The Origins of /h/-Final Nouns in Middle Korean

Abstract

The investigation of lexical asymmetries and exceptions serves as the basis for internal reconstruction and provides an insight into the development of the current synchronic state. This study investigates the unique phonological patterns and semantics of /h/-final nouns in Middle Korean. From a phonological perspective, they show a tone pattern that does not align with nouns ending in an obstruent but aligns with those ending in a vowel or a sonorant. This suggests that the stem-final /h/ might have been absent at some point. From a semantic perspective, spatial and temporal nouns are disproportionately represented within /h/-final nouns. Finally, the concatenation of a spatial or temporal noun with a locative suffix typically forms a single linguistic unit. This study integrates these phonological, morphological, and semantic observations and proposes that the stem-final /h/ observed in some /h/-final nouns originated from a reanalysis of the initial consonant of the locative suffix