Thread by @ZevHandel, Welcome to my second thread on the word “pibimpap” 비빔밥!There’s something going [...]

Welcome to my second thread on the word “pibimpap” 비빔밥!

There’s something going on with its morphology—its internal word structure—that puzzles me. I’m hoping someone who knows more about Korean language structure and history can explain it.

Let's bop!

To explain what’s puzzling me, I’ll have to first review two kinds of verbal suffixation, with special reference to food terms.

So let’s take a little dive into some aspects of Korean word formation (and cooking).

Care to join me?

The first kind of suffixation is verb roots taking the suffix -(ŭ)n 은/ㄴ to yield words that modify a following noun.

These so-called “adnominal” forms are a lot like English past participles — they indicate a past action that has affected the modified noun. Examples:

mŏk- ‘to eat’, mŏk-ŭn ‘eaten’
mŏgŭn sagwa 먹은 사과 ‘an eaten apple, an apple that has been eaten’

ha- ‘to do’, ha-n ‘done’
han il 한 일 ‘something done, a finished task’

ilk- ‘to read’, ilk-ŭn ‘read’
ilgŭn ch’aek 읽은 책 ‘a book that has been read’

[Haha, yes, it’s just a coincidence that some English past participles, like “eaten”, are also formed with an -n suffix.]

Moving on ...

When a food preparation verb takes this suffix, it can be used to indicate how a particular food was cooked:

pokk- ‘to stir-fry’, pokk-ŭn ‘stir-fried’
pokkŭn ttangk’ong 볶은 땅콩 ‘stir-fried peanuts’
pokkŭn t’ongkae 볶은 통깨 ‘stir-fried sesame seeds’

Another example:

tchi- ‘to steam’, tchi-n ‘steamed’
tchin mandu 찐 만두 ‘steamed dumplings’

The second kind of suffixation attaches -(ŭ)m 음/ㅁ to a verb root, deriving a noun that has a close relationship to the meaning of the verb. Here are some common examples:

ŏl- ‘to freeze’, ŏl-ŭm 얼음 ‘ice’
ch’u- to dance’, ch’u-m 춤 ‘a dance’
chuk- ‘to die’, chuk-ŭm 죽음 ‘death’
sal- ‘to live’, sal-m 삶 ‘life’ (pronounced sam)
kippŭ- ‘happy’, kippŭ-m 기쁨 ‘happiness’

For convenience, I’ll notate this kind of noun as “Vm”.

When the root verb is a cooking verb, the Vm word is a noun that refers to a dish made by that method of preparation.

pokk- ‘to stir-fry’, pokk-ŭm ‘a stir-fried dish’
ojingŏbokk-ŭm 오징어볶음 ‘a stir-fried dish of squid’

More examples:

tchi- ‘to steam’, tchi-m ‘a steamed dish’
kalbitchim 갈비찜 ‘a steamed dish of beef ribs’
t’wigi- ‘to deep-fry’, t’wigi-m ‘a deep-fried dish’
yach’aet’wigim 야채튀김 ‘vegetable tempura’

There isn’t an exact English equivalent to this noun-formation process, but English can derive food nouns from verbs. This is done without suffixation, as in “fry” (think of the noun “a french fry” meaning ‘a deep-fried potato’) or “stir-fry” as in “a broccoli stir-fry”.

So in Korean, there are two common ways to make names of dishes using cooking verbs:

1) cooking_verb-(ŭ)n + food_noun, e.g. salmŭn kyeran 삶은 계란 ‘boiled egg’

2) food_noun + cooking_verb-(ŭ)m e.g. kyerantchim 계란찜 ‘a steamed dish of egg’

The first type is a verb modifying a noun. The second type is a compound of two nouns, the first modifying the second.

But there's more than that. There is a subtle difference in meaning and lexical status, reflected in the spacing that we see in the Korean spelling.

The Type-2 forms with -m are lexicalized: they are compound words, referring to specific kinds of prepared dishes. Kalbitchim isn’t just steamed beef ribs, but the name of a particular kind of dish.

In contrast, tchin mandu is just a phrase: dumplings that have been steamed.

