Dakdoritang, a spicy braised chicken dish, is widely believed to carry a remnant of Japanese in its name. The reason is that "tori" means "bird" in Japanese. Some food scholars have proposed replacing dakdoritang with "dakbokkeumtang," on the grounds that doritang comes from Japanese. The National Institute of Korean Language likewise recommends dakbokkeumtang instead of dakdoritang.
But there is no stir-frying step in dakdoritang, and bokkeum means stir-fry. The name should be seen as a purely Korean one that attached itself naturally over the long stretch of time our ancestors made and ate the dish. Records dating from before the Joseon Dynasty describe cutting up a chicken, adding gochujang, or red chili paste, and boiling it into a soup to settle an upset or bloated stomach. Japan has no dish comparable to dakdoritang that uses chili powder. The mothers who cooked dakdoritang so often knew no foreign words at all and spoke only Korean. It was they who gave the dish its name.
To cut with a knife is "dorida," and to cut with scissors is "orida." So cutting something out and taking it away with a knife is "doryeonaeda," and striking it off is "dorichida." Cutting something out with scissors and taking it away is "oryeonaeda," but there is no such word as "orichida." It is much like catching a ball with a glove, "badanaeda," versus hitting it with a bat, "badachida." Linguistically, Korean dish names are consistently formed the same way: they describe what was done to an ingredient to make the food, as in tang, guk, jjim, bap and jjigae. In other words, it is dakdoritang because it is a soup made by chopping chicken with a knife.
The National Institute of Korean Language maintains that the origin of dakdoritang may still be Japanese. Its reasoning is that no historical source confirming "dori" as a Korean word before the Japanese colonial period has yet been identified. The institute has said it would reconsider its recommendation of dakbokkeumtang if relevant documents are found.
