Académique Documents
Professionnel Documents
Culture Documents
Language,
Purity Versus Hybridity
Infected Korean
Language,
Purity Versus Hybridity
From the Sinographic Cosmopolis
to Japanese Colonialism to Global English
KOH JONGSOK
Translated with a critical introduction by Ross King
Table of Contents
List of Tables
viii
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the Academy of Korean Studies Grant
funded by the Korean Government (MEST) (AKS-2011-AAA-2103) and
by a translation grant from the Literature Translation Institute of Korea.
I am grateful to Mr. Koh for the opportunity to translate his book, and I
also wish to thank the Literature Translation Institute of Korea, the staff
at Sup sogi Hosu (the Korean Language Village, Concordia Language
Villages), Hyoshin Kim, Daniel Pieper, and Natasha Rivera for their assistance at crucial moments in the translation process.
Infected Korean
Language,
Purity Versus Hybridity
Introduction
Koh Jongsoks
Infected Language
Ross King
Koh Jongsoks Infected Language was first published in Seoul in 1999
with the title Kamymdoen n: Kug i pynduri rl tamn mytkae
i punggynghwa (Infected language: Portraits of the landscape on the
periphery of the national language). That this book must have sold
reasonably well can be surmised from the fact that a revised and slightly
expanded version appeared in 2007 with the same title but carrying the
additional chapter Contamination, Infiltration, Hybridity: A Swipe at
Purism in Korean. The book is difficult to categorize in terms of genre; in
effect, it is a series of critical essays about Korean language and writing
situated at the intersection of history, politics, linguistics, and literature.
Infected Language is not about the Sinophone world, nor has Korea by
any stretch of the imagination ever been a constituent part of that world,
as long as one understands Sinophone to mean Chinese-speaking.
Indeed, most patriotic modern-day Koreans would likely bristle at the
notion of a book about modern Korean-language debates appearing in a
series about the Chinese-speaking world, and perhaps even Koh Jongsok
tandem, side by sidethe Japanese bits in kana and the Korean bits in
hangl. Japanese readers read the sinographs as Japanese and focused
on the Japanese grammatical elements, and Korean readers read the sinographs in Korean and focused on the Korean elements.
In the second instance, with the defeat of Japan in World War II and
with liberation, the new cosmopolis (for the South, anyway) became the
United States, and the new cosmopolitan language has become English,
a language that South Koreans have pursued with a vengeance for more
than half a century now. South Koreas love affair with English and
the controversies surrounding when, how, and to what extent to teach
English in South Korean schools began to heat up in the late 1990s
with president Kim Yng-sams globalization drive, and they continue
unabated to this day (see Park 2009).
The issues of how to cope with the legacies of the sinographic
cosmopolis in general and of Chinese characters in particular have been
studied in depth in the case of Japan. For example, in his useful book on
kanbunmyaku and modern Japan, Tokyo University professor
Sait Mareshi deployed kanbunmyaku as a metaphor for the pulse,
beat, cadences, and aura of kanbun (literary Sinitic) and the way
they have continued to permeate modern Japanese. But there is much
less research about Korean in this regard, and the legacies of the sinographic cosmopolis and Japanese colonialism are further complicated by
the continued and ever-more hegemonic presence of English in postliberation Korean linguistic life. And the Korean situation is rendered even
more complex by the fact that all these issues have been debated in Korea
in an intellectual environment dominated by deeply conservative and
racialized notions of purity, minjok (ethno-nation) and kug
(national languageitself an ideological formation owing in large part to
Koreas experience with Japan; see Lee 2010). It is these illiberal facets of
Korean language ideology and linguistic nationalism that Koh Jongsok
seeks to expose and critique. In the process, the reader learns volumes
about the course of linguistic modernity in Korea since the 1890s and
10
11
Summary
In sum, Infected Language is a linguistically informed, highly readable,
politically progressive, and topically wide-ranging series of essays in
the genre of language criticism that sheds welcome light on a variety
of topics intimately connected with the advent and growth pains of
linguistic modernity in Korea as Korea has negotiated and navigated
between the old sinographic cosmopolis, the newer imperial Japanese
metropole, and the newest global formation of all: English and the American empire. As such, it will be welcomed by all readers interested in
the demise of this once-great translocal cultural formation, as well as by
those with an interest in the historical contours of language, writing, and
politics in modern Korea. Though Koh is quite clear in stating where his
own choices lie, his book leaves the reader pondering the question how
Korea and Koreans will cope with the stark choice that Pollock (2006,
568) sees much of humanity facing now:
a national vernacularity dressed in the frayed period costume of
violent revanchism and bent on preserving difference at all costs,
and a clear-cutting, strip-mining unipolar globalism bent at all
costs on obliterating it.
12
References
Blommaert, Jan, ed. 1999a. Language Ideological Debates. Berlin: Mouton de
Gruyter.
. 1999b. The Debate Is Open. In Language Ideological Debates, edited
by Jan Blommaert, 138. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Gal, Susan. 1998. Multiplicity and Contention among Language Ideologies.
In Language Ideologies: Practice and Theory, edited by Bambi B. Schieffelin, Kathryn A. Woolard, and Paul V. Kroskrity, 317331. New York:
Oxford University Press.
Hwang, Hodk. 2005. Kndae neishyn kwa k i pyosang tl: Taja,
kyotong, pnyk, ekritwir [The modern nation and its representations: The other, communication, translation, criture]. Seoul: Somyng
Chulpan.
Hwang, Hodk, and Yi Sanghyn. 2012. Kaenym kwa yksa, kndae hanguk
i ijungsajn: Oegugin tl i sajn pynchan sap ro pon hangug i
kndae 1: Yngupyn [Concepts and history, Bilingual dictionaries in
modern Korea: Korean linguistic modernity as seen through the dictionary compilation projects of foreigners 1: Research volume]. Seoul: Pangmunsa.
Irvine, Judith T., and Susan Gal. 2000. Language Ideology and Linguistic
Differentiation. In Regimes of Language. School for American Research,
edited by Paul Kroskrity, 3584. Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Kin, Bunky. 2010. Kanbun to higashiajia: Kundoku no bunkaken [Kanbun
and East Asia: The kundoku cultural sphere]. Tokyo: Iwanami Shinsho.
King, Ross. 1997. Language, Politics, and Ideology in the Post-War Koreas.
In Korea Briefing, edited by David R. McCann, 109144. New York: Asia
Society.
. 1998. Nationalism and Language Reform in Korea: The Questione
della lingua in Precolonial Korea. In Nationalism and the Construction
of Korean Identity, Timothy Tangherlini and Hyung-il Pai, 3372. Center
for Korean Studies Monograph Series. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
13
14
15
16
Koh Jongsok
Eight years have passed since the publication of the first edition. The
only new content is the chapter Contamination, Infiltration, Hybridity:
A Swipe at Purism in Korean, and the rest of the chapters remain as
before. The Korean publisher would have preferred to add yet another
chapter and market the book as a revised and expanded edition, but I
wouldnt go along. On one hand, there was my inveterate laziness (will
it ever go away?), but my compulsion to rummage around in the social
contexts of language had somehow faded, too.
