Earticle

Music, as language, is a universal human trait. It appears to transcend time, place, and culture. This suggests that similarities between the two are non-accidental but that there must be some common principles underlying both language and music. I discuss the following four topics in this paper: (1) Linguistic expressions of music, (2) Language-like musical structures, (3) Text-tune association, and (4) Biological basis in language and music. In (1), I talk about a descriptive nature of music, that is, speech by music, or painting in sound, as can be seen in such titles as “Trout quintet,” “Moonlight sonata,” “Pathetique symphony,” etc. I cite the composers’ own notes and sketches regarding their works, in particular, the (sub)titles that composers gave to each movement of their symphonic works, i.e., in Beethoven’s Pastoral symphony, Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, and Debussy’s La Mer. In (2), mostly citing the works by Jackendoff and Lerdahl, I show that just as sentences have a hierarchical structure, so does music, that musical notes are grouped into constituents. I also show that just as there are transformations in language giving stylistically varying sentences, there are theme and variations in music. I cite Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3 (Eroica) as a prime example. An interesting example of music as a mirror of language is that just as there is a greater difference between vowel lengths in English (between stressed and unstressed vowels) than in French (between accented and unaccented vowels), there is a greater difference in the distance between two notes in English music than in French music. In (3) I show a close correlation between text (language) and tune (music), between vowel durations and note lengths, between stressed syllable (downbeat) and unstressed syllable (upbeat), and between intonation contours in language and musical phrasing. I also show how different phonological and syntactic structures between Latin and German, and between English and Korean, entail unmusical discrepancies in text-tune matching. In (4), I discuss a possible biological basis or innateness of music by reviewing the literature, mostly Peretz (2006) and Patel (2008) and many references cited there. I conclude that while there are enough indications to suggest that music is domain-specific and localized in the human brain, there is as yet no evidence showing the existence of a music gene à la language, that is, music is innate.

Sijos is a traditional Korean poem. The purpose of this article is to clarify the differences between ancient Korean sijos and modern Korean ones, and between modern Korean sijos and free verses, and seek the direction for modern Korean sijos to coexist with free verses while finding the way for modern Korean sijos to go. The results of the foregoing efforts are summarized as follows. First, there exists a fundamental difference in the formats of presentation between ancient Korean sijos and modern Korean ones. Whereas ancient Korean sijos are implemented in the musical structure of song chang or sijo chang, modern Korean sijos are implemented based on the inner order of language regardless of music. Second, the two types of sijos are different in their forms. The most primary difference is in the principles of meters. Modern Korean sijos are given the a priori principle of meters termed three verses, six phrases, and 12 metres. On the contrary, free verses are given no principle whatsoever in advance and only the freedom according to the breath of the poet is given as ex post facto necessity. Third, ancient Korean sijos have ‘formal frames’, which are; completing the poetic concept with three verses that form syntax semantic links, composing each verse with four metres (syllable nodes), and creating a change for the transition of the poetic concept by making the first node of the last verse into three syllables and the second node into at least two syntactic words. Such ‘formal frames’ contain the beauty of a high level of modesty, the beauty of peaceful lengthiness, the beauty of stable balance, the beauty of temperate breakaway, and the beauty of flawless plainness and this is the identity of ancient Korean sijos. Since modern Korean sijos are a genre based on the ambilaterality of ‘the property of sijos’ and ‘modernity’, they have a task to contain ‘modernity’ in ‘the property of sijos’, which is three verses, six phrases, and 12 metres because they can secure the status and identity of modern Korean sijos only by doing so. Fourth, modern Korean sijos and free verses should not go toward postmodernism together, but should establish their directions to form a ‘complementary relationship’ so that they satisfy the poetic needs that cannot be fulfilled by each other. The roles of free verses and modern Korean sijos should be divided so that avant-garde, free, and abstruse emotional needs are satisfied by free verses and the needs for stable and tranquil order are satisfied by modern Korean sijos thereby satisfying each others needs for mutual coexistence. Fifth, the way for modern Korean sijos to go in the high-tech age is to make the refined and temperate ‘short sijo’ completed with three verses, six phrases, and 12 metres neatly escape from the triteness coming from the reckless freedom, being in distress, and weird destruction of meters of free verses. The short sijo, which is completed with three verses, six phrases, and 12 metres should be the alternative to heal the reckless morbid pathos of free verses with the neat and balanced ethos of sijos.

