Abstract

The word, ‘cham(站)’ was derived from Mongolian language ‘зам’, originally means “the place where a government official who travels on official business can have a rest.” The meaning of ‘cham’ has changed and extended since it came into Goryeo dynasty in early‒middle Korean. ‘Cham’ has meanings which belong to three fields, such as [space](we can call it ‘cham1’), [meal](we can call it ‘cham2’), [time](we can call it ‘cham3’). By the way, there are many differences in the descriptions about three meanings of ‘cham’ in present‒day Korean dictionaries. So the aim of this paper is to determine the semantic relation among this three meanings of ‘cham’. The discussion result is as in the following. First, the spatial meaning of ‘cham(站)’, that is ‘cham1’, is originally “the place where a government official who travels on official business can have a rest.” In modern Korean, ‘cham1’ gained the meaning newly, that is “the distance between one ‘cham’ and the other.”Second, the meaning of ‘cham(站)’ was extended from meaning area related to space to meaning area related to meal in modern Korean. That is ‘cham2’. ‘cham2’ means “some food to eat between meals while people take a rest during working hours or on the road.” We can see that ‘cham2’ was derived from ‘cham1’, judging from the phrase ‘take a rest’, ‘working’ and ‘on the road’. So we can come to a conclusion that ‘cham2’ has polysemous semantic relations with ‘cham1’. At last, the meaning of ‘cham(站)’ was extended from meaning area related to space to meaning area related to time. That is ‘cham3’. ‘cham3’ means “when one takes a rest during working hours” or “while one does something.” It was possible that the meaning of ‘cham’ was shifted from space to time which has a linear area because ‘cham1’ is situated on the road, that is a linear spatial area. So we can come to a conclusion that ‘cham3’ has polysemous semantic relations with ‘cham1’, too. Therefore, we have to specify that ‘cham2’ and ‘cham3’ are derived from ‘cham1(站)’ by describing that ‘cham1’, ‘cham2’ and ‘cham3’ have semantic relations in Korean dictionaries.