My ideas as expressed in this book remain virtually unchangedeven
concerning Were All Greeksan essay that caused some controversy.
Even if I were to revisit that topic today, I doubt that my conclusions
would be any different. But I was puzzled when a number of readers took
this essay to represent a world view based on survival of the fittest.
My own less-than-perfect command of Korean may be the root of this
misunderstanding, but the side that I was trying to take in that essay
was precisely that of the weakest, least fortunate members of Korean
society. I was also puzzled that still other readers interpreted that essay
as a defense and espousal of dirigiste language policy. Yet I clearly
stated there my opposition to active language planning at the state level,
18
Chapter 1
20
21
22
claim to have learned any one of them truly well, and it all seems to
have been rather a waste of effort now that I reflect on it. Still, learning
new languages back then was enjoyable. I practically lived at the French
Language and Literature Club, one of the more seriously academic
groups, thanks to which I was able to read most of the novels of SaintExupry and Malraux in the original Frenchall very superficially, of
course. That I was able to read works like Michel Tourniers Vendredi ou
les limbes du Pacifique and Patrick Modianos Rue des boutiques obscures
in the original French before the Korean editions came out was also
because of this club. In those days, I even thumbed through works like
Robbe-Grillets La jalousie that I would never have read, even if they had
been available in Korean. Now that I look back on it, the club strikes
me as having been more of a lame gathering of guys with no social
conscience hanging out with girls (who also had no social conscience),
all under the vain pretext of Francophilia. But in any case, I read quite
a few French books in the club and ended up with several close friends
(and even my wife) as a result.
During my brief time at university, I learned how to distinguish the
Greek and Cyrillic alphabets and learned how to read both the Hebrew
and Arabic scripts. After I more or less blew off university and returned
to a more Bohemian lifestyle, I met a much older student (well, at most he
would have been twenty-seven or twenty-eight) who had recently taken
up his university studies again after completing his military service and
who had grown up mostly in Spain. From him I learned Spanish for six
months or so and absolutely fell in love with the language. Simply for the
joy of writing somethinganythingin Spanish, I even sank back to the
level of middle and high school students and found myself some Spanish
pen pals until I graduated. Perhaps I am exaggerating heremy Spanish
pen pal was actually rather charming. The recipient of my more than
one hundred letters was a woman called Susana Perez Lendon Guerero
living in Granada, Andaluca, Spain. She was two years younger than
me. She looked so young and pure in her photographs, but she must be
23
close to forty now. I wonder if Ill ever meet her. Shes still there in my
photo album
Realizing that law didnt suit me, I would take courses over in the
Faculty of Arts whenever possible and as a result memorized a few lines
of German, Latin, and ancient Greek. I also dropped a lot of money on the
Japanese language schools lined up along Chongno, but all that I have
left in my head now to show for that investment is a few stanzas from the
lyrics to the song Blue Light Yokohama, which swept through Korea
in the 1970s. I learned a lot about various different languages without
ever really mastering any one of them, and after paddling around in the
shallow end of this sea of languages, I suddenly found myself standing
face to face with the real world.
24
25
thought that nobody would ever read his native tongue. Cioran gives
voice to this despair of the writer who writes in a foreign tongue in
many places in his books. For Cioran, who is considered one of the
greatest prose writers of twentieth-century French literature, French was
a kind of yoke. For him, French was not just any foreign language contraposed to his mother tongue but a very special foreign languagedifferent
from, say, German or English. He once described French as a language
suffering from arteriosclerosis. By this he meant that French, a language
delicately refined and cultivated at the hands of countless writers over
many centuries, crushed writers with the weight of its past and limited
their creative writing options. Cioran claimed that when he wrote in
foreign languages like German or English, he could deploy the resources
of these languages to express his ideas, but that when he wrote in French,
he could express only ideas allowed by the confining strictures of French
linguistic structure. Needless to say, this characteristically disingenuous
evaluation of Ciorans pretends to put down French but in fact puts the
language on a pedestal. One frequently encounters claims that it is far
more difficult for foreigners to wield beautiful, precise French than it is
for them to master other languages. Russian-born writer Andr Makin,
winner of the Goncourt Prize in 1995, was rejected by several French
publishers and succeeded in publishing his prize-winning work only
after it underwent aggressive copy-editing and polishing at the hands of
the final publisher.
Whatever the language, writing in beautiful, precise prose requires
effort, and in this respect French is no different from any other language.
But it seems nonetheless true that this language is not a particularly kind
one to foreigners. This is probably not the only reason, but in my case,
my fantasy of becoming a Francophone writer turned out to be just that
a fantasy. Four years after dragging my family all the way to Paris,
our trials and tribulations there forced us to return to Seoul. Ever since,
I have been working as a freelance writer in my native Korean because
Korean is the language that I know best.
26
27
28
29
sional expertise and meticulous care, with the result that, for instance,
the Korean-language Dictionary of Semiotics (Kihohak sajn, translated
by the Ehwa Womens University Research Center for Semiotics and
published by Usk in 1990), which is supposed to be a translation
from the English translation of Ducrot and Todorovs Dictionnaire encyclopdique des sciences du langage (published in 1972 by Seuil), is really
nothing more than a pile of paper that happens to retain the format of
the French original. Even if one excuses the numerous mistranslations
and inconsistencies in terminology as owing to the time pressures of a
hastily executed team effort, the constant but unpredictable stream of
ungrammatical and incomprehensible sentences makes it nearly impossible to read this book without the assistance of a highly active imagination (needless to say, this problem isnt unique to this dictionary;
indeed, it isnt unique to dictionaries in general, or even to translation in
general in Korea. Ultimately, it must be seen as a problem of the national
language in South Korea).
And so, though I may be criticized for not understanding the inner
workings of academia, I venture the following suggestion: What if academic degrees were awarded for the compilation of dictionaries, be they
solo projects or team efforts? Contrary to first impressions, dictionary
compilation requires just as much creativity as writing or editing a scholarly article does, not to mention erudition, voluminous powers of recall,
and a meticulous eye for detail. In the case of dictionaries for specialized
fields, in particular, the explanations accompanying each entry amount
to short scholarly articles, and when one considers the need to synthesize
systematically all the relevant knowledge that has accumulated in the
relevant field, a high level of intellectual creativity is essential. When two
or more dictionaries are compiled for the same field but with different
points of view and different levels of execution, comparisons between
dictionaries become possible, in turn creating fertile soil for the compilation of even better new dictionaries. Instead of writing scholarly articles
that will be read only by the author and a journals editorial committee,
then, it seems to me not such a crazy idea to award academic degrees for
30
31
32
Chapter 2
A Footnote to My Confession
The two ongoing solo and independent dictionary compilation projects
being conducted by Pak Yongsu and Nam Yngsin are both fueled by
nationalism. That this is fundamentally the case can be seen in that their
day-to-day pronouncements betray a strong nationalist inclination but
also in that the entry words in their thematic and reverse dictionaries
are restricted to so-called pure Korean words. Of course, because their
projects are still ongoing, they may still include Sino-Korean vocabulary
and foreign words (loanwords) in their projects, but for now one can
say that their work proceeds under the aegis of linguistic nationalism
the linguistic nationalism that began with Hanhinsaem Chu Si-gyng,
passed through the Chosn Ynguhoe and Chosn Hakhoe during
the Japanese colonial period, and continued after liberation in 1945 with
Kim Tubong and Yi Kngno in North Korea and Choe Hynbae and
the Hangl Hakhoe in South Korea. This linguistic nationalism could
also be called linguistic purismif so, then my thoughts on the national
language (and national language policy) are different from those of
Messieurs Pak and Nam.
