We came across a special term, Munteul meaning a literary framework during the field work for in the coastal region of Western Gyeongnam. Munteul is a common concept of form and style in all of the women divers’ songs including their rowing songs. It ...
We came across a special term, Munteul meaning a literary framework during the field work for in the coastal region of Western Gyeongnam. Munteul is a common concept of form and style in all of the women divers’ songs including their rowing songs. It is also a concept of form and style generalized among the women divers of Jeju Island and other regions. Munteul of coincide with the ‘meaning’ category of the Formula(formula-formulaic expression-theme) worked out by A. B. Lord. Munteul can be considered not only as the singers’ unit of memory and transmission, but also a unit for making poems. All informants have the Munteul as the semantic and structural unit of the songs. There are a great number of sorrowful, pleasant, and reproaching Munteuls, We can only guess its variety. However, its form is so simple. The songs have some functional factors. So, whatever content the Munteul has, it is a help to rowing labor. Some principles like ‘choice and metonymy, extension, borrowing’ work on the formation of Munteul. In the process, the part related with the real labor and personal emotion unrelated with the real labor were unified in a structure. It is a substance having a sort of diachronic disposition, because Munteul can continue as far as the songs last. This study is on transmission and variation of in Western Gyeongnam Province. In 1889, women divers in Jejudo came to the mainland to work in Cheongsando, Wando, Busan, Yeongdo, Geojedo, Dolsan, Gijang, Woolsan and even in Gyeongbuk Province. In this sense, it is safe to say that the women divers from Jejudo began to temporarily leave their homes for other work places as early as the late 19c in earnest. Accordingly also began to spread to the mainland at that time. As for Geoje City and Sacheon City in Western Gyeongnam Province, rowing boats singing continued till the late 1960s when power boats were newly introduced. Women divers, who were born in Jejudo and moved to Western Gyeongnam Province for work, learned when swimming to the workplace on the coast from Jejudo or when rowing to the workplace in their new working environment. Most of the women divers who settled in Western Gyeongnam Province actually learned the songs when working in the mainland after leaving their home town. Women divers who had learnt when swimming to work in Jejudo sang only fragmentary parts of the song. It is because the distance they had to swim from the seashore to their workplace on the coast was short, and they had to sing in waves with only a short time to sing . Contrastingly, those who had learned when going to their workplace from the mainland by boat could sing relatively longer parts of the songs. This is attributed to the fact that they rowed to small islands on the coast for relatively longer periods of time in Western Gyeongnam Province, with longer time to sing. The songs could be even richer depending on personal characteristics of the singer, which is believed to be correlated to the singer’s word-creating and singing abilities.