자동차 이름에 대한 언어학적 고찰

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the nature of automobile names manufactured in Korea. Noticing that most automobile names originate from a foreign language, our main focus will be on the linguistic analysis of automobile names with various origins. For this analysis, we have looked at changing automobile names through time. With the growth of car production, we notice the introduction of a range of different models from compact to full-sized cars. When considering their names, it is evident that the compact car tends to have a meaning of ‘youth, energy’ in essence, while the full size car tends to have a meaning of optimal innovation/novelty. By considering the linguistic nature of automobile names, we can reach a greater understanding of them. Phonetically, in most cases, they contain plosive sounds at the beginning of a syllable. And their names end with the phonetic sounds of [a] or [o] as often as not. It is also striking that automobile names get lengthened from compact to full-sized cars. Structurally, they consist of simple words or the combination of more than two words. From a morphological perspective, the prefixes indicating ‘a meaning of greatness or nobility’ are likely to be preferred as automobile names. This leads to the semantic fact that the semantically familiar words such as animal names, king-associated or optimal