To my mind, all purismslinguistic purism includedare connected
in their sensibilities by an umbilical cord to fascism (or collectivism or
34
absolutism more generally). The purification in the national languagepurification movement (kug sunhwa undong) is the same purification
of the various reeducation camps of earlier absolutist societies or of the
purification education (sunhwa kyoyuk) that the notorious Samchng
Kyoyuktae made as its goal in the early days of President Chn Tuhwans
Fifth Republic. That the German language-purification movement that
had begun in the seventeenth century grew quiet for a time only to
gain spasmodic momentum under Hitler or that the Chosn (Korean
language) purification movement launched at the end of the nineteenth
century has flourished as much as it has in North Korea after liberation suggests the close affinity between linguistic purism and absolutism.
Linguistic purismmuch like the idealistic Korean unification movementis a symptom of aggravated nationalism. From this perspective,
both the Hangl Hakhoe and the Pan-Korean Alliance for Unification
(Choguk Tongil Pm-minjok Ynhap), regardless of their diametrically
opposed positions under Koreas various political regimes over the years,
are kindred groups. In actual fact, the right-wing Hangl Hakhoe and
the left-wing Pan-Korean Alliance for Unification both stand side by side
(cordially, of course) on the far right of Korean societys ideological landscapebecause they are both guardians of the kuksu , or national
essence.
Linguistic purists are worried about contamination of the national
language. They lament that the lexicon of the national language is
infected by foreign words, and they complain that literary style in the
national language is infected by translationese. I agree with their prognosis that the national language is contaminated. But I do not think that
this contamination is a cause for concern.
The reasons I am not worried about contamination of the national
language are two. The first is because, realistically speaking, contamination of the national language is unavoidable and inevitable. As long
as Korea does not establish a utopia on some remote island and shut
itself off from the outside world, there is no way to block the conta-
A Footnote to My Confession
35
mination of the national language. The purists wring their hands over
the contamination wrought by foreign words and Sino-Korean vocabulary in the Korean lexicon. They are especially hysterical about SinoKorean words coined in Japan. But in fact, a significant portion of the
Sino-Korean lexicon in Korean is made in Japan. The vast majority of
the cultured vocabulary used now in Korean, in particular, comprises
Sino-Korean words that the Japanese created by translating Westernlanguage terms and that were imported into Korea starting at the end of
the nineteenth century. As long as we Koreans are unwilling to throw
down our pens and live without ever opening our mouths, there is no
way to cull from Korean all those made-in-Japan Sino-Korean words.
In principle, it would be possible to go to the trouble of replacing
all these words with neologisms based on pure Korean etyma, but
such a project would simply be yet another loan translationyet another
calquing process. The many pure Korean linguistic terms that appear
in Oesol Choe Hynbaes Urimalbon are good examples of loan translations based on made-in-Japan Sino-vocabulary. Moreover, for some
morphemes it is simply incredibly difficult to tell whether they are
pure Korean or not. A significant proportion of the words thought
to be pure Korean are either Sino-Korean words that have undergone
morphological deformation or loans that have come in through spoken
language from either Chinese or Mongolian. And then there is the question of practicality. The fact that the pure Korean linguistic terms like
im (myngsa = noun), t (hyngyongsa = descriptive verb), um (tongsa
= action verb), kyt (chosa = particle), it (chpsoksa = conjunction), n
(kwanhyngsa = modifier form), k (pusa = adverb), nol (kamtansa =
exclamation), and kkt (chonggylsa = final ending) coined by Chu Sigyng and the set of terms like irmssi (substantive), and so on, introduced in Choe Hynbaes Urimalbon have not been accepted by the
general public shows that the linguistic habits of a speech community
cannot easily be changed by the guidance of one or two people or by
nationalist fervor alone.
36
A Footnote to My Confession
37
38
Bundles of words are classified by theme, and only those words in the
lowest subgroupings are then arranged in alphabetical order. In general,
thematic dictionaries are designed not to help readers but to assist
writers. Anybody who writes professionally will have felt the need for
such dictionaries long ago. That some of the earliest Koreans to realize
the need for thematic dictionaries in Korean and to proceed to compile
some of them on various scales were poets is therefore closely connected
to the fact that thematic dictionaries are designed to assist the writing
process. The advent of thematic dictionaries in Korean has stimulated
Messieurs Pak and Nam, along with still other scholars and lexicographers, to compile a whole range of other types of specialized dictionariesreverse dictionaries, synonym and antonym dictionaries, nuance
dictionaries, and so onthereby opening up the possibility of a more
three-dimensional grasp of Korean. Korean lexicography still has a long
way to go compared to the West or to Japan, but it is a fact that Koreans
thinking about dictionaries has begun to change.
Nam Yngsins Hn+ Kug Sajn (Hn+ Korean-Korean dictionary),
which is a regular word dictionary, is unusual in that it contains
rich example sentences, gives etymologies for words, explains difficult
Chinese characters, includes North Korean vocabulary, uses a reference
column for additional information, and lists verbs in their stem forms as
opposed to the traditional (and unhelpful) dictionary form in -ta. One of
the greatest weaknesses of Korean-Korean dictionaries until recently has
been the almost total lack of example sentences. All that dictionaries did
was provide a list of meanings for the entry word, without ever giving
the courtesy of example sentences showing how the word was actually
used. Moreover, all too often the words mobilized in the explanation
were more difficult than the entry word itself. Nams Hn+ Kug Sajn,
therefore, is already a huge improvement over previous dictionaries with
respect to this particular defect. Of course, Nams dictionary still needs
improvement in places regarding the level of concision in its explanations, and the quantity of example sentences is not yet entirely sufficient,
but that this solo effort has improved on earlier publications is absolutely
A Footnote to My Confession
39
40
for the dictionaryit is simply one feature that sets it apart from other
dictionaries. No doubt, the compilers consideration of North Korean
words in this dictionary is connected with his concern about NorthSouth linguistic divergence and his assiduous pains to somehow turn
back that tide. This is just a guess on my part, but I imagine that the
compiler may well think it necessary to address this tide of divergence
through language policy measures. I repeatthis is just my guess, and I
have never directly encountered the compilers position on this question;
I simply wish to register my own thoughts on this subject in this context.
