Korean Language Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for linguists, teachers and students of the Korean language. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
I’m learning to conjugate into past tense in formal language (합쇼체). From what I’ve learned, if a stem ends in a consonant, you add “았습니다” or “있습니다” after it depending on the vowel before.
However, I’ve seen 춥다 conjugated into 추었습니다 , dropping the ㅂ altogether.
My question is: - is 춥다 an anomaly for doing this or is there another rule during conjugation that I need to know (for when to drop ending consonants)?
Hoping someone else would explain it in detail, let me just give you a tiny bit of info about this phenomenon.
춥다” an irregular adjective?Yes, along with other “-ㅂ” stem adjectives/verbs except for some. We can't say every such adjective/verb is, but a bunch are.
It's called “ㅂ irregular conjugation (ㅂ 불규칙 활용).” A conjugation where a stem's final “ㅂ,” as in “ㅂ” in “춥-,” becomes an “ㅗ” or “ㅜ” before a conjugation with no initial consonant, such as “-었-.” E.g. “춥다” → “추웠다” (“추” + (“ㅂ-”→“ㅜ-”) + “-었-” + “-다”).
Such a “ㅂ” was originally a “ㅸ” (unused nowaday), which likely had the /v/ sound in initial and the /ㅂ/ sound in final. Later, the /v/ sound shifted to the /w/ sound.
(“
추ᇦ-” + “-어”) → “추ᄫᅥ” (Since “-어” has no initial consonant, the “ㅸ” takes the initial position here.) → “추워”
The Kyungsang dialect. They say “추ᄫᅳ라 /choovɾa/” for the standard equivalent “추워라 /choowoɾa/.”
