A Study On The Korean And Chinese Pronunciation Of Chinese .

PACLIC 32A Study on the Korean and Chinese Pronunciation of ChineseCharacters and Learning Korean as a Second LanguageXiao LuoSchool of EducationUniversity of CincinnatiCincinnati, OH, U.S.A.luoxo@mail.uc.eduYike YangJing SunDepartment of Chinese and BilingualSchool of EducationStudiesThe Hong Kong Polytechnic University University of CincinnatiHong Kong S.A.R.Cincinnati, OH, U.S.A.yi-ke.yang@connect.polyu.hk sunj9@mail.uc.eduAbstractSino-Korean words have their etymologicalroots in Chinese characters. Previous studiesshowed that the correspondent relation betweenChinese and the Korean pronunciation ofChinese characters facilitates the reading ofSino-Korean words by Chinese learners ofKorean as a second language (L2). This studyquantifies such correspondence at the syllablelevel by calculating the degree ofcorrespondence in Korean-Chinese syllables.The degree of correspondence between Koreanand Chinese syllables was examined. Resultsshow that among the 406 Chinese characterfamilies in Sino-Korean words, 22.7% have anaverage correspondent consistency lower than0.5 and 33.3% are equal to or higher than 0.5but lower than 1. Suggestions for teaching andlearning Korean as an L2 are proposed.(Cho & Chiu, 2015). They serve as special sourcesfor Chinese native (L1) speakers to learn to readSino-Korean words in Korean as a secondlanguage (L2) or a foreign language (FL) (Im &Lee, 2008; Guo, 2018).The significant role that vocabulary plays in L2reading is well documented in literature (e.g.,Ouellette, 2006). Given the large number of SinoKorean words in the lexical repertoire, it isworthwhile to examine the degree ofcorrespondence between the Chinese and Koreanpronunciation of Chinese characters. This willconsequently facilitate teaching, learning, andreading of Sino-Korean words for the largepopulation of L2 Korean learners in China,considering that there has been a growingpopulation of Chinese learners of Korean in recentyears (Gao, 2010).21IntroductionDue to cultural interactions in history (Ebrey,1996), Korean shares a large number of SinoKorean words with Chinese, which areetymologically rooted in Chinese characters buthave their Korean pronunciation (Wang et al.,2016). Traditionally written in logographicChinese characters, Sino-Korean words are nowwritten in Hangul, the Korean alphabet, whichmaps a basic grapheme to a single phoneme andcombines phonemes into a syllable in a “squarelike shape” (Pae, 2018; Wang et al., 2003; Pae etal., 2018). Nevertheless, 70% of the contemporaryKorean vocabulary belongs to Sino-Korean wordsLiterature ReviewComparisons between the Chinese and the Koreanpronunciation of Chinese characters have beenconducted at the phonemic level. Li (2003)revealed the correspondent relation between thepronunciation of Chinese characters’ initialconsonants in Chinese and Korean. For example,he found that the Chinese characters with the initialconsonants b, p, and f are pronounced as the initialconsonants ㅂ(b) and ㅍ(p) in Korean. He believedthat such correspondence would “facilitate thestudy of Chinese phonetic history and relationsbetween Korean and Chinese language andliterature” (Li, 2003, p. 94). However, very fewstudies have explored the correspondence betweenthe Korean and Chinese vowels or that between the42832nd Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and ComputationHong Kong, 1-3 December 2018Copyright 2018 by the authors

PACLIC 32Korean rhymes and Chinese finals with regards topronunciations of Chinese characters (Li, 2005;Yang, 2015).Im and Lee (2008) is one of the several studies(Moon, 2005; Guo, 2008) that attempted toquantify the correspondent relation between theChinese and the Korean pronunciation of Chinesecharacters. Based on the selected 824 Chinesecharacters for Korean education as an L2 or FL, Imand Lee (2008) scored three types of correspondentrelations: 1) Korean initial constants vs. Chineseinitial consonants, 2) Korean vowels in opensyllables vs. Chinese vowels, and 3) Koreanrhymes in closed syllables vs. Chinese finals. Theyfound that certain Korean phonemes have a highcorrespondent rate with their Chinese counterparts.For example, the Korean initial consonant ㄱ(g)has a 76.9% correspondent rate with its Chinesecounterparts j and g; the Korean vowel ㅑ(ya) hasa 100% correspondent relation with the Chinesevowel ie and e. The authors argued that suchcorrespondent relation could facilitate the meaninginference of unlearned Sino-Korean vocabulary forChinese learners of Korean as an L2 (Im & Lee,2008).To our knowledge, Guo (2018) is the only studythat conducted comparisons between the modernChinese and Korean syllable types of thepronunciations of Chinese characters used in bothlanguages at the syllable level. Based on the 3,500frequently used Chinese characters in MainlandChina and the 3,500 frequent Chinese characters(Hanja) used in South Korea, Guo identified fourtypes of syllables that are used to representChinese characters’ pronunciations in bothlanguages: V, CV, VC, and CVC 1 . The authordiscovered that the Chinese syllables of V type(e.g., ai) has a correspondent rate of 62% to theKorean syllables of V type (i.e., 애(ae)). TheChinese syllable of CV (e.g., gu) type has a 64.6%correspondent rate to the CV type (e.g., 고(go))syllables and a 30% correspondent rate to the CVCtype (e.g., 곡(gok)) of syllables in Korean. Theauthor also concluded a correspondent rate of81.8% between the VC type of syllables betweenthe two languages and a 92.5% correspondent ratebetween the CVC type of syllables between the1In these syllable types, C means consonant and V meansvowel.Chinese and Korean pronunciations of Chinesecharacters.Both Li’s (2003) and Im and Lee (2008)’scomparative analyses were conducted at thephoneme level, rather than at the syllable level.And even though Guo (2018)’s study addressedcomparisons at the syllable level, it only specifiedthe correspondent rate between syllables’ structuraltypes in the two languages instead of specificsyllables. All these may not help Chinese learnersof Korean learn to read Sino-Korean words as anL2 because “native speakers (or readers) of anonalphabetic language (e.g., Chinese) tend to paylittle attention to the intraword components and usewhole-word processing in recognizing a word”(Akamatsu, 2003, p. 210). In addition, because“particular characteristics of L1 word recognitionprocesses may remain in the course of developingL2 reading skills or strategies” (Akamatsu, 2003, p.224), it is highly possible that Chinese learners ofKorean as an L2 will apply their word processingstrategies in Chinese when reading Korean. Thus, abetter understanding of the correspondent relationbetween Chinese and Korean pronunciation ofChinese characters at the syllable level would benecessary.3Research Significance and QuestionsIt is of great significance to quantify thecorrespondence between the Chinese and theKorean pronunciations of Chinese characters at thesyllable level because: first, it documents thecontemporary pronunciations of Chinese charactersin the two languages to understand their syllabicphonological correlations, which have not beenpreviously examined; second, it serves as animportant guideline for curriculum design andlearning strategies for teaching and learningKorean as an L2, especially for L1 Chineselearners; third, such quantified relations can beused for the psycholinguistic research concerningword reading and processing in L2 Korean. Thus,the present study aims to answer the followingresearch questions:1. What are the mapping distribution andcorrespondence at the syllable level in the Koreansyllables and the Chinese characters adopted inKorean?2. What are the determining factors in suchdistribution and correspondence?42932nd Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and ComputationHong Kong, 1-3 December 2018Copyright 2018 by the authors

