Place-names reflect their historical and social background of the formation. Though placenames were once established, they are, as time goes on, apt to be changed phonologically and morphologically and also modified in direct translation into Chinese ...
Place-names reflect their historical and social background of the formation. Though placenames were once established, they are, as time goes on, apt to be changed phonologically and morphologically and also modified in direct translation into Chinese word.
In this paper, We are going to study the native place-names that have been collected by means of field work for 6 years.
Each native place-names is the one which has been transmitted orally in that region, while the Chinese counterpart appeared as a written form and so has been called from that time on. At first, both of the forms coexist side by side but most of native forms slowly disappeared of ages. However many of them still exist at present. When they are translated directly into Chinese word, there are two cases; one is the wholely translated form, the other the partly translated from. The former case, as '큰말' into, '大村', results in a complete Chinese word. In the latter case the native word is mixed with the Chinese one, as
'牧골' into '牧谷', resulting in a complete Chinese word, or the mixed form of a native word and a Chinese one, as '긴밭골' into '長밭골'.
There is a consistency when a native place-name morpheme is directly changed into a Chinese place-name morpheme, but not always so. In particular, '말' is always changed into '村' but '골/굴' is changed into '谷' or '洞' at the rate of 50%. As '미=산' relationship is not always true, the meaning relation of a native word with a Chinese one is not always the same. Some morphemes of the same meaning, like '강현고개', are juxtaposed, which is considered as one fixed place-name word when the place-name morpheme is set before the other morphemes.
Looking into the structure of native place-names, a general word itself became a placename, but there is not a transfered place-name like a general word.
There are prefixed place-names in the vocabulary of native ones, but there is not a derivational suffixed place-name. This is because place-name morphemes act as derivatonal suffixes which have exclusive nature.
Place-names are generally formed by means of compounding. The structure of compound place-name has been 이₁?, and shows the possility of 이₁ⁿ. As place-name morpheme is free form, verb classes, such as '가는골', can be freely attached to the place-names. The subpart of an onomatopoea which is a reduplicated compound, can be juxtaposed by a place-name more frequently than the general words; e.g. '둥글바위'.
There can be a place-name made by the combination of derivation and compounding. Apart from the special case, such as '바우배기', we can find no word formation ended with derivational suffixes.
The framework place-names mixed with derivation and compounding occurs more frequently than the general words.
The structure of place-names is different from one of the general words because of the peculiarity of place-name morphemes. But if we exclude the restrictions of the special case, the structure of place-name is much more various.