The Korean language in Japanese–and vice versa!

THE MAP SHOWN HERE highlights an important aspect of Japanese-Korean relations that’s often overlooked by outsiders, and even some Japanese and Koreans themselves. Notice just how close the southern Japanese island of Kyushu and the southern part of the Korean Peninsula are to each other. A flight departing from Fukuoka City takes 90 minutes to arrive in Tokyo and two hours to reach Sendai in the northeastern part of the country—but only 45 minutes to land in Busan, or an hour to touch down in Seoul. The hydrofoils that ply the Korean Strait between Fukuoka City and Busan make the trip in three hours, moving along at a speed slightly less than that of an automobile on an expressway.

In today’s era of nation-states, the Kyushu native has of course much more in common with the native of the Tohoku area, now a fellow countryman, than he does with someone from Busan. But in an earlier era, geographical proximity was the predominant factor in human interaction, until that aspect was vitiated by the creation of national borders.

There was so much interaction—both ways—between Kyushu and the southern part of Korea that more than a few scholars in both countries consider the region as a whole to have been one cultural sphere. That state of affairs continued until the 7th century, at least, and until the end of the 8th century, Kyushu (and the Japanese imperial court) interacted more extensively with the Baekche (Kudara in Japanese) and Silla kingdoms than it did with the northeast.

The fruits of this interaction were much the same as those for any two nearby regions throughout the world, and they include more than just intermarriage. There are many examples—burial mounds, tools, ornaments, artwork, architecture—but none more obvious than language.

Korean in Japanese

Anyone familiar with both languages realizes they share many similar characteristics. The sentence structure in Japanese and Korean is nearly identical (and quite different from Chinese). In fact, the sentence-ending particle denoting a question is identical (-ka in Japanese, -kka in Korean). Linguists estimate the languages have at least 200, and as many as 300, cognates.

For example, the word for village in Japanese is mura, while the Korean equivalent is maul. But linguists say that during the Silla era, it was also mura in Korean. Another is hana, which is the indigenous Korean word for the number one. That wound up in Japanese in the phrase, hana kara hajimeyo, or let’s start from the beginning.

The Japanese word for pan is nabe, while in Korean, it’s naembi. When two Japanese lift something together, they say in unison, “Seh, no” before exerting themselves. Some linguists believe that might be derived from the native Korean words for three and four (sett, nett), as in one, two, three, four. When Japanese carry mikoshi in a festival, they often chant, “Wasshoi, wasshoi,” which some suggest comes from the Korean “oasso”, or “(We) have come”.

One frequently cited example is “nara”. That’s the Korean word for “country” (as in nation), and which probably was used at first to refer to a settlement (as was the corresponding word in Japanese, kuni). Is it a coincidence that also happens to be the name of Japan’s first capital city, Nara? This comparison is especially intriguing because many people from the Korean Peninsula came to settle in the Nara area more than a millennium ago.

Others disagree, however. I have read (on a Japanese website I can’t find anymore) a short article by a man who claimed that Nara’s pronunciation 1,300 years ago was different than it is today, and that the word does not originate in Korean. Not being a linguist, I can’t say for sure, but his argument can’t be dismissed out of hand. Languages do change drastically over the centuries, as any native English speaker who has tried to read Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in the original can attest.

One expression I would love to know the origin of is “oh-rai”. The Japanese use this when someone is backing up a truck or a car. Another person standing outside the vehicle will say “oh-rai, oh-rai” to let the driver know that he still has clearance to his rear. This obviously comes from the English “all right”, but it’s curious that I never heard that used in the U.S. (From what I remember, the verbal assistance is usually, “back…back…ho!”)

I was stunned during my first trip to Busan when I watched a similar scene unfold from the sidewalk in front of my hotel. A Korean guy was backing up a small truck, and his partner was in the street behind him, waving him on and saying, “oh-rai…oh-rai”—the identical phrase as in Japan!

Yes, the Japanese Know

Koreans suggest that Japanese don’t like to admit their ancient debt to the peninsula, but my experience doesn’t bear that out. Some years ago, I taught an English class for a small group of first-year high school students, and one day I ran through a short list of Korean-derived Japanese words with them. Not only were they all familiar with the information, they seemed to be bored by it.

In other words, this is common knowledge for 15-year-old Japanese, which means that they must learn it in junior high school, if not earlier. Their boredom has nothing to do with a negative attitude toward Korea; it’s just that like most people, they have a limited interest in etymology. How impressed or curious would the average 15-year-old English native speaker be after learning that the word “alcohol” was derived from Arabic and “ketchup” came from Malay?

Japanese in Korean

I also wonder how many Koreans realize—or care to admit—that linguistic borrowing is a two-way street. The Korean word for beer, or mekju, is derived from the Japanese mugishu, literally, barley liquor. That’s what the Japanese used to call beer when they built the first breweries in Korea. (They call it biiru now.) Often the borrowing is not apparent on the surface; the Koreans use the basic Chinese characters underlying the Japanese word, but have applied their own pronunciation for the characters. One such example is “red ink”, in the sense of financial loss. That’s akaji in Japanese, while the Koreans pronounce it jokja.

Another example is the Japanese word toriatsukai, which means handling, or dealing with. The Koreans thought that word useful enough to adopt as their own, pronouncing it chuegup, though my Romanization might be off. (Even the Chinese have borrowed that one.)

Writing in The Korean Language, linguists Iksop Lee and S. Robert Ramsey go into more detail: they cite as obvious borrowings the Japanese words kaban, for bag or briefcase; sakadachi, for headstand; suri, for pickpocket; and wairo, for bribe.

They also provide examples of how Koreans applied native readings to the Chinese characters used to write the Japanese word. A partial list includes the Korean words for vague, magazine, planet, pollution, comprehend, newspaper, social standing, and tap water. Further, they state:

…there are literally many hundreds of words constructed out of Chinese morphemes and written with Chinese characters that were coined in Meiji Japan to accommodate Western words and concepts. This vocabulary of modern life (which also was adopted by China) includes such now common terms as science, physics, art, philosophy, civilization, culture, folklore, communism, capitalism, stock market, trade union, national language, subway, highway, telephone, electron, compromise, and so on…

Koreans might indignantly claim these words entered their language only because of the colonial period, and of course they’d be right. But Koreans also have devoted a lot of energy over the past half-century to eradicating other loanwords from the Japanese language. The ones mentioned here are some of those that remain unchanged, and they’ll probably stay that way.

Besides, that’s how forces interact in a cultural sphere. Influences go back and forth for many different reasons, not all of them pleasant, and to claim otherwise would just be a silly, pointless discussion, or what the Japanese might call a kudaranai hanashi. Speaking of which…

Recall that the Japanese term for the Baekche kingdom was Kudara. Back in the 7th century, the Silla Kingdom conquered Baekche, and many people from the latter kingdom fled to Japan rather than stay in Korea. The Japanese term kudara, some theorize, is derived from an old Choson word meaning large village. Adding “-nai” to the ends of verbs and adjectives in Japanese creates the negative form, so the story goes that today’s Japanese word kudaranai originally meant something that was not “kudara”, or “Baekche”—or not very important or good.

Indeed, it might be a good idea for some folks on the peninsula to take some of their own advice and “draw the proper conclusions from history”. One of the first conclusions that scholars from many different disciplines usually draw is that there’s no such thing as purity.

A specialist in evolutionary biology, for example, might even say that’s the way it’s supposed to be.