Shaun Brady’s NY Times story “She’s Blazing a Trail for a Traditional Korean Zither in Jazz” (archived), about “Seoul-born gayageum player DoYeon Kim,” of course interested me as a jazz fan, but I was also (more Hattically) intrigued by the word gayageum. Wikipedia says:
The gayageum or kayagum (Korean: 가야금; Hanja: 伽倻琴) is a traditional Korean musical instrument. It is a plucked zither with 12 strings, though some more recent variants have 18, 21 or 25 strings. It is probably the best known traditional Korean musical instrument. It is based on the Chinese guzheng and is similar to the Japanese koto, Mongolian yatga, Vietnamese đàn tranh, Sundanese kacapi and Kazakh jetigen.
Ah, I thought, the koto is familiar (and indeed it’s the only one of those terms that’s in the OED, dating from 1795: “The koto bears a strong resemblance to our dulcimers, having the number of strings, which are struck with sticks”). Wiktionary says:
Literally “zither of Gaya,” referring to the legendary origin of the instrument in the kingdom of Daegaya.
Sino-Korean word from 伽倻琴, from 伽倻 (“Gaya confederacy”) + 琴 (“zither”).
The 琴 link tells us the same character is used for Mandarin qín/Cantonese kam and for the Japanese word with the Go-on (Chinese-based) reading ごん (gon) and the Kun (native) reading こと (koto) as well, thus tying the East Asian zithers together.
And this paragraph from the Times piece introduced me to another Korean term:
Sitting on a pillow on the floor, she rested the instrument, longer than its player is tall, across a bright pink Minnie Mouse blanket on her lap and struck a single resonant note. “In Western music, it’s when you hit the note, that boom, that’s important,” she explained. Another strike of the silk string, this time bent through wavering, serpentine permutations as she pressed down on the strings with her left hand, a manipulation Kim refers to as “cooking” the note — a loose translation of the Korean word “sigimsae.”
Wiktionary defines 시김새 (sigimsae) as “(music, in pansori) method or state of producing sounds; (music, in traditional Korean music) embellishing sound added before or after the main tones” and says the first element, 시김 (sigim), is of unknown origin.
On the music side, Tony Scott and Bud Shank recorded with Koto players in the 1960s.
https://youtu.be/z7b6O02gYEs?si=XD60GE44YsUcSXK-
I think these days it is most common for the koto to be played by plucking the strings rather than hitting them with sticks a la a hammered dulcimer. But it may have been otherwise in 1795?
W/ no disrespect to Bud Shank, I suspect many Americans of my generation first heard the koto (at least outside of the audio to some travelogue or orientalist documentary) via David Bowie messing around with it on a moody Berlin-period instrumental. Although this appreciation claims the piece is not moody but “serene”: https://byronsmuse.wordpress.com/2020/03/15/david-bowies-moss-garden-and-ukiyo-e-ladies-playing-koto/.
I am rather alarmed by the wikipedia statement “A 2020 acoustic cover of Led Zeppelin’s ‘The Battle of Evermore’ by PianoRock feat. Dean McNeill[23] also prominently features a synthesized koto.” I can’t provoke myself to listen to confirm, but I assume the pseudo-koto has been assigned the part originally done by non-synthesized mandolin?
In what sense could an acoustic recording feature a synthesized instrument?
I too am alarmed; happily, before long I will have forgotten the subject ever came up.
伽倻 *kaya was a later form of 伽羅 *kara, the self-appellation of a group from the southern Korean Peninsula that was probably the same name that was recorded in Classical Chinese as 韓. This is pronounced 한 han in Modern Korean, as in 韓國 (한국) Han’guk “Korea”, but is reconstructed as *[ɡ]ˤar in Old Chinese (Baxter-Sagart).
The self-appellation used in the north of the Korean Peninsula was 句麗 or 高麗 *kɔrɛ, which is the ultimate source for “Korea” and related forms used in European languages.
