
south: I don't see why two peoples so far apart would have such similar
words and pronunciations whereas the languages in between (eg. Mandarin)
sounds less alike. I'd like to believe it's just coincidence, but I've
just come across way too many Korean words that are pronounced in almost
exactly the same way as in Hokkien.

Anyone knows more about this?

> chungrok: blue-green?
> parang: blue or green
> namsaek: exclusively blue (something-colored, but I don't recognize "nam"
>   because I *thought* nam by itself meant "south," maybe got contracted?)
Seems to me that "nam" comes from the Hokkien "lam" (blue), which derives
from the Mandarin "lan". Maybe I'm just deluding myself, but in Hokkien,
blue is "lamsek" (pronounced almost exactly the same as the Korean except
for the initial consonant). In fact, "lamsek" literally means "blue
color". The "sek" seems to be the same as the Korean "saek" (pronounced
the same way, too).

> borah: purple
> jaju: plum
> hwaesaek: grey
Hmm. "Grey" in Hokkien is "huaysek" (probably pronounced the same way as
in Korean, but I never heard "hwaesaek" in Korean before so I'm not sure).

> hayang: white
> kkamang: black
>
> keum: gold (colored)
[snip]

Hmm. "Gold" in Hokkien is "Kim", derived from the Mandarin "qing" (ching
or tsing, in the older romanizations).

> I learned silver and copper at some point, but don't remember them.
Hey, this could be a way of checking my hypothesis (or conspiracy theory,
if you will). "Silver" in Hokkien is "gim". If you find out, I'd like to
know if my theory holds up :-)

(But I forgot what "copper" in Hokkien is, so we can't check that one for
now.)

> Take all this with a grain of salt.  Korean was my first language but I
> lost it all when we moved back to the U.S.
<sly grin> maybe what I said above is all just a wild fantasy after all...

On the other hand, if even possibly inaccurate information still shows a
correlation between Korean and Hokkien (plus my own observations), perhaps
there's some truth to my theory? I notice especially that in the Korean
and Hokkien words that seem to correlate, the *consonants* often match up
in a striking way (vowels do too, but not as often). This is unlike words
from Mandarin, where the consonants are often different from corresponding
words in Korean (though there's very likely a consistent set of consonant
changes that can derive one from the other).

I'll be *really* glad if somebody can shed some light on this...


T