A Footnote to My Confession
41
Some words share the same form in North and South Korean but
differ in meaning, and the reverse also occurs: some words with different
shapes mean the same thing. Moreover, many North Korean words are
simply not used in the South at all. Some of these words are North Korean
regional dialect words that have been promoted in status to become
part of North Koreas cultured language (Munhwa), and others are
the product of generations of the official language refinement (Mal
Tadmgi) campaign waged for generations by the North Korean regime;
and there are still other neologisms that reflect North Koreas socialist
system and official ideology. And it isnt just the Korean language of
North Korea that is strange to South Koreans. The Korean language
of the Yanbian region in northeast China, which shares a wide range
of linguistic norms and regional and social dialects with North Korean
Munhwa, also looks strange to South Koreans. In other words, South
Korean language under the name of standard language (pyojun)
and North Korean language under the name of Munhwa really are
diverging, just as people have noted.
This divergence has occasioned more than a little hand-wringing on
the part of serious North and South Korean intellectuals (as well as on
the part of some policy makers). Needless to say, opinions on the question of who should bear the bulk of the blame for this state of affairs
have differed depending on which side of the Thirty-Eighth Parallel one
stands. South Koreans have cited as the main reason the excesses of the
language policies pursued by the Pyongyang regime under the name of a
linguistic revolution, and North Koreans have assigned primary responsibility to the current state of the South Korean language, which they
characterize as having fallen in status to that of a mongrel language
(chaptangmal) from overexposure to the languages of imperialists and
reactionary bourgeois. But alongside political and ideology offensives,
there have also been sincere attempts to turn back the tide of divergence
purely because of fears that linguistic divergence might somehow lead
to a solidifying of ethno-national division. Talks between the North and
South about unifying Korean Romanization and about dictionary-compi-
42
lation projects that include vocabulary from North Korea and Yanbian
are one aspect of such attemptsthey are the product of a sense of crisis
and of a sense that North-South linguistic divergence has reached an
extreme level.
I do not share this sense of crisis, for two reasons. First, NorthSouth linguistic divergence has been greatly exaggerated. If North-South
summit talks were to be opened, it is clear that no interpreting would
be needed for either side. And when South Korean readers come into
contact with North Korean texts, the phenomenon they experience is one
of a slight strangeness or unfamiliarity, not incomprehension. For the
average South Korean, the regional and social dialects of South Korea,
for example, the fictional texts of Yi Mungu and Kim Sngdong, and
the Internet language that now runs rampant in Korean cyberspace are
no less divergent than North Korean is. Besides which, this divergence
includes in itself enrichment. Take, for example, the beauty and richness of the Korean language in the first part of the North Korean revolutionary opera Pibada (Sea of blood). There are many who will criticize
the world view of Pibada as nave and derivative of the old Sinpagk, but
there are few who would deny that the Korean language that comprises
this work breaks new ground in terms of its beauty and richness. In the
course of diverging in this way, Korean has also been enriched. Moreover, as and when the mood for unification ripens, and once personnel
exchanges and movement increase and the North and South Korean mass
media become mutually intermeshed, the divergent elements from North
and South will be absorbed and neutralized by both sides, leading to a
gradual homogenization of the two varieties.
Second (and this is really the more important angle), even if North and
South Korean truly are diverging, and even supposing that this process
is accelerating, there is nothing that anybody can do about it. As long as
one rejects absolutism, there is no way to staunch the flow of divergence,
and there is really no need to staunch it, anyway. Only dead languages
can avoid change, and the factors that change languages are linguistic
A Footnote to My Confession
43
44
Notes
1. This is the position of individuals like Yi Odk, who criticizes certain
linguistic nationalists engrossed in the creation of neologisms that the
speech community is likely to reject. For him, the ideal form of Korean
language is the quotidian spoken languageunsullied by school educationthat one learns from ones parents in childhood and the living
language that has been passed down orally since times immemorial by
the minjung, or popular masses. Insofar as Yi emphasizes the language
of the masses (minjung i n) rather than the language of the ethnonation (minjok i n), his view of language is different from the mainstream view of the Hangl Hakhoe.
Chapter 3
Infected Language,
Infected Literature
One Perspective on Koreaphone Literature
From ancient times until the end of the nineteenth century, the vast
majority of the literary heritage accumulated by Koreans was in hanmun
(literary Sinitic). The difference between written language and spoken
language that Koreans viewed as so natural for so long has presented
difficulties in delineating the boundaries of Korean literature. Does
Korean literature mean only literature written in Korean, or does it
include also literature written on Korean soil by Korean authors in the
medium of hanmunthat is, classical Chinese? Language is fundamental
to the definition of literature, and thus any bundling together of literatures using disparate languages is somehow unnatural. To put it another
way, it is natural to view Korean literature as only that literature which
has been created in Koreanjust as the French and the Germans exclude
from French literature and German literature the medieval literature
amassed in Latin.
Even so, Korean literature cannot mean only the hangl literature
collected or recorded after the fifteenth century, when the Korean
46
vernacular script was first invented. For starters, the hyangga songs
written in hyangchal script must be included in Korean literature, and
among the many documents recorded in idu script until the end of the
nineteenth century, there are some that can be singled out and included
within the definition of literature. But again, there is no getting around
the fact that once one puts aside literary works written in hanmun, the
sum of Korean literature written until the end of the nineteenth century,
whether in quality or quantity, is too meager to warrant the dignity
of the term ethno-national literature (minjok munhak). This is because
compared to the literary heritage amassed by Koreans during the same
period in hanmun, the literary heritage that can be assembled on the
basis of hyangga, hangl literature, and select documents written in
idu is tiny. When the contours of Korean literature are made identical
with those of the Korean language, the vast majority of literary works
amassed by Koreans up to the end of the nineteenth century are ultimately excluded from Korean literature.
Among the various ways to escape this quandary, one is to distinguish between Korean literature and Koreaphone literature, in which
case Korean literature would include literary works written in Korea by
Koreans in hanmun, and Koreaphone literature would designate only
works written in Korean, starting with the hyangga of the Silla dynasty.
Its a bit of a quick-and-dirty solution, but it is not an inelegant one,
either.