This paper examines the creation process of Hangul from a new perspective. First, it is claimed that this new writing system, which King Sejong the Great himself invented and named Hunmin-jeongeum, is a set of phonetic symbols to represent the Sino-Korean pronunciation of Chinese characters. “Hunmin- jeongeum (訓民正音)” means the correct pronunciation of Chinese characters to be taught to the people. In other words, Hangul was made to represent the Sino-Korean pronunciation of Chinese characters based on Tongguk-jeongun (東國正韻), which is the book about the Sino-Korean pronunciation of Chinese characters that King Sejong had compiled by modifying the earlier Sino-Korean pronunciation of Chinese characters. Subsequently, King Sejong’s second daughter, Princess Jeongui(貞懿), used Hunmin-jeongeum to indicate some phonological changes in the pronunciation of Chinese characters, and in the process, she realized that the new script could be used to represent Korean inflectional endings such as verbal inflectional suffixes, case markers, and particles. This recognition led her to the use of the new script to write the Korean language. During this period, the name of the new script was ‘eonmun (諺文)’, which literally means ‘vulgar script,’ and this name reflects the perception about Hangul viewed as a lower-level script compared to Chinese characters. During the period of Taehan Empire (大韓帝國), it was referred to as the ‘national script (국문(國文))’ since eonmun was considered a vulgar, depreciative term, but it was called eonmun again during the period of Japanese colonial rule, and then the term Hangul was used in opposition to the use of the name. King Sejong initially invented only 27 letters to represent onset consonants, and they were used to transcribe Yùnhuì (韻會), the Chinese rhyme book. Then, a buddhist monk and scholar named Shinmi, a well-known authority on Buddhist scriptures of the period, participated in the creation of the new script, and letters for middle vocalic sounds of syllables, letters for vowels, were additionally invented. The characters of the writing system for Sanskrit, a language of ancient India, were divided into mātr for vowels and vyanjana for consonants, and these letters were called ‘half letter (半字),’ and its education was called teaching alphabets or ‘teaching half letter (半字敎)’. On the other hand, each letter of Siddham script represented a combination of a consonant and a vowel corresponding to a syllable, and this writing system was called ‘full letter (滿字)’. The education of this script was called ‘teaching full letter(滿字敎)’, which refers to the education of Sanskrit characters or Siddham. Sanskrit characters are syllabic characters that represent combinations of consonants and vowels. Teaching of half and full characters (半滿二敎) is an expression frequently appearing in Buddhist scriptures, and it refers to the education of Sanskrit characters. The renowned Buddhist monk, Shinmi, was well versed in Vyākaraṇa, the grammar of the ancient Indian inflectional language, and shèngmíng-jìlùn (聲明記論), a phonological study of Vyākaraṇa, since he learned them through the Tripitaka Koreana of Buddhist scriptures. Thus, he contributed to the additional invention of 11 middle vocalic sound letters of Hunmin-jeongeum based on the mātr, vocalic letters of Sanskrit characters. Before that, 27 letters for consonants were created based on the onset consonant sounds of Chinese Phonology (聲韻學), and they were called 27 fănqìe (反切) letters. They are ‘27 eonmun letters’ mentioned in the letter of appeal that Choe, Manri wrote against the creation of the new script.

