Koreanic Family

[Neonnaut]

Thought I'd make a start on this. I don't have too much time to work on this and don't know a lot about Korean, so anyone who knows more than me, feel free to contribute.

Roadmap

• Proto Korean: ? to 57 BCE. A lot of mention of Altaic theory here.
• Old Korean: 57 BCE through 900s CE. It was written using Chinese Hanja. Old Korean can be constructed by tracing back Middle Korean, but is little more than a vague outline due to poor sources.
• Middle Korean: 1000s through 1500s. This can be divided into Early Middle Korean and Late Middle Korean. Hangeul was created in the 1400s and luckily gives us a great view of the phonemes involved, but the actual realisation of these phonemes is still lightly debated.
• Modern Korean: 1600s through ?. There are several ongoing changes in the 20th century and in this century, so I'm not sure what the endpoint would be. Some divide Modern Korean into Early Modern Korean and Contemporary Korean.
• Jeju language: Spoken on an island between Japan and Korea. It is conservative of Middle Korean forms.
• Yukjin language: Spoken in north-eastern North Korea. It is conservative of Middle Korean forms.

Middle Korean Phonology

Sources:

• A History of the Korean Language, ki-moon lee
• The Korean Language, Ho-Min Sohn. Unfortunately I'm getting paywalled here.
• Wikipedia
• Wiktionary, Koreanic_reconstructions
• A contrastivist view of the evolution of the Korean vowel system, Seongyeon Ko I Haven't used this yet, but it seems to list all vowel changes from Middle to Modern.

Consonants

m ㅁ	n ㄴ		ŋ ㆁ		Nasal
p ㅂ	t ㄷ	ts ㅈ	k ㄱ		Plain plosive/affricate
pʰ ㅍ	tʰ ㅌ	tsʰ ㅊ	kʰ ㅋ		Aspirate plosive/affricate
p͈ ㅃ	t͈ㄸ	t͈s ㅉ	k͈ ㄲ		Tense plosive/affricate
	s ㅅ			h ㅎ	Plain fricative
	s͈ ㅆ			h͈ ㆅ	Tense fricative
β ㅸ	z ㅿ		ɣㅇ		Voiced fricative
	l~ɾ ㄹ				Liquid

Tense consonants were allophones of some consonant clusters in Middle Korean.

Vowels

i ㅣ	ɨ ㅡ	u ㅜ	Close
	ə ㅓ	o ㅗ	Close-mid
		ʌ~ɔ ㆍ	Open-mid
	ɑ~a ㅏ		Open

Late middle korean had the following vowel harmony:
"light" /ə u ɨ/ vs "dark" /ɑ o ʌ/, with neutral /i/. The harmony is usually described as involving advanced and retracted tongue root.

Diphthongs and triphthongs:

ja ㅑ	jə ㅕ	jo ㅛ	ju ㅠ
wa ㅘ	wə ㅝ	wi ㅟ
ɔj ㆎ	aj ㅐ	əj ㅔ	oj ㅚ	uj ㅟ	ɨj ㅢ
waj ㅙ	wəj ㅞ	jəj ㅖ	jaj ㅒ	joj ᆈ	juj ᆔ

Tone
/V̀/ low tone (written without dot)
/V́/ high tone (written with "·" placed to the left of the syllable block)
/V̌ː/ rising tone with long vowel (written with ":" placed to the left of the syllable block)

The rising tone can be analysed as a long vowel which could only take the sequence, high and low tone.

[bradrn]

Source for all this, please?

[Neonnaut]

Source for all this, please?

Sure

[bradrn]

Source for all this, please?

Sure

Hmm… I see:

• A History of the Korean Language, ki-moon lee
• The Korean Language, Ho-Min Sohn. Unfortunately I'm getting paywalled here.
• Wikipedia
• Wiktionary, Koreanic_reconstructions
• A contrastivist view of the evolution of the Korean vowel system, Seongyeon Ko I Haven't used this yet, but it seems to list all vowel changes from Middle to Modern.

Our policy so far has been to report sound changes separately for each source. Combining sound changes from multiple sources is an attractive thing to do, but it requires a great deal of editorialisation, and makes sound changes much more difficult to verify.

(Oh, and Wikipedia I consider too unreliable to use for anything linguistic.)

[fusijui]

For most if not all of the language families/groupings I personally know much about, what it sounds like you're expecting simply doesn't exist. There is not the documentation of sound changes that's published and also (plausibly) comprehensive, let alone also uncontroversial and widely accepted.

Additionally, those who have access to the kinds of material you want may volunteer to transcribe the data you want into the database structure you want, but that in itself is a an ask, even if the actual goodies are even there in the first place.

Meaningful/usable results; freedom from editing + high verifiability; volunteer engagement: pick two at most.

[bradrn]

For most if not all of the language families/groupings I personally know much about, what it sounds like you're expecting simply doesn't exist. There is not the documentation of sound changes that's published and also (plausibly) comprehensive, let alone also uncontroversial and widely accepted.

Sure, but we can nonetheless collect the sources which already exist, and transcribe them all into the database. The aggregate result is, I think, as close as we can get to being ‘comprehensive’ without requiring us to do significant original research ourselves.

(To use a cliche, I believe this is one of those cases where ‘the whole is greater than the sum of its parts’.)

Meaningful/usable results; freedom from editing + high verifiability; volunteer engagement: pick two at most.

I believe we can get all three of these, more or less:

• The results should be as meaningful/usable as the sources they’re taken from, and I don’t think we can ask for more than that.
• We get high verifiability by being able to link the sound changes back to their cited sources.
• Volunteer engagement is least certain, but up till now people have seemed pretty enthusiastic about the whole thing.

[fusijui]

I've been a downer, but really do wish this project success

[bradrn]

I've been a downer, but really do wish this project success

Thanks! And I never thought otherwise… these discussions are important ones to have.