Historical evidence of phonological changes in Korean names, 1940–2021

초록

A historical analysis of popular names in Korea shows several phonological shifts toward ease of pronunciation and spelling in Roman letters. To investigate, we collected, romanized, and statiscally analyzed the top twenty popular Korean given and changed names of both sexes (male and female) per decade in three geographical dimensions (national, metropolitan, and traditional). The results showed the historical shift to ease of pronunciation and spelling in three ways. First, recent names have fewer consonantal sequences and fewer numbers of Roman letters. Second, syllable-final [n] is preferred to [ŋ] in recent names. Third, a common vowel over an uncommon vowel is preferred in a syllable in the romanized forms of names. These results imply the preference for unmarked phonology to facilitate the pronunciation by other nationalities, as well as the orthographic adaptation changes to the sound-based Roman alphabet from the meaning-based Chinese characters. The complete list of the top 20 popular names per decade is provided in the appendix in the Korean alphabet.

키워드