My student who recently changed her name to Jara (which is just something she invented as far as I can tell) drew a picture of my minneapolitan rainbow monkey holding some bananas (at right).
The first part of the descriptor to the right of the monkey's head is easy to understand: 왜저레 [wae-jeo-re = "what the heck" – but in this context it's my name: "way-je-ret"]. The last part of the descriptor is easy to understand: 몽키 [mong-ki = "monkey" obviously]. So the overall intended meaning is clear to me, too: "Jared's monkey." But the suffix on my name was puzzling me: -꺼 [kkeo].
The ending is not in my reference grammar. And the initial explanations from my coworkers only told me what I already had figured out – it's a possessive. The standard possessive suffix (i.e. genitive case ending) in Korean is -의 [ui]. It's the only one I thought existed. So confronted with what seemed a new one, after so many years… of something so basic. Well, I was distraught.
None of the Koreans I asked seemed at all unfamiliar with it – they all took it as obvious. But when I pointed out that it wasn't in my reference grammar or anywhere to be found in any online dictionary or web search, they, too, were scratching their heads. I began to suspect it was a sort of informal or slang contraction of something – but of what, exactly? It's not even to be found in Samual E. Martin's presumeably exhaustive Reference Grammar. Therefore if it's slang, it's fairly recent or considered somehow more obvious than you'd think.
Eventually, a coworker of mine suggested it was a contraction of -의것 [uigeot]. This isn't entirely implausible – there's a sort of tendency to faucalize (geminate) consonants in the context of contraction processes in the language. So dropping the [ui] and faucalizing the [g] -> [kk] seemed vaguely conceivable.
So I'm going to settle on the idea that -꺼 = -의것 for now.
I'm not sure why Jara made herself into a turtle at my monkey's feet. That's more of a psychological puzzle than it is a linguistic one, however.
Another student in the same class drew a portrait of me on his vocabulary quiz. I appreciate its minimalism.
