In a span of two days, I came across “아르바이트” from two different sources, and it is far too interesting a word to pass up. At first glance, it is obviously a loan word because it is too long and there are a bunch ㅡ’s in it.
Loan words in Korean adopt a number of very predictable patterns to approximate non-native sounds. [1] There are straight substitutions for consonants that don’t exist in Korean. For example, ㅍ (p) substitutes for “f” or ㅈ (j) substitutes for a “z” sound. [2] Vowels are combined to create new diphthongs. The long i sound (as in “eye”) is created through the addition of 아 ( “a” as in father) and 이 (“i”, but sounds like “ee”) — 아이 (“ai”) –, while 에 (“e” as in bed) and 이 (“i”) combine to make 에이 (“ei”, but pronounced like “ay” in day). [3] consonant clusters have the neutral “eu” sound as place holders. For example, 스트레스 is technically “seu-teu-re-seu”, but if you ignore all the eu’s, you get “stres,” i.e. stress.
So, when I come across “아르바이트”, I sound it out to see if I could identify the English: a-reu-bai-teu –> arbait… Arbeit! WTF is a German word doing in Korean? I thought it was a fluke until I saw it twice.
So, “arbeit” in Korean appears to refer to part-time work or a manual labor type wage-based job. I have some serious questions about how this entered the language. The general (native) way to say work is 일하다 (il -hada). This is a verb-object combination, where hada means “to do” and takes il as the object. What does il mean? The dictionary lists three distinct words: work, day, one. For “day” and “one,” il is the Korean pronunciation of two Chinese characters: 日 (ri4, “day”) and 一 (yi1, “one”). Maybe 일 is a native Korean word meaning work, but I like the supposition of it being related to day such that the etymology of work in Korean would be “what you do all day.”