This is why you can say t’wigin ŭmsik 튀긴 음식 ‘deep-fried foods’ but not *ŭmsikt’wigim 은식 튀김 ‘a deep fried dish made of food’.

English speakers can get a feel for this, I think, by contemplating the difference between “stir-fried broccoli” and “broccoli stir-fry”. The first is a phrase that means ‘broccoli that has been stir-fried’, the second is a dish that may have other things in it besides broccoli.

Anyway, the stage is now set, so if you are still with me, let’s get back to the word that started all this. And you’ll soon see why I feel puzzled by it.

The verb for ‘to mix, to rub’ is pibi-. Its past adnominal form is pibin 비빈 ‘mixed’, and its noun derivation is pibim 비빔 ‘a mixture, a hash’.

Based on the patterns of word formation I’ve illustrated, we might expect a dish of mixed rice to be called either

1) pibin pap 비빈 밥 ‘mixed rice’

or

2) pappibim 밥비빔 ‘a hash of rice’

But neither of those is the actual word. As we all know, the word is pibimpap 비빔밥. Why?

Why?

All the dictionaries I’ve checked seem to think there is nothing odd about this word. Martin’s dictionary analyzes it as a compound of two nouns, the first modifying the second: pibim ‘hash’ and pap ‘rice’.

Here's Martin et al.'s New Korean-English Dictionary entry.

But are we to take this at face value, given the grammatical patterns of Korean and the examples of the other food words? Is this word, despite being so common, well-known, and beloved, actually ... weird? deformed?

As we think about what’s going on, it’s important to note that there are a handful of other words that have the same structure as pibimpap. Here are some:

pibimmyŏn 비빔면
pibimguksu 비빔국수
pokkŭmpap 볶음밥
pokkŭmtchamppong 볶음짬뽕

There are a few more, but not many.

So here are some hypotheses that I can think of to explain the structure of the word pibimpap.

I have no idea if any of them are right.

Let’s briefly consider them, and then I’ll give up and ask for help.

Hypothesis 1: What’s the problem?

Maybe it’s perfectly normal to form NN compounds in both orders, and some just happen to have 비빔 before the food name and some happen to have it after. That one ordering is less frequent than the other is an accident, not a grammatical puzzle.

Hypothesis 2: There’s a meaning difference

Perhaps Vm+N and N+Vm mean something different, and dishes like pibimguksu 비빔국수 and pokkŭmpap 볶음밥 are prepared in such a way that the Vm+N structure describes them more appropriately than N+Vm would.

Hypothesis 3: Assimilation

This is my favorite hypothesis simply because it’s the most interesting. Could the original name of the dish have been pibin pap 비빈 밥 ‘mixed rice’, but then the -n changed to -m because of assimilation to the following bilabial p ㅂ?

Is there any historical evidence to support the assimilation hypothesis?

Maybe.

In two articles on the history of Korean foods that appeared in The Journal of Ethnic Foods in 2015, the following attested written forms for pibimpap are cited:

“bubiumbap, bubiembap, bubuimbap, bubeimbap, bubuinbap, and bubimbap”.

(See https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/journal-of-ethnic-foods/vol/2/issue/4)

It’s the form “bubuinbap”, i.e. pubwinpap 부뷘밥, that catches my eye. Might this attested spelling reflect an original adnominal verb with -n?

Assimilation would explain not just "pibimpap" but also "pokkŭmpap", "pibimmyŏn", and even "t’wigimmandu" 튀김만두, all of which could have started with Vn and changed to Vm under the influence of the following bilabial consonant.

But then to explain words like pibimguksu, we’d have to argue for analogy: that after pibimpap and pibimmyŏn had become established words, they served as a model, and by analogy pibim started being used as the first element in compounds to name similar dishes.

Perhaps kuksu pibim 국수 비빔 was the original word for a hash of noodles, as seen in Martin et al.’s dictionary (blue rectangle)? And pibimguksu came into use later by analogy with pibimpap?

But really this is all just speculation by a fumbling student of the language. Maybe someone who understands Korean morphology and word history better than me can shed some light on this.

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