Re: Blue grass and skies

On Wed, 9 Aug 2000, DOUGLAS KOLLER wrote:

> From: "Yoon Ha Lee"
>
> > Korean does that too.  Paransaek (I *think* that's the right
> > transliteration) is blue or green; choroksaek is exclusively green.
> > There's no word for just blue unless my mom missed it.  <wry g>
>
> Not speaking Korean, my guess would be that "-saek" corresonds to Chinese
> "se4", "color" (Cantonese offers "sik1", which gets us closer to the Korean
Yes, saek is color (by itself, too).  I'm not sure what type of language
Korean falls into.  Someone told me agglutinative, which kind of makes
sense, but I don't have any *formal* grammar, just hindbrain knowledge
since my mother spoke Korean in the home.

> [Japanese "seki"]). "lan2" gets us to "paRAN" (Japanese: "ran")(though it
> could be an indigenous word and a coincidence), and "lü4" (Cantonese "luk6")
> gets us to "choROK" (Japanese: "ryoku" or "roku") (ditto) ("cho", maybe
> "grass"?). I suspect there's a word out there for "qing1", but I don't know
> enough about Korean phonetics to start making educated guesses about what it
> could be.
>
> Kou
It might be archaic or poetic or simply that I never encountered it since
my Korean is lousy.  I'm going to fire off an inquiry to my folks, since
they can actually *read* Korean linguistics texts when they need to.  <sigh>

YHL