Talk:가락

Distant possible connection
-- I note a similarity to 🇨🇬, particularly the counter sense. Given that the Japanese term is attested as kara as far back as the 700s, and considering the reconstructed 🇨🇬, these wouldn't seem to be cognates. However, might the Middle Korean have influenced Japanese usage? Or might the Proto-Korean →  shift have happened earlier than the 700s? Or might the Proto-Korean reconstruction of the medial be incorrect?

I am intrigued by the potential here. While there is no corresponding Japonic verb "to split" of similar phonetics to 🇨🇬 or even kara (the only verb roots that come to mind are wak-, war-, or noun ; a distant "maybe" might be ), the semantics for 🇨🇬 could imply that the core meaning isn't "intrinsic qualities" so much as "branch", which would more closely align to the sense currently given for 🇨🇬.

‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │Tala við mig 22:01, 3 November 2020 (UTC)




 * , the reconstruction is strong here because there is no evidence of fortition of  to  ever having happened in Korean. The lenition of  was not complete in the twelfth century, since the  has 麻帝 for . There is also no evidence of the Middle Korean  allomorph of the suffix  in any Old Korean glosses to the Buddhist canon, all the way up to the end of the Old Korean glossing tradition around 1300.
 * So I think it's just coincidence—there was probably not much Korean influence on Japanese after the thirteenth century, and if Wiktionary is correct the semantics don't seem to match very well. is more for noodles, certain types of rice cakes (see left), rubber bands, etc. Songs are also counted with 가락.--Karaeng Matoaya (talk) 00:44, 4 November 2020 (UTC)


 * Excellent, thank you again!
 * That detail about the apparent lateness of lenition is quite useful in other contexts as well.  Japanese has many ancient nouns that exhibit a kind of ablaut of sorts, where compounding forms have more open vowels and standalone forms have more closed vowels.  Examples include, , , .  One author, J. Marshall Unger, hypothesized that these might point towards an ancient bi- or trisyllabic form ending in  where the last syllable was omitted in compounds, but when used as standalone nouns, the initial consonant of the last syllable lenited out and the two vowels then fused.  He thus reconstructed "eye" as mari and suggested cognacy with 🇨🇬.  The semantic shift struck me as odd, but not insurmountable (consider 🇨🇬 and 🇨🇬).  However, if the Korean term was actually *mat in ancient times, that seems to shoot this theory in the foot: while Japanese seems to dislike the  phoneme in its historical development, making lenition plausible,  has been preserved.
 * Regarding the Korean term, any chance it's a nativization + sense shift from 🇨🇬? As in, "the [upper or front] end [of the body]"?  ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │Tala við mig 01:38, 4 November 2020 (UTC)


 * , I'm not sure I agree with the semantics of the 🇨🇬 etymology myself. The conventional comparison is MK > Modern  (probably fused diminutive), with both "head" and "oldest child" being primary or highest in some sense, but this also strikes me as a bit strange semantically.--Karaeng Matoaya (talk) 02:12, 4 November 2020 (UTC)