From ancient times until the mid-fifteenth century, when the Hunmin
chngm was invented, the two inscriptional systems used by
Koreans were hanmun and idu , and from the mid-fifteenth
century until the end of the nineteenth century, hangl was added to
the mix to create a tripartite inscriptional system whereby hanmun, idu,
and hangl existed alongside each other. Hanmun and idu resembled
each other insofar as they both used Chinese characters, whereas idu
and hangl resembled each other insofar as they were used to write
Korean. So when I say Koreaphone literature, I mean literature written
47
48
The first half of the original text of this song as recorded in the Samguk
yusa is as follows:
49
Thus, Hong Kimun reads the first part of Song of the Korean Pine
as follows:
Kas tywohi caz i
Kosol antol iWuli tim ay
Ne estehi nice kolochin
wulGwelten nach i kwochi syahwon tiwiya1
This translation, which Hong Kimun terms a direct translation, begs a
number of questions. First, assume that, through some stroke of fortune,
this translation has brought readers safely and without mishap to the
language of the Sillans while avoiding all the landmines of error that
lurk at every step of the long and perilous journey called hyangga interpretation. To put it another way, imagine that the Sillans sang this song
exactly as Hong Kimun has rendered it. Even if this were the case, this
eighth-century Korean would give a very strange impression to twentieth-century Koreans. Except for professional researchers in the field of
Korean historical linguistics, there is probably almost nobody who could
understand even the gist of Hong Kimuns translation. Hong Kimun
provides the following explanation of his direct translation into modern
Korean:
Hancham musnghan channamu
Kal i toeyado iulji anni
N tchi ijrya hasidn
Urldn k nach-i kochyjil chul iya
The once-flourishing pine
withers not even in winter
How could I ever forget you?
Will that face that I so revered ever change?
In this free translation one can hear all the more clearly the voice of the
eighth-century poet. Although there are deliberate archaisms in places, if
one replaces toeyado with toedo, iulji with sidlji, urldon with urrdon,
and kochyjil with pynhal, even the average reader should not find the
50
poem too taxing. What I wish to point out here is the distance between
Hong Kimuns direct translation and his free translationthat is, the
distance between eighth-century Korean and twentieth-century Korean.
Even for the linguistic intuitions of the normal person who has never
received linguistic training, it would be difficult to realize that these two
texts are recording one and the same language.2
Next, and regrettably for all of us, the likelihood that Hong Kimuns
direct translation has captured the essence of the language of the Sillans
is almost zero. In fact, two other monumental works of hyangga interpretation that preceded Hong Kimuns own book by that titleOgura
Shinpeis Kyka oyobi ritoku no kenky (A study of hyangga and idu)
and Yang Chudongs Chosn koga yngu (A study of Koreas ancient
songs)both read this song quite differently from the way Hong did. The
differences are not confined to simply determining the exact forms of
what are, in origin, the same words. To put it another way, the differences in these interpreters opinions do not owe simply to minutiae
of phonetic outer formdepending on the scholar, each interpretation
assigns completely different lexemes to the same Chinese characters, and
the form and meaning given to each syllable differ accordingly.
For example, where Hong Kimun reads MK kas tywohi for the first
four characters of Song of the Korean Pine (), Yang Chudong
reads MK mulhuys or mulGuys.3 As a result, whereas Hong understood
as once-flourishing ~ very good, Yang interpreted it as murt
~ modn (all; each and every). In the same passage, Yang also entertains
the possibility of reading as MK mot and as MK hoy, and
according to his explanation, this MK mothoy means palace. He adds
that the character earlier had the vernacular gloss mat. And if one
recalls the Samguk yusa passage about this song, a reading of in the
palace sounds plausible. In any case, where Yang Chudong reads
as all the Korean pines or the entire Korean pine or in
the palace, Hong Kimun reads the once-flourishing pine. Personally, I
51
52
53
54
Sino-Vocabulary in Korean
The Korean lexicon has been changing ceaselessy since ancient times,
and one of the strongest catalysts behind this change has been the influx
of Sino-vocabularylexical items composed of Chinese characters. The
penetration of Sino-vocabulary had already begun in ancient times. Of
course, one can imagine the Korean language before the influx of Sinovocabularya Korean language with a lexicon filled only with purely
native words before it was infected by foreign elements. But ever since
historically attested times, Sino-vocabulary has penetrated ceaselessly
into Korean, with the result that the Korean lexicon has come to have a
bipartite structure comprising the two pillars of native and Sino-Korean
vocabulary. This bipartite structure began to take form as early as the
ancient Three Kingdoms period and was further intensified during the
Kory and Chosn dynasties. There is evidence of a substantial influx
of Mongolian vocabulary at the end of the Kory period, but this was
not so radical as to convert the former bipartite lexical structure into a
tripartite one.
Sino-vocabulary did not simply create endless sets of synonym pairs
with native words; with the cultural might of Sinitic culture behind
it, it also drove out many native words. This is true judging even
from the period after the fifteenth century when the Hunmin chngm
was created, thereby providing a much clearer picture of Korean. For
example, MK kuwuy government office was replaced with the word
kwanchng , and MK kuwuysil government clerk was replaced
with kwalli . Sino-Korean kyeymo step-mother drove out
MK tasomemi, chinchk relatives drove out azom, and chp
secondary wife; concubine drove out kwoma. Even adverbs like MK
elwu possibly, MK cyekuntes for a brief moment, MK sile possibly,
and MK pacilwo by amazing coincidence were replaced by Sino-Korean
kahi, chamkkan , nnghi, and konggyoroi, respectively.
And many native Korean verbs were replaced by combinations of SinoKorean verbal noun + ha- do/be. For example, the MK kyeleloW- be
55
56
57
And in cases like the calques from English in table 2, the made-in-China
calques have been replaced in Korean with made-in-Japan calques.
58
Twentieth-Century Neologisms
Todays Korean is not the Korean of one century ago. Among the various
more widely known languages of the world, there are probably few that
have undergone such massive changes as Korean has in the last hundred
years or so. It is not so easy for Koreans now to read documents from the
end of the Chosn dynasty, but if a Korean from the end of the Chosn
dynasty were to be reborn today, it would be much more difficult for him
or her to read documents from present-day Korea. This would be as true
59
60
Of course, Sin Chung knew neither the writing system called hangl
nor Arabic numerals. But for arguments sake, suppose he knew both
hangl and Arabic numerals. Even assuming so, for this eighth-century
bard, the poem written by his compatriot 1,200 years later would be no
different from one in a foreign language. For starters, he would have
no clue what a television or a metal pipe is, or what inch and zoom in
refer to. Furthermore, even if words like nodongja laborer, hwamyn
screen and pyngmyn surface were to be written in Chinese characters, he would not understand them in the sense that speakers of Korean
understand them today. This means that language change (along with
changes in world consciousness) is keenly affected by material and ideological (or just new) impulses. For example, another poem titled Steel
Idea (Kangchl Idea) by the same poet would be incomprehensible
even to a Korean from the early twentieth century:
Chamjari ka hel rl nako
Tuguge ka robot rl natsi
Pokrein l nahn kt un
Ppantchak, hann aidiytta.
Kangchl idea ka
Hwangto mnji irkimy
Hgpchigp ndk l pamktn
Chugkson ro
Ttae ro nn han saram trgal
Mudm l panoki do handa
61
62
in Front of the Yard does because style is not a matter of the individual
only but also, to a certain extent, a matter of ones society and ones
linguistic community.
