Comments on: Wordcatcher Tales: Two Teas, A Bug, OMG

By: Doc Rock

Doc Rock — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 21:52:55 +0000

PS: I follow your blog regularly and especially look forward to your Wordcatcher segments and your photos. Keep up the good work! Doc

By: Joel

Joel — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 15:43:59 +0000

Thank you! That’s exactly what I suspected. The native Korean and Sino-Korean forms for ‘pine’ seemed too close for coincidence, but my Korean hancha dictionary glosses 松 ‘pine’ as 솔송 [sol-song] in the usual native Korean plus Sino-Korean readings of the same meaning. I’ll update accordingly.

By: Doc Rock

Doc Rock — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 10:39:37 +0000

Your juxtaposition of the Hangeul 솔잎차 followed the Chinese equivalent in Hancha (松葉茶) seems to imply that the characters are read 솔잎차 in Korean. They are not, they are read 송엽차 [song- yeopcha]. 솔 [sol] is the pure Korean for pine as in 솔나무, while 송[松] is the reading of the Sino-Korean loan word. What is confusing, perhaps, is that in the compound 솔잎차 the native Korean 솔잎 [pine leaf/needle] has the Sino-Korean loan word 차 [茶] appended to it.

Note also that the Chinese character 茶 has two readings, 차/다. Western words for “tea” are derived from both the Chinese pronounciations–so we see “tea” in English and “chai.” “Chai tea” is obviously redundant. In Russian tea is “cha,” for example. These differences seem to reflect which ports of China one originally got tea from.