PACLIC 3244.1The Present StudyResearch MaterialThe higher this index is, the more consistent thecorrespondence between Korean and Chinesesyllables is.The research material consists of the 1,800frequently used Chinese characters in South Korea,which are from the official Basic Hanja forEducational Use (교육용기초한자 (敎育用基礎漢字)) published by the Ministry of Education andHuman Resources Development of the Republic ofKorea.Korean CCSyllable members4.2제 (je3)0.14( 2/14)ti0.14題, 提chu0.07除( 1/14)zhu0.07諸qi0.07齊Number of Chinese Characters (CC): 14Number of Chinese syllables: 7Average Consistency0.18 (0.29 4 0.21 3 0.14 2 0.14 2 0.07 0.07 0.07) 14*indicates powerful Chinese syllableResearch MethodThe present study replicated Kim and Shin(2015)’s research method and concepts. First,based on the list of the 1,800 Chinese characters,we formed Chinese character families (CCfamilies). A CC family consists of all the Chinesecharacters with the identical pronunciation inKorean language. Second, for each family, welisted all Chinese characters and clustered theminto groups based on their Chinese pronunciationswithout considering tones. Third, in each CCfamily, we counted the following categories: thenumber of Chinese characters (CC), the number ofChinese syllables or Korean-Chinese syllablecorrespondent pairs (K-C pairs), and the number ofChinese characters with the same Chinesepronunciation.In addition, this study calculated another twoimportant indices. We borrowed the first from Kimand Shin (2015) and named it as the KoreanChinese syllable pair correspondent rate (K-C rate),which is the result of division of the number ofChinese characters with the same Chinesepronunciation by the total number of Chinesecharacters in a CC family. This correspondent rateindicates the frequency or the possibility that aKorean syllable corresponds to each of itscorrespondent Chinese syllable. A highercorrespondent rate means that a Korean syllable ismore likely to correspond to a certain Chinesesyllable.Another index is the average consistency(AveCon) of CC families (Kim and Shin, 2015). Itis calculated as the mean of the Korean-Chinesesyllable pair correspondent rates of all the Chinesecharacters in a CC family. This index signals theextent to which a Korean syllable corresponds toall its correspondent Chinese syllables consistently.弟, 第,帝, 堤祭, 際,濟製, 制Chinese K-C pairsyllable2 correspondentrate (K-C rate)di*0.29( 4/14)ji0.21( 3/14)zhiTable 1. Information of the 제(je) Chinesecharacter familyWe take the 제(sound: je) family in Table 1 forillustration. This Korean syllable has 14correspondent Chinese characters (i.e., CC 14),which means that all these 14 members arepronounced identically as je in Korean. In addition,this family has seven correspondent Chinesesyllables (i.e., di, ji, zhi, ti, chu, zhu, qi), suggestingthat the 14 Chinese characters are pronounceddifferently in Chinese. It also shows that thisfamily has seven Korean-Chinese syllablecorrespondent pairs (hereafter K-C pair). For theChinese syllable di or the 제(je)---di pair, thenumber of its Chinese characters is four, thus itscorrespondent rate is 0.29. The Chinese syllable dihas the greatest number of family members, and2In this study, Chinese syllables are written in Hanyu PinyinRomanization used in People’s Republic of China.3 In this study, Korean syllables are romanized next to Hangulaccording to the Revised Romanization of Korean used inRepublic of Korea.43032nd Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and ComputationHong Kong, 1-3 December 2018Copyright 2018 by the authors