The organization of The Pine in Front of the Yard reflects not the
individuality of Hwang Chiu apart from or outside of the world but the
subjectivity of the Korean language used by Hwang Chiu at the end of
the twentieth century, as well as one particular subjectivity of the endof-the-twentieth-century Korean language created by the end-of-thetwentieth-century world. The chances of a present-day foreigner who
has learned some modicum of Koreanas long as he is a talented poet
writing a poem like The Pine in Front of the Yard are probably better
than those of Sin Chungs doing the same. There are far more and far
deeper traces lurking in twentieth-century Korean of twentieth-century
foreign languages and twentieth-century Korean society than there are
of eighth-century Korean. Even poems stripped bare of foreign elements
or of specific historical or social circumstances would be just as strange
to Sin Chung. For example, the poem While Waiting for You by the
same author as The Pine in Front of the Yard begins like this:
Ne ka ogi ro han k chari e
Nae ka miri ka n rl kidarinn tongan
Tagaonn modn paljaguk n
Nae kasm e kungkunggrinda
Pasrakkrinn namunnip hana to ta naege onda
Kidarybon chk i innn saram n anda
Sesang es kidarinn il chrm kasm aerinn il isslkka
When I get there first
And wait for you to come as promised,
Every footstep
Reverberates inside my chest
And every rustling leaf rustles to me.
Anybody who has ever waited knows
There is nothing on this earth quite so heart-rending as waiting.
63
There are almost no foreign elements in this poem. The lexemes mobilized in the poem are so-called native Korean words and mostly core
vocabulary, at that. One could note that the word sesang world
is a Chinese-character word, and indeed this word may well have been
known during Sin Chungs time. Moreover, it would be hard to claim
that the emotional impact of this poem is influenced by foreign civilization or ideology. Whomever or whatever the speaker of the poem means
by you, the impatience and anxiety felt while eagerly awaiting something
or someone is a universal emotion that transcends time and place. And
yet Sin Chung would not be able to decipher this poem. This is because,
just as with the other poems already cited, the lexemes that make up this
poem would almost all be missing from Sin Chungs lexicon. Perhaps he
would be able to understand the second-person pronoun n and the noun
saram person. And if one were to write the loanword sesang earth;
world as in Chinese characters, perhaps he would understand that
word, too. But even if he understood these words, he would not be able
to understand the poem as a wholethere are simply too many words
in this poem that he wouldnt know. For Sin Chung, this poem would
be like an encoded document demanding a difficult decoding process
even though the majority of its component words are easy ones, familiar
to any present-day Korean kindergartener.
What this means is that language change occurs under the influence
of not only external forces but also of language-internal impulses. Sin
Chung was waiting anxiously for the call of King Hyosng, and though
the poem While Waiting for You coincides to a certain extent with Sin
Chungs fervent desire, Sin Chung would not be able to understand it
because the poem is written in Korean but in a Korean that is not Sin
Chungs Korean. If a poem composed of basic vocabulary items (the halflives of which are relatively longer than those of other types of vocabulary) is perceived by him as a foreign language, then imagine what the
case would be with twentieth-century prose literature, which bears innumerable traces of countless foreign contacts over a long period of time.
64
65
like Franz Bopp, Rasmus Rask, Jacob Grimm, and August Schleicher
refined Joness studies and in the process of expanding his work came to
the conclusion that most of the languages of India and Europe, starting
from the Celtic languages on the Atlantic coast and stretching all the
way to Sanskrit in India, were one family sharing the same bloodline.
They christened this the Indo-European language family.
They went even further and set themselves the ambitious task,
through comparisons of these languages, of reconstructing the hypothetical Indo-European Ur-language, or Proto-Indo-European, that must
have been the unique progenitor of all these languages. They even
tried to imagine the Indo-Europeans who must have used this imaginary protolanguage in remote antiquity. Insofar as the comparative
method that they used was, within the limitations of their materials,
quite rigorous and exacting, one cannot simply denigrate the concept
of Indo-European itself as a fiction, but it seems fair to say that the
emotional or affective basis for historical-comparative linguistics was a
kind of mythical romanticism.
The Indo-European language family, embracing numerous languages
over a wide territory, is subdivided into various subgroups: Indo-Iranian
languages like Hindi and Persian, Romance languages like French and
Italian, Germanic languages like English and German, Slavic languages
like Russian and Polish, and Celtic languages like Irish and Welsh.
Thanks to the added influence of colonialism and imperialism, English,
French, Spanish, and Portuguese have all spread into North and South
America, Oceania, and Africa, with the result that today Indo-European
languages have come to cover almost the entire globe, with the exception of some parts of Asia.
The European historical-comparative linguists who so loved to create
linguistic genealogies for their languages also wanted to create genealogies for all the other languages of the world. Of course, compared to the
Indo-European language family, which is richly attested in numerous
documents ranging from 1500 BC to the present over a period of more
66
than 3,500 years, it was no easy task to create linguistic genealogies for
languages that were attested rather more scarcely. For example, Italian,
French, and Portuguesesister languages of the Romance language
familyare all well attested in detailed documents that show the process
of how their mother (Vulgar Latin) gave birth to them, but there
are plenty of other languages in the world that came to be written
down only as a result of contact with Europeans. But the Europeans,
like good colonizers, were only too happy to assume the white mans
burden, and as a result of their labors, today some ten to twenty different
linguistic genealogies, or language families, are recognized. Some of
the bigger language families are Altaic (including Mongolic, ManchuTungusic, and Turkic), Uralic (including Finnish and Hungarian), SinoTibetan (including Chinese and Tibetan), Afro-Asiatic (including Arabic
and Hebrew), and Dravidian in the south of India (including Tamil and
Telugu).
But there are also languages that remain outside such genealogies:
languages like Basque, in the border region between France and Spain,
and Ainu, which used to be spoken on the island of Hokkaido in Japan,
are cases in point. With languages like these, no amount of genetic
testing to ascertain their genetic affiliation will make their bloodlines
any clearer; they are linguistic orphanslanguages from outer space.
67
68
69
One has to be careful when using the term related language, too. For
example, in the case of Romanian, which is usually included among the
Romance languages, it is difficult for linguists to decide whether the
Latin bloodline is the more fundamental constituent or whether the nonLatin elements are more fundamental. Moreover, these bloodlines themselves often turn out to be nothing more than myths. This is true of the
term Romance languages itself, but one practice in the field of linguistics labels these languages New Latin, a strategy that implies that these
Romance languages and Latin are essentially one and the same language.
Still, Latin has clearly subdivided into several other languages with the
result that there is little room for confusion between mother language
and daughter languagenobody thinks that Italian and Latin are the
same language. But in the case of languages like Old Korean, where
there has been no subdivision or splitting off of new daughter languages
during the evolution process, there is ample room for confusions of this
nature. In other words, the possibilities for rampant myth-making about
bloodlines are much greater. And indeed, in the consciousness of most
South Koreans, the language of the Sillans is the same language as the
Korean used in Korea todaythe countless foreign elements in modern
Korean that clearly make these two languages different are judged to be
irrelevant to the bloodline and are simply removed from consideration.