By the way, the 거문고 geomun’go (kŏmun’go) is a traditional Korean zither that truly stands in a category of its own due to its unique design. While the gayageum has a Sino-Korean name that reflects its kinship with other East Asian zithers, the name geomun’go is composed of native Korean morphemes, usually interpreted as “black musical instrument”.
The name is coincidentally reminiscent of the
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kora_(instrument)
It’s kórá in Dyula (hence the English name); kɔn in Kusaal, kʋ́ndé in Mooré, with plural kʋna or kʋla. Presumably a Wanderwort of some kind in West Africa.
this led me down a rabbithole of working out that the zither that figures in the plot of The Double* seems to be a guzheng playing the role of a guqin (which has fewer strings, no bridges, and i think more specifically high/court-culture associations).
.
* 2024 chinese quasi-historical drama series (i’m tempted to call it wuxia, but i think it’s not quite in the pocket for the genre) with a very loosely interpreted song dynasty setting.
Wanderwort of some kind in West Africa
Including Mandinka, whence the word for ‘guitar’ used by Alex Haley’s ancestor Kunta Kinte, and passed down the generations to him as “ko”.
Well, Mandinka is part of the same dialect complex as Dyula, so that one didn’t need to do a lot of word-wandering.
Fulfulde has kolli, perhaps another instance ot the word (though the dictionary says it only has three strings, whereas a kora has twenty-one, though shaped like a sort of banjo.)
The Western Oti-Volta kon-/kol- alternation would make sense if the vowel were nasal, but it’s oral in all the languages that preserve contrastive vowel nasalisation. Odd. Probably a sign of loanliness.
Jongseong Park: Thanks, I was hoping you’d show up to provide some insider knowledge!
The Kusaal Bible uses kɔn for whatever the כִּנּוֹר was.
Bentley’s 1887 Dictionary and Grammar of Kongo has “kokolo” to mean “a native banjo or guitar” although that has enough other phonemes in play that it could be sheer coincidence.
Haley’s narration of his specific 18th-century ancestry is (SPOILERS) generally not thought to be reliable.* Whether his narration of what vaguer statements about his ancestry were passed down to him as a boy is or isn’t reliable is I think less clear, not least because it’s harder to either confirm or disconfirm. I would feel better about it if there were pre-1970 accounts of some other American families with a tradition of a similar African-origin word for a stringed instrument. (Which there may be – I haven’t investigated.)
*And some doubts were present as soon as it came off the press – it won a special Pulitzer Prize which avoided the need for the prize-awarders to put it into a genre category and thus either call it fiction (which might have been impolite) or non-fiction (which might have been inaccurate).
The griot who was supposedly the source for the West African part of the tale in fact seems to have recognised a good story when he heard one (no doubt an occupational requirement.)
https://xkcd.com/978/
although that has enough other phonemes in play that it could be sheer coincidence
Presumably the ko- of this Congo kokolo would be a noun-class prefix, making the stem itself -kolo. Does your source give a plural form?
Some West African words have ended up in Lingala, but I can’t find anything of this shape in the very limited lexical materials I’ve got for that language.
Hausa garaya is yet another vaguely similar word for a stringed instrument. Another one that only has three strings, though, I gather. Dunno if it’s the same as the Fulfulde kolli.
@DE: No plural given by Bentley but there is a “6” in the definition/gloss, which I suspect may be a signal telling you how to do the full declension if you’ve read the rest of the volume carefully? Some other nouns on the same page are also 6’s, but there’s also a 7, a 9, and a 13.
The one part of Roots which I never saw anyone doubt was Haley’s family’s oral history, so I assume that it was as he remembered it, including the ‘guitar’ word. Did anyone else in his family remember any details differently?
