Thread by @ZevHandel

1/ Let’s talk about butter in Korean.

Not this one.

2/ Hope you're not too disappointed.

I was thinking more maybe this one.

3/ You can see on the packaging that the Korean word for butter is 버터.

4/ If you aren’t familiar with Korean, the common romanizations (beoteo, pŏt’ŏ) won’t give you much idea how the word it pronounced. Both vowels are like English “uh” [ʌ].

The word is pronounced something like “buh-tuh”.

Clearly a borrowing from the English word "butter".

5/ (I’ll stick with these impressionistic English-like renderings of the pronunciations of Korean words for a while in this thread, rather than standard romanization. That means I won’t be notating Korean tense consonants. That's okay, it's mainly the vowels we care about here.)

6/ There’s also these delicious looking Lotte brand butter coconut cookies—serve 'em with coffee!

You can see on the packaging that the word for butter appears again and it’s also … 😫. Wait a minute.

7/ That’s not "버터"! It’s "빠다"! 😕

That sounds more like “bah-dah”. Also clearly an English borrowing, but somehow it’s not the same. What’s going on here?

8/ The first one, 버터 “buh-tuh”, is the ordinary word meaning ‘butter’ in South Korea today. And it certainly sounds more like the English word "butter" than the second one, 빠다 “bah-dah”, does.

9/ So what’s the deal with that second one? Where'd it come from, and why is it on my cookie package?

10/ You might think Wiktionary could help us out here, it is often accurate on the origin of words. Let’s take a look at the English-language Wiktionary page entry for this mysterious word 빠다 “bah-dah”.

en.wiktionary.org/wiki/빠다

11/ Here’s part of the entry:
*****
Etymology
From English butter
빠다 • (ppada)
1. (North Korea) butter
Synonyms
• (South Korea) 버터 (beoteo)
*****

12/ Okay, the etymology is fine, "from English butter", we already figured that part out.

And the meaning is ...
⁉️ ‘butter’ in NORTH KOREA 🤯 ❓

13/ Why would Lotte use the North Korean word for ‘butter’ in its cookie branding?

Clearly we’re not getting the whole story here. So we’d best dig around a little more.

14/ Setting aside the North Korea question for now, let's focus on these two different Korean words meaning 'butter', both seemingly of English origin.

It turns out that this isn’t the only Korean word that comes in two versions, both of which appear to be English borrowings.

15/ Consider 점퍼 “juhm-puh” from English “jumper” (more British English than American English): a sweater, pullover, or jacket.

As in this pictured catalog image for a hooded aviation jacket, captioned "후드항공점퍼".

16/ But there’s also a similar word 잠바 “jahm-bah”. Means the same thing. Clearly also borrowed from English “jumper”.

So what’s the deal? 🤷‍♀️🤷‍♂️

17/ Our recent look at English Wiktionary was pretty unsatisfying. Korean-language Wiktionary entries should be more reliable, don't you think?

Let’s see if we can get good info from the Korean Wiktionary page on 잠바 “jahm-bah”: ko.wiktionary.org/wiki/잠바

18/ The definition is:
'점퍼'의 비표준어
‘Non-standard form of “juhm-puh”’

Hmm. Non-standard. Well, okay, but where did it come from?

19/ I will share one more example of this kind of apparent double-borrowing from English: 빵꾸 “bahng-koo”. It comes from the first half of the English word “puncture” and refers to a hole, typically as found in a flat tire.

20/ But then we also find 펑크 “puhng-kŭ”, meaning essentially the same thing, and ALSO clearly from English “puncture”.

(If you do an image search on “펑크”, you’ll discover right away that it’s also a borrowing of English “punk”. I will resist going off on that tangent. 😅)

21/ Okay, so what’s the deal?

How can we explain all this?

WHAT IS GOING ON ??????

22/ You may have noticed that in each of these pairs of words there is a consistent pattern of alternation between the vowels ㅓ “uh” [ʌ] and ㅏ “ah” [a]. One member of each word pair has ㅓ “uh” and sounds closer to the English word; the other has ㅏ “ah” and sounds less close.

23/ Here are those three pairs of words again, so you can see the pattern:

1. butter: 버터 vs. 빠다 (“bUH-tUH” vs. “bAH-dAH”)
2. jumper: 점퍼 vs. 잠바 (“jUHm-pUH” vs. “jAHm-bAH”)
3. puncture: 펑크 vs. 빵꾸 (“pUHng-kŭ” vs. “bAHng-koo”)

24/ If you've been reading my threads, you know this is normally the point where I head off on a long, discursive aside in order to build suspense or, depending on your personality, frustration.

But I’m not going to do that this time.

25/ I am simply going to reveal to you why Korean has borrowed some English words *twice*, with different pronunciations. One of which doesn’t sound that close to English.

No tricks.

26/ The key to figuring this out is thinking about how an English “uh” vowel could end up in Korean as ㅏ “ah”. That's weird, right? Korean has a perfectly good ㅓ “uh” vowel that sounds very close to the English one.

27/ And this Korean ㅓ “uh” vowel is consistently used in dozens of other borrowings from English, like the last syllable of ‘donut’ 도넛 “doh-nUHt” or, for that matter, ‘coconut’: 코코넛 “koh-koh-nUHt”.

28/ It's also seen in the Korean title of the 1994 Jim Carrey/Jeff Daniels vehicle Dumb and Dumber:
덤 앤 더머 “dUHM an dUH-mUH”.

(According to IMDB, the Japanese film title, hilariously, is ジム・キャリーはMr.ダマー: “Jim Carrey is: Mr. DAH-mAH”.)

imdb.com/title/tt010968…

29/ The explanation has to be that these words with “ah” did not come directly from English into Korean, but were borrowed in two stages, **through a third language**: a language that lacks an “uh” vowel and so substituted the closest vowel sound it had, “ah”, for English “uh”.