70
71
72
73
From the perspective of linguistic geography, the single most important criterion in distinguishing between dialects and independent
languages is that of mutual intelligibility. In other words, when two
speakers are incapable of mutual comprehension, they are seen to be
speaking different languages.4 One can also take the spatial dimension of linguistic geography and convert it to the temporal dimension.
Thus, regardless of whether a language is called by the same name at
different points in its evolution, if the speakers of this language from
different points in time are (imagined to be) unable to achieve mutual
comprehension, it can be said that these are different languages. In
which case, eighth-century Korean and present-day Korean are different
languages, completely independent of each other. Under this understanding, the question whether modern-day Korean is formed on the
basis of Sillan, Koguryan, or (as one recent Japanese researcher would
have it) Paekchean loses much of its force.5
If one adopts this perspective, Korean as seen along a temporal axis
and according to the possibility of mutual intelligibility will fracture into
a multiplicity of Korean languages. We are left not with the Korean
language but with countless Korean languages. In which case, we are
also left not with one single Koreaphone literature but with countless Koreaphone literatures. And the same goes for other languages, as
well. It is commonplace to say that the so-called Romance languages
are languages that have evolved from Vulgar Latin, but nobody can
pinpoint for certain where Vulgar Latin ends and where, for example,
Italian begins. Following a temporal axis, there were simply numerous
Vulgar Latins at different stages and numerous Italians. The beginnings
of English literature, French literature, and German literature are said
to coincide with the epic poems Beowulf, La chanson de Roland, and
Das Niebelungenlied; I do not wish to deny that the languages mobilized
in these works are English, French, and German, but I do nonetheless
think that those languages are not the same languages as modern-day
English, French, and German. Just as what exists in Korea is not the
Korean language but numerous Korean languages, one must reckon with
74
multiple Englishes, Frenches, and Germans rather than with just English,
French, and Germanand with multiple English, French, and German
literatures.
To repeat: speakers of Old English would not have been able to understand Middle English after it was infected with French in the wake of the
Norman Invasion of 1066, just as for speakers of Korean from the end of
the nineteenth century, present-day Korean with its made-in-Japan Sinovocabulary and European loanwords would be totally incomprehensible.
75
76
Notes
1. Cited from Hong Kimun, Hyangga haesk [Hyangga interpretation]
(Pyongyang: Chosn Minjujui Inmin Konghwaguk Kwahagwn, 1956;
reprint, Seoul: Ygang Chulpansa, 1990), 315. The transcription follows
the Yale system as modified for Middle Korean (henceforth, MK) in
Samuel E. Martin, A Reference Grammar of Korean (Rutland, VT: Tuttle
Publishing, 1992).
2. Because Hong Kimuns direct translation and free translation are
rendered for Korean readers in what is more or less the same writing
system, some Korean readers may find this hard to appreciate. Such
readers should recall that the person who wrote down Hong Kimuns
direct translation in the Hunmin chngm was precisely Hong
himself, a twentieth-century Korean. The direct translation is an imitation of how he imagined Silla-era Koreans must have read hyangchal
literary compositions in vernacular Korean inscribed using Chinese
characters. So if Hong Kimuns direct translation is an accurate approximation of Sillan speech, the original written in hyangchal and the
direct translation written in the Hunmin chngm are simply different
recordings using different inscriptional systems of the same concatenation of sounds. If so, then the distance between the direct translation
and the free translation is the same as that between the original and
the free translation. If one compares the original and the free translation, does not the difference between eighth-century Korean and twentieth-century Korean sink in a bit better? Some readers might counter
that the linguistic difference is unfairly enhanced because of the difference in inscriptional systems, with one recorded in hyangchal (Chinese
characters) and the other recorded in hangl, but such readers are
invited to imagine that the direct translation and free translation are
rendered in Romanization (as here). In this case, too, the difference looks
much greater than that between modern French and modern Italian.
3. Yang Chudong, Chngjng koga yngu [Revised and expanded study of
ancient songs] (Seoul: Iljogak, 1965/1997), 612.
4. Of course, because the linguistic boundary between language and dialect
is so unclear, political considerations also come into play in delineating
the boundary. Norwegian and Danish are called different languages
even though there are almost no impediments to mutual intelligibility
77
Chapter 4
Contamination,
Infiltration, Hybridity
A Swipe at Purism in Korean
Reining in Hangl-ology (Hangl-hak)
On January 1, 2004, with the passing of Korean grammarian H Ung
(19182004) at the age of eighty-six, the world lost one of the great stars
in a tradition of nationalist linguistics reaching back to the end of the last
century and the pioneering grammatical studies of Chu Si-gyng (1876
1914). Dr. Hs death called forth a spate of essays and articles in the
popular media praising his life and academic contributions and paying
respect to his memory. Indeed, the legacy bequeathed by Dr. H in the
areas of Korean language studies and the Korean language movement
fully justifies the outpouring of articles mourning his loss. Although his
theoretical leanings were quite different, in the zeal with which he strove
to put his views into practice Dr. H was a direct heir of the pioneer
grammarians Chu Si-gyng and Choe Hynbae, and indeed, his views
commanded just as much allegiance in the spheres of nationalist linguistics and the national language movement as those of his teachers. Like
his two intellectual predecessors, he was known to Koreans as a hangl
80
81
executive director of the Hangl Hakhoe. The year 1970 was the year
when Choe Hynbae, his teacher, died. Professor Choe, likewise, had
served as executive director of the Hangl Hakhoe from 1949the year
when the former Chosn Hakhoe (Society for the Academic Study of
Korean) had changed its name to Hangl Hakhoeuntil his death. In
other words, the Hangl Hakhoe was led for half a century by this
teacher-disciple duo, and their two names were virtually synonymous
with the identity of the society, so much so that the strength of the
connection between their names and that of the Hangl Hakhoe could
be likened to that between professor Paek Nakchng of Seoul National
University and the Changjak kwa Pipyngsa publishing company.
Insofar as mere mention of the Hangl Hakhoe brought to mind the
names Choe Hynbae and H Ung, it must have been only too natural to
refer to these two scholars as hangl hakcha. Likewise, it must have been
quite natural to go back one generation further and refer to Chu Si-gyng
the teacher and founder of the Korean linguistic nationalism shared by
these two menas a hangl scholar, too. But it is not Choe Hynbae
and H Ung alone who were customarily referred to as hangl scholars;
other scholars with close connections to the Hangl Society like Chang
Chiyng (18891976), Kim Yungyng (18941969) and Chng Insng
(18971986) were also usually referred to as hangl hakcha. In this way,
the custom of referring inappropriately to an entire group of national
language scholars as hangl scholars and to their field of inquiry as
hangl studies or hangl-ology shares a common history with the name
of the Hangl Hakhoe.
