With the change of seasons, some of the side dishes that come with the set meals at our regular lunch places are changing to take advantage of what is currently fresh in the markets.
Here's the lunch we ate today at Cheongha Hanjeongsik, followed by a photo of the first lunch we ate there back in January.
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| April 2015 meal at Cheongha Hanjeongsik 청하한정식 |
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| January 2015 meal at Cheongha Hanjeongsik 청하한정식 |
Both meals have flounder, fried eggs, cabbage kimchi, and
gim 김 (seasoned seaweed). But the other dishes are different. Of particular interest was this new dish:
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| tot namul dubu muchim 톳나물 두부무침 |
The proprietor told us that it is called
tot 톳, a kind of seaweed called
hijiki in Japanese. Here it is dried, seasoned, and mixed with soft tofu.
Does seobisu for free items come directly from English, or by way of Japanese saabisu (< English service of course)? How would we be sure? That food looks delightful. And the restaurant looks great.
ReplyDeleteI meant the restaurant in the other post. I catch up with several posts at once and forget what was in which.
ReplyDeleteExcellent question about Korean loans from English. There are certain clues you can use to determine which loans have come in via Japanese. The pronunciation of English schwa, /ʌ/, and r-colored vowels as Korean /a/ is a sure sign of Japanese as an intermediary. These vowels end up as Korean /ʌ/ if they come straight from English.
ReplyDeleteSo, seobiseu /sʌbisɨ/ is not from Japanese saabisu, or it else it would be */sabisɨ/.
However, things are not as simple as that! Since the end of Japanese occupation in 1945, Koreans have been slowly purging their language of Japanese loanwords. When those Japanese loanwords are actually English loanwords, then they don't get purged, they just get modified to better match English phonology. So it's actually possible that the Korean word was borrowed from Japanese saabisu as /sabisɨ/, but was then modified to /sʌbisɨ/ so it would no longer look Japanese. But that doesn't mean it was ever borrowed from English! It's just been disguised to look like it was borrowed from English.
So, I'd want to know two things to figure out how this word actually came into Korean: (1) Was is ever pronounced /sabisɨ/ in Korean? (2) Do the peculiar semantics of the Korean word ("a complimentary item") that don't really match the English meaning of "service" agree with the semantics of Japanese saabisu?
I am sad because I just realized that I forgot to click "Notify me" on all the other posts I commented on this evening.
ReplyDeleteThe semantics matches the Japanese usage perfectly, and it's not a very English-like interpretation of the word "service," after all. So absent more phonological evidence, I would go for the un-Japanized phonology but borrowed by way of Japanese explanation.
ReplyDeleteMakes sense to me!
ReplyDelete