extinct Korean surnames

[lolmac]

I've been doing a tremendous amount of research into Korean surnames.  There are only about 250 currently in use; hundreds more have gone extinct over the millenia

Comments

[dsgood]

You might find some leads here:

American Name Society
Promote onomastics, the study of names and naming practices, both in the United States and abroad. Seeks to find out what really is in a name, ...
www.wtsn.binghamton.edu/ANS/ - Cached - Similar
►

[lolmac]

Unfortunately, I'm looking for information on extinct surnames in Korea. The type of name I'm looking for will never have been in the US at all.

The ANS website at that link has no actual data on names. It has s a list of links that would probably be very helpful for most questions involving names in the US or Canada, especially names from the UK or Ireland.

They do publish a quarterly journal that seems to cover non-American names, but they don't seem to have a global index of the material. And even if an issue-by-issue search of their list turns up an article on my question, I don't think I'm up to spending $54 for it. Or $39, which is the price of an individual article; $54 is the cost of a single issue.

[minquette]

I ran into the same problem you did - the most useful sites were actually in Korean. If you haven't already, learn_korean and korean allow you to ask these sorts of questions. Hopefully someone literate in Korean can help you out with those ones over there :) Otherwise, perhaps you have/know someone with access to scholarly databases via university libraries (or the like) and can do some research through there.

If this is for a work of fiction rather than personal curiosity I don't think it's beyond the realm of possibility to find pre-15C CE Chinese names that could have been nativised.

Good luck!

[lolmac]

Thank you! I thought there were probably LJ comms for Korean questions, but I didn't know what they were.

It's for a novel, and for reasons specific to the novel, I need surnames that are as Korean as possible, avoiding nativised Chinese if I can.

[minquette]

I understand completely :)

I admit I went and used some of my scholarly resources and found nothing in English. Preliminary research doesn't even show many native Korean names past the 250 or so still in use today. Perhaps skimming a few Korean history books and seeing if any of the names you find in there aren't in use today?

Your best bet still seems to be asking someone with Korean language skills to translate some of those names from the sites you found in the Korean forums :(

[lolmac]

skimming a few Korean history books and seeing if any of the names you find in there aren't in use today
Yup, I'm doing that also. ;-)

Thanks so much for the links to the Korean comms -- I'm bound to have more questions as the work evolves, and that kind of resource is wonderful to have!

[fay]

Can you read Korean? I have a friend who might be able to recommend some resources, but she only speaks Mandarin and Korean, not English. :/

[lolmac]

Ah, I should have mentioned that: I'm a Caucasian in the US. I can neither read nor speak Korean, unfortunately.

[fay]

Being Caucasian or in the US both in any combination wouldn't preclude one from reading or speaking Korean, but if you've access to someone who can read, rootsinfo.co.kr apparently has relevant resources. :)

[talkingdonkey]

The majority of the linguistics communities on LJ are open to translation questions. That might be helpful.