Korean and Altaic

¦Review Articles Korean and Altaic ROY ANDREW MILLER Paralipomena of Korean Etymologies. By G. J. Ramstedt. Collected and edited by Songmoo Kho. Helsinki: Suomalais-Ugrilainen Seura, 1982. Suomalais-Ugrilaisen Seuran Toimituksia, Mémoires de la Société Finno-Ougrienne, vol. 182. 295 pp. To understand the full implications of this book's curiously involved title one must first know something about the equally involved history behind its publication; this is also essential if the prospective reader of PLM1 is to make effective utilization of this volume's diffuse contents. At the same time, sketching the circumstances behind the publication ofthis volume provides a welcome, indeed a somewhatoverdue, opportunity to survey the present state of Korean etymological studies, particularly as these bear upon the question of the genetic relationship of Korean to the Altaic languages. Few will be surprised to learn that two of the three scholars who have made the most significant contributions to our knowledge of the history of the Korean language—and hence also to what is currently understood concerning the relationship of Korean to Altaic —should have been Japanese, Ogura Shinpei (1882-1944)2 and 1 . PLM = Paralipomena ofKorean Etymologies, the book here under review. Other abbreviations: SKE = G. J. Ramstedt, Studies in Korean Etymology, MSFOu, vol. 95 (Helsinki, 1949). AKE = Additional Korean Etymologies by G.J. Ramstedt, Collected and edited by Pentii Aalto, Suomalais-Ugrilaisen Seuran Aikakauskirjasta, vol. 57 (Helsinki, 1954). TMS = V. I Cincius, ed., Sravnitel'nyj slovar tunguso-man'czurskix jazykov, Materialy k etimologiceskomu slovarju, 2 vols. (Leningrad, 1957, 1977). MSFOu = Mémoires de la Société Finno-Ougrienne, Suomalais-Ugrilaisen Seuran Toimituksia. 2.Ogura Shinpei's monograph on the Old Korean poetic corpus, HyökaoyobiRito no kenkyü, Keijö Teikoku Daigaku Höbun Gakubu Kiyö, vol. 1 (Seoul, 1929), laid the 143 144Journal of Korean Studies Shiratori Kurakichi (1865-1942).3 But frequently those unfamiliar with the involved vicissitudes of Far Eastern linguistic scholarship are somewhat startled to be told that the third figure in question— and the one of the three whose contributions outweigh all the rest— was a Finn, Gustav John Ramstedt (22 October 1873-25 November 1950).4 Ramstedt, born at Tammisaari, Finland, went on from a high school in Turku to study Finno-Ugrian languages and linguistics at Helsinki University. At age twenty-five he began, with a contribution to the Finno-Ugrian field, a spectacularly prolific and significant career of scholarship and publications that was to continue virtually without interruption for over half a century, almost down to the last days of his final illness. In 1898 Ramstedt was encouraged by Otto Donner, then president of the Suomalais-Ugrilainen Seura (Société Finno-Ougrienne), to undertake a linguistic fieldwork expedition to Mongolia; and from that point in his life, Ramstedt's scholarly activities rarely departed from the Altaic realm. Among the immediate fruits of his early mission to the Transbaikal and Outer Mongolia were his 1902 monograph on Khalkha phonology,5 the first reliable phonetic account of a spoken Mongolian language, and in the same year his pioneering comparative-historical treatment of the Khalkha conjugations. Soon thereafter Ramstedt's studies became more and more involved with Turkological questions, as he began to undertake the comparison of Mongolian and Turkish, a problem to which he turned his attention as early as 1909, followed shortly thereafter by his enormously important monograph on the comparative morphology of Mongolian and Turkish secondary verb stem formation in 1912, a work that may well be said to have estabfoundations for modern scholarship in the history of the Korean language, and remains a work of enormous scientific value. Equally important was his work on the modern dialects (Chösengo högen no kenkyü, 2 vols., Tokyo, 1944), and his study of the Chao-hsien-kuan i-yü bilingual of the early fifteenth century (cf. S. Ogura, "A Corean Vocabulary," Bulletin ofthe School ofOriental Studies 4 [1926—28]: 1—10). 3.Shiratori Kurakichi was primarily a philologically oriented historian, but inter alia he contributed to the literature a number of extremely important studies of the languages of non-Sinitic peoples on the borders of China, into which category falls also his work on Korean. His linguistic studies...