Re: Occitan! E.M. Korean! Basque!

Yoon Ha Lee wrote: "Wow!  <G>  Can you recommend sources on Middle Korean?
(I am anxious to have someone on this list whom I can ask about Korean,
since my own knowledge is fragmentary and colloquial at best.)  What other
Occitan-E.M. Korean affixes occur?"

To be honest, I'm still working on it. My sources are a current grammar work
on Korean which includes a sizable amount of information on Middle Korean
and a neat grammar/textbook of Old Occitan; while I took Korean in college
and read passably in French, I need to do more work on Old Occitan first.
Which is my current goal.

My goal is to use a primarily Korean syntax but an Occitanian lexis with
(Middle) Korean supplement. Therefore, EMK forms like the possessive -s
(used to mark inanimate and honorific nouns: WANG-s koc 'the king's flower',
now only 'visible' in compound words that show glottalisation where they
meet) and the now-extinct 'object' honorific SOB (used like the 'subject'
honorific SI to show respect) with OMK words.

It gets tricky mostly about the syllabification etc.; EMK was much more
flexible, having consonant clusters at the beginning of words like sk-, st-
etc., but what to do with word-initial r?

In Old Occitan, the initial r- was a tap, not rolled as in modern Spanish or
Italian. Hence I set up contrasting phonemes in the mixed form: r / R. The
former may occur in initial syllables - although not in the Korean-based
lexis, which replaced the native /r/ with n- in initial syllable. Hence EMK
nyangpan "elite" (modern yangban).

Otherwise, it's pretty straightforward. Syllable-final -s, -t, -c remained
distinct in EMK; c was pronounced as "ts" except before y, i, where it
became the affricate "ch" used in modern Korean everywhere. In Occitan, this
same sound appears written as z, tz, or as c before e or i; but since
Northern Occitan changed k_a to the affricate "ch", which was written as ch
(Northern chat, southern cat 'cat'), there is an easy way to represent both
the Occitan ch_a and the Korean ch_i: "ch" and elsewhere z, c_i, e = 'ts'.

I'll get the cites for you so you can investigate my sources. They're fun!
Especially if you are familiar with Basque, which shares some areal
characteristics with Occitan...

Anna J. Johnson
Mystif & Scrat Inscrutable
*************
Somtyme one of mankynde is both man & woman & suche ... in englyssh is
called a scrette.
- Caxton, Trevisa's Higden (1482)