P.S. I read that in his earlier career, Haley got an interview for Playboy with George Lincoln Rockwell (after assuring him that he, Haley, wasn’t Jewish.) That interview was later recreated in a movie, with James Earl Jones as Haley and Marlon Brando as Rockwell. I haven’t seen it, but I imagine that the casting director, once they secured those two, was dancing a little jig.
Here’s the relevant page in Bentley, and here’s the table of classes (6 = no prefixes).
As I suggested above, it’s harder to disprove Haley’s claims about his own family’s oral history, so it probably comes down to whether you think he was a fabulist acting in subjective bad faith versus a good-faith enthusiast afflicted with confirmation bias when he saw evidence that he thought at first glance confirmed a pleasing narrative hypothesis but didn’t actually do that if you dug a little deeper (which is a common phenomenon in genealogy done by respectable elderly WASP ladies, I should perhaps note). I don’t have a super-strong view on that beyond being a bit embittered by his alleged fabrications in _The Autobiography of Malcolm X_ (for which he was the ghostwriter, made more awkward by the fact that the murdered nominal narrator couldn’t review the final MS and overrule embellishments he wasn’t comfortable with), which seem more troubling/dangerous than any lack of actual strict historicity in Haley’s own supposed ancestral narrative.
Given Haley’s record as a liar and a plagiarist, my default position is that everything in Roots should be assumed fictional unless there is a specific reason to believe otherwise.
I’m with Brett. I enjoyed the book when it came out, but I doubt I could bring myself to read it again.
Bentley, alas, seems to antedate the later industry-standard adoption of Bleek’s system of numbering Bantu noun classes. Looks like he means Bleek-Meinhof 9/10, which would indeed make the ko- part of the stem. If it’s like Swahili, that may go with it being a loanword (9/10 homegrown words tend to refer to animals, but these are pretty vague associations.)
I just happened to run across a review (of another work) just now by Dietrich Westermann hisownself saying (in passing) that Bentley’s work “deserved its high repute.”
In modern Mandarin it’s Hán, as in Hánguó “South Korea”, not to be confused with 漢/汉 Hàn, the endonym.
(North Korea gets called Chàoxiàn, i.e. Joseon.)
Bentley’s work “deserved its high repute”
(No tones, though. But I suppose that was par for the course in 1887.)
FWIW as best as I can recall I never read the actual _Roots_ book, but I certainly remember the extraordinary cultural phenomenon of the tv adaptation. (I was 11 years old, and recently returned to the States from my tour of duty in Japan.) I do think the tv adaptation could have been just as impactful, to use a jargon-word, if there had been a fine-print disclaimer saying that this was maybe just a teensy bit fictionalized in terms of any specific family’s literal ancestry but judged generically plausible in terms of the generic ancestry of many actually-existing American families.
The 한국민족문화대백과사전 has this to say about 시김새:
시김새의 어원과 관련하여 ‘시김’에 ‘새’라는 접미어가 붙어서 된 말로 보는 해석이 있는데, 장식음을 뜻하는 식음(飾音)이 연음화와 변화형을 거쳐 시김이 되었다고도 하며, ‘시김’이라는 용어는 ‘삭임’에서 온 것으로 보기도 한다.
Regarding the etymology of sigimsae, one interpretation views it as the word sigim combined with the suffix -sae. It is also suggested that the term sigeum (飾音), meaning “ornamental note,” became sigim through phonetic linking and morphological variation. Additionally, the term sigim is often seen as being derived from the word sagim (digestion/fermentation).
Thanks!
A similar term to 시김새 sigimsae is 추임새 chu’imsae which refers to the verbal responses interjected rhythmically throughout a traditional musical performance by the drummer and the audience. This is usually interpreted as 추임 chu’im with the suffix -새 -sae which indicates a shape, state, or degree. The first element is probably the verb 추이다 chu’ida (추이- chu’i- being the stem), a causative form of 추다 chuda (추- chu- being the stem) which can mean “to praise excessively”, with the nominalizing suffix -ㅁ -m added.
Sounds plausible.