A Study on “Exceptional” Systematic Sino-Korean Pronunciations Influenced by Analogical inferences

This paper explores the impact of inference based on character shape and meaning on the Sino-Korean pronunciation system, focusing on the characters '鎖', '樝', '梓', '喝'. These characters are typically pronounced as 'soai', 'sa', 'tsai', 'kar' in the modern Sino-Korean literary reading system. However, in some contexts, their pronunciations change to 'sa', 'tsa/tsha', 'tsa', 'har', respectively. The Standard Korean Language Dictionary (1999) categorizes these variations as exceptional readings. Yet, a historical phonological analysis of these characters reveals that these pronunciations align with the established norms of historical phonological correspondence. This finding suggests that some of the familiar modern Sino-Korean literary readings might be based on analogical inferences. It also indicates that the pronunciations previously considered exceptional in Sino-Korean may actually be systematic, adhering to the rules of historical phonological correspondence.