South Kyungsang consonant system in the context of the Korean language dialects and the Altaic language family

Abstract

This paper compares the data of our acoustic study on the South Kyungsang Korean consonant system with information about consonants of other Korean language dialects (North Korean, Seoul Korean, and Jeju Korean) and languages of hypothetic Altaic language family (Turkic languages of Siberia: Altaic, Teleut, Telengit, Kumandin, Tubin, Chelkan, Shor, Baraba-Tatar, Yakut, Dolgan) found in the scientific literature. The purpose of this study was to reveal the specifics of the South Kyungsang Korean consonant system within the system of Korean dialects and in comparison with the languages of the Altaic language family using comparative and typological analysis. The material of our study includes 1050 Korean words recorded on a voice recorder from 10 speakers of South Kyungsang Korean. Following the methodology used at the Laboratory of experimental phonetic studies of the Institute of Philology, SB RAS, each word was pronounced by each of the informants four times. We analyzed only the second and the third repetitions in the computer program Speech Analyzer, taking into account the data of oscillograms, spectrograms, f0, and intensity. We have noticed the similarity of the South Kyungsang consonant system with the consonant system of North Korean dialects, suggesting that the South Kyungsang and North Korean dialects have preserved some elements of the ancient Korean language. In addition, we have found the similarity with some consonant systems of Turkic languages due to the opposition of noisy consonants on a quantitative basis and to the blurred boundaries between sonority and noisiness.