Japanese/Korean Linguistics

A Korean Sign Language (KSL) toponym can emerge as a monomorphemic sign output indexed to the initial morpheme from a source Korean toponym; however, in some instances the KSL toponym creates an output mapped to the second source morpheme (Ji 2022). This shift flouts positional salience since KSL toponyms typically represent the initial source morpheme semantics. A comparison between the related sign languages Japanese Sign Language (JSL) and KSL offers a possible explanation. Ji (2022) observations about a collection of roughly 300 KSL toponyms were examined via a sign toponym typology developed in George (2022). An etiological examination of JSL shows that JSL toponyms generally index to semantically transparent Japanese source toponym morphemes (George 2022); KSL may share a similar process. The apparent crosslinguistic tendency to index semantically transparent morphemes may explain the non-indexation of an initial morpheme in KSL.