The objective of this study is to compare the lexicon of Filipino, the national language of the Philippines, and Korean, the national language of Korea, by focusing on the history and process of borrowing lexical items resulting from contact between the said countries and their colonizers—Spain and Japan, respectively. It was born out of the observation that, whereas the Philippines has seemed to be more democratic when it comes to borrowing and maintaining Spanish loanwords in Filipino vocabulary, Korea, on the other hand, has exerted a conscious effort to eradicate Japanese terms and instead look for ways to provide "more Korean" equivalences to concepts introduced to them. We employ analysis of corpora available in listing and sorting representative lexical items that highlight the process that national language planners used after the period of colonization. We also utilized the dicionary sweep method to verify the etymological information and derivational history of these lexical items to have a glimpse of how these concepts/referents were represented morphologically as well as orthographically. Since its independence in the mid-20th century, Korea has attempted to empathize with its national spirit and eradicate colonial culture prevalent in the society. Various government agencies, notably led by the National Institute of Korean Language, initiated to purify Japanized words into indigenous Korean words, or transform/invent Korean terms rather than use deeply rooted Japanese terms. For instance, instead of a Korean word for 'plate,' 접시 [chǒpsil], the Japanese word さら [sara] was commonly used previously, and even a foreign word for 'club' was introduced into Korean through its Japanized transliteration, 倶楽部 (クラブ) [kurabu] that is read in Korean [kurakpu]. On the other hand, we can see an extensive and enduring overlay of Spanish on Filipino (based on Tagalog, among other Philippine languages) that we can also see hispanized words or, etymologically speaking, words that were not originally borrowed from Spanish but were orthographically and phonologically adjusted to "look" or "sound" Spanish. Examples include everyday Filipino lexical items that were directly borrowed from Spanish but respelled to accommodate the orthographic system of Filipino (Fil. kutsara < Sp. cuchara 'spoon'), and the use of Spanish affixes such as -o/-a '(person doing the action indicated by the verb)' in tsismoso/-a 'gossip-monger.' This comparative study illustrates two mechanisms by which a language accommodates linguistic representations of concepts brought about by new experiences, technological advancements, and drastic changes within the community that speaks it. This comparative study also highlights how a community may choose whether to create a new term based on their indigenous tongue, or borrow the term from the language that introduced it, which depends not just upon its collective histry and memory, but also—and equally important—the preference of its members. Finally, it is hoped that this study contributes to future lexicographic projects, language planning activities, and other research and pedagogical implications for the two national languages.

Co-presenter: Kyung Min Bae