한국 한자어 명사와 가장 가까운 중국 방언 찾기

Abstract

The main goal of this article is to identify the most similar Chinese dialects to Sino-Korean in term of lexicon. It investigates 151 nouns out of 648 nouns listed in the Hanyu fangyan cihui, the third printing of the second edition. If a Sino-Korean noun is listed in use in any Chinese dialect in the book, it was taken as a subject for a comparison with other 19 dialects. The results of this study are summarized in data (26), which demonstrates the Changsha dialect of the Old Xiang dialects is the closest dialect to Sino-Korean lexicon. Changsha is followed by Mandarin dialects and Nanchang, a Gan dialect. By the mean of cognates being shared between Sino-Korean and each dialectal group of China, this article concludes that the Mandarin dialects are the most similar to Sino-Korean lexicon, followed by Gan and Xiang dialects. The results of this study imply following points: (a) the speed of lexical changes is different from that of phonetic changes in Sino-Korean because Sino-Korean turned out to be the closest to the Hakka dialects, followed by Southern Min and Guangzhou, in terms of phonetic similarities. (b) the phonetic similarities between Sino-Korean and southern dialects of China do not necessarily means genetic relations between them. It simply means the stages of their evolution are similar. (c) phonetic changes are more conservative than lexical changes in Sino-Korean.