"Horse" and "language" in Korean

A Korean student was just in my office and saw this book on my table:  mal-ui segyesa 말의 세계사.

She said, "Oh, a world history of words!"

But I knew that couldn't be right because the book is a world history of horses.  It's actually a Korean translation of this book by Pita Kelekna:

The Horse in Human History (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2009)

So what happened?  Did the student make a mistake?

A colleague who is a Korean specialist remarks:

세계사 is indeed "world history."  And 의 is the genitive marker.

말 is both "horse(s)" and "language, speech, word(s)",  i.e., a simple homonym.  She didn't do anything wrong, although the English rendering should have been "world history of speech" or some such.  As always, context counts and she probably figured anything in your office would be language related.

From another colleague who is a specialist in Korean language teaching:

I would also think the book is about the history of language rather than a world history of horses. I never heard of a horse history book.

I asked Bob Ramsey:

말 means both "horse" and "word", right?

He replied:

Sure does. But 'word, speech, language' has a long vowel, while the vowel of 'horse' is short. (And the long vowel, btw, was a rising tone in Middle Korean.)

I continued:

But these things are not reflected in the orthography, are they?

Bob replied:

No, they're not. They're written exactly the same way in today's orthography. Thus your student's reaction.

Juha Janhunen observed:

Yes, indeed, I never thought of it, but in modern Korean mal 'horse' and mal 'language' (as in Ilbon-mal 'Japanese language', Goryeo-mal 'Koryeo language' = the language of the Central Asian Koreans) sound the same. To my knowledge mal 'horse' goes back to măl = măr < *mor(V), while mal (mar) 'language, word' derives from mal < *mar(V). The vowels a (< *a) and ă (< *o) were written with different letters in the original version of Hangeul (1446), but in most Korean dialects today they have phonetically merged, which is why the letter for ă (a dot) is no longer used in the standard orthography, so the two words have become both homonyms and homographs.

Since we have often touched upon Eurasian words for "horse" and will be coming back to them in short order, it's worth mentioning one of the nine different etymologies for "mal 말" listed in Wiktionary that means "horse":

The ma sound denoting "horse" is common to a number of languages of central Asia, where horses were first domesticated, suggesting a possible cognate root. Compare Manchu ᠮᠣᡵᡳᠨ (morin, "horse"), Mongolian морь (morʹ, "horse"), Mandarin 馬 (mǎ, "horse"), Japanese 馬 (uma, "horse") and Proto-Indo-European *márkos ("horse") and descendants such as Irish marc ("horse", archaic) or English mare ("female horse"). More at *márkos.

This experience with a word in the title of a Korean book on my office table raises many interesting and important questions concerning orthography, phonological evolution, homonymy and homophony, and so forth, but above all context.

 

Selected readings

"An early fourth century AD historical puzzle involving a Caucasian people in North China" (1/25/19)

"Of horse riding and Old Sinitic reconstructions" (4/21/19)

"Of reindeer and Old Sinitic reconstructions" (12/23/18)

 

[Thanks to Bill Hannas, Haewon Cho, and Yishu Ma]