Korean Job Discussion Forums

jkelly80 · Joined: 13 Jun 2007 Location: you boys like mexico?

So the hanja for 김 (the surname) is 金, pronounced "jin" in Mandarin (i'm not sure which tone).

My question is: Korean has the phonemes in its language to just transliterate it as 진, but they made it 김. I'm wondering why does this occur in Korean (either this specific case or just in general).

out of context · Joined: 08 Jan 2006 Location: Daejeon

The majority of Chinese words in Korean were brought into the language hundreds of years ago, when both languages sounded a lot different. Mandarin Chinese in particular bears little resemblance today to what it sounded like back then. It's likely that the name pronounced "Jin" in Mandarin today used to sound much more like "Kim".

jkelly80 · Joined: 13 Jun 2007 Location: you boys like mexico?

That makes sense. Thanks.

CentralCali · Joined: 17 May 2007

Another thing is that it's possible the names came from another branch of the Chinese language than Mandarin.

Return Jones · Posted: Fri Jun 20, 2008 2:59 am Post subject:

jinks · Joined: 27 Oct 2004 Location: Formerly: Lower North Island

out of context · Joined: 08 Jan 2006 Location: Daejeon

I'm pretty sure that the Korean family name "Kim" was imported from China, and did not pre-date the arrival of Chinese words in the Korean language.

The change of "ki" to "ji" is an example of palatalization, a very common type of sound change seen in languages worldwide. High front vowels like "i" and, to a lesser extent, "e" tend to cause preceding consonants to adopt a more palatal articulation. We see it in Korean when "s" is pronounced like "sh" before "i" sounds.

In Mandarin, for example, we say "Beijing" today, but it used to be called "Peking". It's exactly the same word; in the past, it sounded more like "Pei-king", but the "k" palatalized into "j". The same principle is behind the soft and hard "c" in English; originally, all "c" sounds in Latin were hard, but the ones in front of front vowels "i" and "e" became palatalized into "ch" (which is how they remain today in Italian and Romanian) and eventually weakened further into "s" (in other Romance languages).

Mandarin Chinese today has a reduced phonemic inventory compared to the past and stronger phonotactic constraints. Korean allows syllable-final consonants that were once allowed in Chinese but are not any longer. (In Mandarin, anyway; these syllable-final consonants are still present in dialects like Cantonese.) An end result of this is that Chinese has many more homophones than it used to.

I'm not sure about the exact years when Chinese words started to entered Korean, but here's a link to an etymological dictionary which gives Middle Chinese forms.
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~wbaxter/etymdict.html
If you look at the fourth file (d061-080), p. 4, you'll see that the Middle Chinese pronunciation of "jin1" (金) was "kim".

CentralCali · Joined: 17 May 2007

out of context · Joined: 08 Jan 2006 Location: Daejeon

"Far off"? Why did they use "k" in the first place? To be contrary?

tzechuk · Joined: 20 Dec 2004

Actually... Korean is a lot closer to Hokkien and Cantonese Chinese than it is Mandarin Chinese (I am a speaker of Cantones and Mandarin). The word *Kim* is *Kum* in Cantonese.

Anyway, according my husband whose surname is Kim, he claims that the surname Kim is pure Korean, meaning that it was one of the few family names that used to exist only in Korea and not imported from China... and I believe him.

My own father, who is Chinese, told me that a certain tribe of Lau (my maiden name) had to go on exiles to the North of China, borderline to North Korea and when they got there, they changed their surname to Kim to escape. Before that, there wasn't any Kims (or Jin or Kum, whichever pronunciation) in China at all.

Another thing about the surname is that the character means Gold, as another poster said.. but Gold, ordinarily in Korean is pronounced as geum. Koreans wanted the name to be different from the precious metal, so they changed it to Kim.

Kim, incidentally, is a bit wrong, because it's really Gim, in modern days transliteration.

tzechuk · Joined: 20 Dec 2004

jvalmer · Joined: 06 Jun 2003

Also, Korean used to be a tonal language less than 500 years ago.

Hater Depot · Joined: 29 Mar 2005

金 is pronounced kin in Japanese, which obviously sounds similar to 김.

mithridates · Posted: Fri Jun 20, 2008 10:40 am Post subject:

Rob'sdad · Joined: 12 May 2008 Location: Seoul

If you have interest in Korean surnames, check out "한국성씨 재미있는 이야기" ( The interesting story about Korean surnames)

Alas....it's in Korean but quite interesting all the same.