User talk:Fish bowl

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Using Japanese linguistic terminology for Korean etymologies?

For the Korean word 아이, it said that the spelling 兒孩 is ateji (wikt:en:Special:Permalink/78438710). I removed the ateji description, and replaced it with saying that the character 兒 is a hundokja (훈독자 / 訓讀字) in the current version. I feel like it is better to use Korean linguistic terminology rather than Japanese linguistic terminology to describe a Korean word. Is this correct? FunnyMath (talk) 20:38, 31 May 2024 (UTC)

Yeah honestly I felt the same way, although I'm not sure that in this case 훈독자 is the right word either? 훈독자 would be 串 = 곶 (got), right? —Fish bowl (talk) 20:46, 31 May 2024 (UTC)

After thinking about it, I think this is what happened: originally, the 아 was not written with 兒. This is because none of the Sino-Korean readings of 兒 were even remotely similar to the 아 sound in Middle Korean 아ᄒᆡ〮 (àhóy) from which 아이 originates. Over time, one of the Sino-Korean readings for 兒 got corrupted into 아, and only then did people start using the spelling 兒孩. This spelling was used until the "h" sound disappeared (from 아해 (ahae) to 아이 (ai)), where there is no longer a confusion that 아이 is a Sino-Korean word, as 이 does not sound like 孩. So I think you're right; it is more accurate to describe the use of 兒 as a phono-semantic matching. I think the person who initially wrote the etymology for 아이 got confused, and thought that the spelling 兒孩 was used before the "a" reading for 兒 developed. I then built on that mistake by thinking that 兒 is a hundokja (훈독자 / 訓讀字). FunnyMath (talk) 21:57, 31 May 2024 (UTC)

(also, regarding the wording "Yeah honestly I felt the same way": I got confused with other Korean entries that also use the word "ateji", actually —Fish bowl (talk) 22:33, 2 June 2024 (UTC))

I suspected that the word "ateji" is used in several other Korean entries. I think this is a problem for two reasons: (1) it is vague, as it could refer to the hanja being used phonetically or semantically, and (2) it might be culturally insensitive to place so much focus on Japanese terminologies instead of Korean ones; it's great that people are thinking of the differences and similarities between Korean and Japanese, but I'm not sure if Koreans would be happy to see that people are using Japanese terms to describe their language, given the history of colonialism and such. Should we go ahead and systematically get rid of all mentions of ateji and replace them with more precise terms? FunnyMath (talk) 18:54, 4 June 2024 (UTC)

(@Saranamd —Fish bowl (talk) 19:19, 4 June 2024 (UTC))