30/ A third language that has absorbed a lot of words borrowed from English, and that had a major influence on the Korean language in the 20th century.

👀 You see where this is going.

31/ That language is, of course, Japanese. Japanese, with its five vowels
a i e o u
and not an “uh” sound to be found among them.

32/ The English word “puncture” was borrowed into Japanese as panku パンク, with first vowel “ah”.

And the English word “butter” ends up in Japanese as batā バター, with two “ah” vowels.

33/ Though it’s not laid out terribly clearly, the Japanese origin of the older Korean word for ‘butter’ is documented in the official Korean government dictionary, P’yojun Kugŏ Taesajŏn 표준국어대사전. It’s published by the National Institute of Korean Language.

34/ You can access this dictionary on-line here: stdict.korean.go.kr

The entry for 빠다 “bah-dah” gives the etymology as from Japanese. (And then cross-references to the newer Korean word.)

35/ These English words with “uh” that end up in Korean with “ah” were first borrowed from English into Japanese—that’s where the vowel shift happened—and later borrowed from Japanese into Korean.

36/ These Japanese words of English origin were part of a much larger borrowing wave into Korean, along with many other Japanese words that were absorbed into Korean before and during the Japanese occupation of the first half of the 20th century.

37/ Here are four other Japanese words that have been borrowed into Korean:

(I’ve returned to McCune-Reischauer romanization for Korean.)

1. Japanese kaban 鞄 > Korean kabang 가방 ‘bag, satchel’

2. Japanese kuruma 車 ‘car’ > Korean kuruma 구루마 ‘wagon, dolly’

38/
3. Japanese tamanegi 玉ねぎ > Korean tamanegi 다마네기 ‘yellow onion’

4. Japanese taku(w)an 沢庵 > Korean takkwang 다꽝 ‘pickled daikon’

39/ After the occupation ended, there gradually followed a period of several decades during which deliberate attempts were made to “purify” Korean by purging Japanese-borrowed vocabulary.

40/ This is why the Japanese-borrowed words for ‘scallion’ and ‘pickled daikon’ disappeared, and were replaced by Korean coinages yangp’a 양파 (literally “Western scallion”) and tanmuji 단무지 (literally “sweet daikon”), respectively.

41/ Of course there are also many words of Japanese origin that are still retained in Korean, like kabang 가방 and kuruma 구루마—and kudu 구두 ‘dress shoes’. (Not to mention all the Sino-Korean compounds that were coined in Japan and then exported to China, Korea, and Vietnam.)

42/ So what happened to those Japanese-borrowed words that came originally from English? How were they purged and replaced?

They were re-borrowed from English. Or, thought of another way, they were Anglicized—pronunciations adjusted to more closely match the original English.

43/ And that’s how we end up with today’s common words Korean words
pŏt’ŏ 버터 ‘butter’
chŏmp’ŏ 점퍼 ‘jacket’
p’ŏngk’ŭ 펑크 ‘puncture’
(That “ŏ” in romanization represents the “uh” vowel.)

44/ But we've left something hanging. An unanswered question from earlier.

That was a long time ago. You might not remember.

45/ What’s up with the Lotte butter-coconut cookies and the North Korean word for ‘butter’?

46/ Well, for the Lotte treat, you might think the product name was established a long time ago. But that’s not so; the product was introduced in 1979 according to Namuwiki. Perhaps the older spelling was used for nostalgic effect.
namu.wiki/w/빠다코코낫

47/ As for North Korea, I’m just guessing here, but I presume that North Korea has simply retained the older Korean word for ‘butter’, the one borrowed from Japanese. It’s hard to imagine the North Korean government deliberately borrowing American or British English words.

48/ If you've stuck with me so far, you might now be thinking: It seems rather remarkable to find double borrowings in one language like this, doesn’t it?

But is this really something special?

49/ We’ve seen before how the same word from French has been borrowed into English multiple times.

https://twitter.com/ZevHandel/status/1405396271326666753?s=20

50/ Words often travel through intermediary languages as they spread. Sometimes the two pathways are close enough in time that the historical currents are obvious, as is the case with these multiple Korean words borrowed from English: directly or via Japanese.

51/ Other times the pathways of borrowing are so intricate or the historical time disparity is so great that it takes a lot more work to recognize that two words have a common historical origin.

I'd like to give you an example that I think is pretty neat.

52/ Consider the English word “tea”. It comes from the Chinese Southern Min word tê 茶, borrowed into English through Dutch sea traders who first brought the special leaf to Europe.

53/ And consider the English word “chai”, borrowed more recently from Hindi-Urdu cāy चाय, and used in English for a particular kind of tea drink.

54/ That Hindi-Urdu word “chai” ultimately comes from northern Chinese, from a source word closely akin to the ancestor of modern Mandarin chá 茶.

55/ And of course, Mandarin chá and Hokkien / Southern Min tê are themselves cognates derived from a single ancient Chinese word for tea, pronounced something like *lrâ in Old Chinese.

“tea”and “chai” are THE SAME WORD.

56/ Dan @jurafsky detailed the history of the word “tea” beautifully in this blog post (and in his subsequent book The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu):
languageoffood.blogspot.com/2014/08/tea-if…

57/ Sometimes in the US you see this menu item at a café: “chai tea”.

I love that compound: historically, it’s the same word twice.

58/ That’s the end!

That's the end of my thread!

Except ...

59/ I can’t end without linking to BTS’ hit summer song of 2021, “Butter”. I prefer this “Choreography” video, apparently filmed in one smooooth buttery take.

/end