Yesterday the principal of Tek's daycare invited me, Erma, and Erma's mother to lunch at one of the fanciest traditional restaurants in Gyeongju. We're not entirely sure why. "Probably networking," speculates Erma.
The restaurant, Yoseokgung 요석궁, is built in traditional style, with the private rooms arranged in a rectangle around an open central courtyard.
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| You can tell which rooms are occupied by looking for the shoes. |
I'm coming in later than Erma and her mom. Where's our room?
Oh, there's Erma signaling to me.
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| Hi Erma! I see we're in the corner room. |
When we arrived (before the principal), the table was already set with golden tableware and a few
banchan 반찬 (side dishes). I like the way the plastic lid of the water bottle matches the color of the bowls.
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| I really love this golden tableware. I wish I owned a set. |
Heated floors, soft elegant cushions.
The napkins have the name of the restaurant (요석궁) on them. They are pre-dampened. Cold and wet.
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| You would be sad if you put this on your lap. |
Some of the
banchan were completely ordinary, like these seasoned vegetables and cabbage kimchi.
But some were distinctive. This is a cube formed of fine, cloud-like tendrils of dried pollack.
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| foreground: dried pollack (bugeo 북어); background: seasoned ground squid (ojingeo sikhye 오징어식혜) |
After all four of us were seated, the more substantial dishes started coming out.
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| In the large dishes from left to right: jellyfish, fish dumplings (on the white plate), bulgogi, fatty pork, and seafood scallion pancake. |
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| This is galbi jjim 갈비찜 (stewed beef ribs), one of my favorite dishes. |
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| Crab. |
The crab (above) and the abalone (below) were apparently not part of the set meal we ordered, they were provided free. (The Koreans call this kind of complimentary item a "seobiseu 서비스", a borrowing of the English word
service.)
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| Grilled abalone skewers. |
N commented: 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 responded: Excellent 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.
So, 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?
N said: The 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.
I now have some more information to supplement the discussion above. I asked Erma's mother if people ever used to say "sabiseu" instead of "seobiseu". She said they did; there is variation. This would seem to seal the deal: the Korean word must be a borrowing via Japanese.
ReplyDeleteErma's mother further said that these days, young people sometimes ironically say "sabiseu" instead of "seobiseu". If I understood her correctly, they do it because they know enough English to recognize that the Korean word does not mean the same as the English, and by reverting to the Japanese pronunciation, they can knowingly reference this fact while simultaneously making fun of the usage.
That's a great sociolinguistic example! Somebody should write a paper about that.
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