Last week my friend Peter blogged on his blog about the origin of the name of the community where I live – Ilsan. He included a fairly flattering digression about our meeting a few weeks back. I learned some things about the name of this place that I didn’t know.
What I said back to him about it is as follows. They are really just speculations. For context, read what he wrote first.
I’m surprised you omit (or did Choi Jae-Yong omit?) mention of a very notable fact, which is that the hanja 韓 [han] is the same element in [hanguk = i.e. the modern name for Korea as used in South Korea], and [hangang = the Han River] (although the latter there seems to be some additional confounding factors of yet another hanja, 漢 [han], and there is another Han River (Han Jiang) in China, here, which seems to use both characters – check out 漢江 and 韓江 in Naver’s hanja dictionary).
So, I have no idea how accepted this next thought is among Korean linguists / philologists… but personally I find compelling the idea that this particular (very important) Korean word came into Korean directly from a Mongol or Turkic proto language (Altaic), and is cognate with the well-known word Khan, which means “great leader” or “chieftain”. Hence rather than saying that hansan means “big mountain” it would be more etymologically accurate to call it “chief mountain.” Likewise, hanguk is simply “land of chieftains” or somesuch. Check out the “names of Korea” discussion at wikipedia – 韓 [han] seems to mean more than just “big”, to the extent it became the representation for this non-Chinese-origin Korean word (although as mentioned above, the Chinese seem to use it more broadly, too, than just big, and may be tracking back to the same Altaic source).
Peter responded with some additional observations. Anyway, I think it’s all very interesting. Finding etymological information of Korean place names is nearly impossible for non-Korean speakers, so I suppose that’s a good reason to post this here.
[daily log: walking, 7km]