The aim of this study is to compare passive expressions in the Korean language and Chinese language in order to help Chinese learners who study Korean to better understand Korean passive expressions. Fore mostly, building on previous studies, this study offers a comparative analysis of the meaning of and realization conditions for the passive expressions in Korean and Chinese and reorganizes what these two languages have in common and how they differ from each other. Korean passive expressions are found to be more complicated in terms of their realization conditions and are more diverse in their meanings. Based on these findings, the discourse functions of the passive expressions in Korean and Chinese were analyzed. The passive expressions in both Korean and Chinese shows the focalization of the patient at the level of sentence. During discourse, both the Korean and Chinese passive expressions serve the function of “maintaining the topic of discourse.” While the passive expressions are often adopted in Korean when the speaker is trying to “express politeness,” “obscure responsibility,” and “avoid humiliation,” such discourse functions were not found in the passive expressions in Chinese. It is hypothesized that the findings from such a contrastive analysis will facilitate the understandings of Chinese learners who study Korean.

The purpose of this paper is to find out the recent lexical borrowing phenomenon in the Korean-English neologisms by sorting out and analyzing loanwords and loanblends under Einar Haugen’s study of borrowing where he classified lexical borrowing into three major categories: loanwords, loanblends and loanshifts. This paper attempts to explain the loanwords and loanblends in the Korean-English neologisms extracted from 188 Korean neologisms 2017 reported by The National Institute of The Korean Language, and argues that most of lexical borrowing in Korean-English neologisms occurs in the form of loanblends rather than loanwords, and locally produced English words like Konglish cannot be classified as either loanwords or loanblends as it does not meet the conditions of none of these two categories. The results show that over 54.25% of the Korean neologisms where English is responsible for over 90% of the entire loanwords and loanblends is made through clipping and blending word-formation processes which allow the form of loanblends while loanwords occupy only 6.91%.

This paper aims to study on Islamic elements of Iranian constitution through Islamic expressions. Unlike other countries’ constitutions, Iranian constitution has 18 pages in its preamble, focusing on major concepts based on the Islamic spirit. Iran’s constitution cannot escape the huge category of Islam as the basis for the existence of a nation or society is based on Islam, with almost of articles referring to Islam. Also, 124 out of 157 articles in the constitution mention Islam in order to comply with Islamic values, but the political system is a combination of Velayate Faqih and democracy. Islamic expressions in Iranian constitution are largely classified into the concepts related to Allāh, Imām, Islām and Islamic law. By affirming that “Iran is an Islamic Republic,” the mechanism of operating the principles of the nation is focused on Islam, not merely on declarations. Above all, the term “Islam” is used 168 times as a noun or adjective in name and reality, and it is expressed in many articles that Iran is an Islamic Republic based on Islam. The activities of Islamic Consultative Assembly should not be out of Islam, and laws passed by the Islamic Council are also subject to a majority decision by the Guardian Council based on Islamic standards. Iran is divided into three powers, but ultimately, its supreme leader has enormous power and each of them is independent under his control(Mohammadi, 2012: 104). The supreme leader even has the authority to dismiss the president if he violates the national interests or his constitutional obligations(article 110). The recent tightening of sanctions on Iran has raised public discontent over the Islamic theocracy. It is impossible to say whether this Islamic theocracy will continue or what some changes will occur in the future.

This research aims to explore individual meanings as well as polysemic aspects of three body terms with French as « oreille, yeux, nez » using a corpus-based analysis and to examine how their meaning extension is realized. ‘Body terms’ has received particular attention to the field of cognitive semantics and there has been much related research (domestic and foreign) combined with diverse terms of various languages. However, relatively little attention has been paid to French body terms and especially, few studies have dealt with them using corpus-based analysis. Three terms « oreille, yeux, nez », means « ear, eye, nos » respectively, are related with each other for a spatial proximity as well as a characteristic of ‘information’s input organ’, which could affect their meaning extension. Our findings through this study showed that firstly, three terms’ prototypical meanings as well as their extended meanings could be categorized. Secondly, the frequency of use of these three terms could be extracted based on the same corpus and their collocated constructions. Thirdly, how their meaning extension is realized could be represented and verified in terms of HUMAN > ANIMAL > OBJECT > ABSTRACT in the light of meaning extensions’ direction.