But in much the same way that the scholarly breadth of nationalist
linguists like H Ung could not be confined narrowly to a hangl-ology
that specialized in the writing system called hangl, the research activities of the Hangl Society as a whole are not limited to this kind of
hangl studies, either. The scholarly activities of the Hangl Society,
both in theory and in practice, bring together anything and everything about the language called Korean. Most assuredly, these activities
include work on that shadow or reflection of Korean called hangl
82
83
hangl must have seemed most appropriate for expressing the nationalist ideals to which the society aspired. But in choosing Hangl Hakhoe
as the name for a society dedicated to multifaceted research on the
Korean language, the leaders of this society sowed the seeds of confusion
between hangl (the script) and hangug (the language) in the minds
of Koreans at the level of everyday usage.
Every year on Hangl Day (October 9), cries of love for hangl fill the
popular media. But the hangl in these voices is not simply the Korean
indigenous script promulgated in 1446; more often than not, what is
meant is simply Koreanthe Korean language as a whole. Thus, one
encounters expressions like hangl translation of Hamlet or English and
hangl quite frequently. Recently, I have been reading the Korean translation of American historian Stefan Tanakas Japans Orient: Rendering
Pasts into History (Ilbon tongyanghak i kujo; Minhak kwa Chisngsa,
2004), and the preface to the translation reads: Authors preface to
the hangl edition. Needless to say, hangl translation of Hamlet and
Authors preface to the hangl edition should be corrected to Korean
translation of Hamlet and Authors preface to the Korean edition, and the
expression English and hangl (as long as it is not about how to use
the writing system called hangl to write the natural language called
English) should be corrected to either English and Korean or Latin script
and hangl. It is likewise a commonplace to refer to the generation of
Koreans who attended elementary school just before and after liberation in 1945 and who reached maturity around the time of the April 19
movement in 1960 as the hangl generation, but this, too, is somewhat awkward. If what this expression is meant to capture is something
like the generation that did not obligatorily learn Japanese in school
and thus the generation that does not know Japanese, then hangug
generation would be more appropriate. In fact, the term hangl generation would be most appropriate for the later generation whose members
can barely read Chinese characters because they never learned them in
school. The point is this: hangl is simply the name of the writing system
used to write Korean.
84
Of course, none of this means that the Hangl Hakhoe should change
its name, or that we Koreans should abandon the term hangl generation. However inappropriate its name may be, the Hangl Hakhoe is a
proper noun with deep roots in the Korean populace now, and the term
hangl generation, too, is just as familiar. But this does not mean we
should forget that hangl is a writing system and hangug a language.
If we really wanted to, we could understand and accept the custom of
referring to indigenous lexical items that are not foreign loanwords or
Chinese-character words (Sino-Korean vocabulary) as hangl. After all,
in Korean orthography, native or pure Korean lexical items are written
in hangl, right? We encounter this same sense of hangl when we
say things like I have five kids in my class with hangl names: Karami, Sinae, Poram-i, Yesl-i and Slgi or The hangl place-name for
Sinchon is Saemal, and the hangl place-name for Mapo is Samgae.
But if it were up to me, even in cases like these I would prefer to use
indigenous Korean, native Korean, or pure Korean to avoid confusion. My
given name of Chongsk can be written like this in hangl; but just
because it can also be written in Chinese characters doesnt make it any
less a hangl name. My two childrens names are non-Chinese-character names: Arom and Achim. But that makes them indigenous names
or pure Korean names before it makes them hangl names. Even if one
allows a usage like hangl name in cases like these, the hangl being
talked about needs to be strictly distinguished from the writing system
promulgated in 1446 by Sejong and cultivated over long centuries.
85
the hangl scholars who christened their research society the Hangl
Society, too, Korean and hangl were so intimately connected that they
must have seemed one and the same. But the connection between Korean
and hangl is neither inevitable nor preordained. One could just as well
write Korean in a foreign script, too. For example, in the same way SerboCroatian, the primary official language of the former Yugoslavia, can be
written in either Latin letters or Cyrillic letters, we could write Korean in
either Latin letters or Cyrillic letters if we wanted. To be sure, we would
need to do a bit of thinking in order to work out some rational orthographic rules. Actually, in ancient and medieval times Koreans contrived
ingenious ways to write Korean using Chinese characters with systems
like idu, hyangchal, and kugyl and used these systems for quite a long
time. By the same token, we could use hangl to write foreign languages
to write, say, languages like Spanish, Italian, or Japanese. Again, we
would need to work out some rational orthographic rules, but the principle is the same.
Generally speaking, there is no such thing as an organic connection
between language and writing or between any one language and any one
script. Turkish was written for many centuries with the Arabic script
but came to be written with the Latin script after the introduction of the
republican system of government after World War I. And Vietnamese,
which had been written down using Chinese characters for so long, is
also written now using the Latin script. The Serbo-Croatian language
mentioned earlier was written in Cyrillic script in Serbia and in Latin
script in Croatia. Thus, however good a fit hangl may be for writing
Korean, this does not mean that there is some God-given and inevitable
link between the two. Naturally, then, one should keep these two
concepts distinct. Concepts that parallel hangl are Chinese characters,
Japanese kana, Latin script, Greek script, Cyrillic script, Arabic script,
and so on, whereas notions parallel with hangug (Korean) are Japanese,
Chinese, English, Russian, and the like. The Korean language existed
long before hangl was invented. And the Japanese language existed
long before kana were invented, just as the Russian language existed long
86
before the Cyrillic script was invented. If I may be permitted a somewhat extreme analogy, using hangl to mean the Korean language is no
different from using English to refer to the Latin alphabet, or Mongolian
to refer to the Cyrillic script. Even if Koreans hang on to expressions like
hangl generation and hangl scholar, in everyday discursive contexts
referring to the language we should use hangug, and in contexts referring to the script we should use hangl.
There are two reasons why I am beating this particular horse to
death here. First, with persistent repetition over time, this confounding
of terms has led to confusion in communication. More than that,
there is also my conviction that this confusion has contributed indirectly to making Korean linguistic nationalism rather less benign and
tolerant than it could be. Compared to the number of languages in
the world, the number of writing systems is in a distinct minority.
There are countless communities that can boast of their own indigenous languages but rather few communities that can boast of their own
indigenous writing systems. The Latin alphabet is almost certainly the
most widespread writing system in the world, but the only language
communities that could perhaps claim it as their own indigenous script
are, more narrowly defined, speakers of Italian or, more generously
defined, speakers of Romance languages in generalthose languages
like Spanish, Portuguese, French, Romanian, and so on, whose roots
lie in Vulgar Latin. For speakers of English, German, Malayo-Indonesian, Turkish, and Vietnamese, the Latin alphabet is simply a borrowed
script. In the case of the Cyrillic script, too, it is probably only Russian
speakers who could claim it as their indigenous script, whereas for
speakers of Bulgarian or Mongolian it is just a borrowed script. But
technically speaking, both the Latin alphabet and the Cyrillic alphabet
have their roots in the Greek and Phoenician scripts, which in turn can
be traced back to the hieroglyphic writing of the ancient Egyptians, so
perhaps it is a bit dodgy after all for modern-day Italian speakers or
Russian speakers to claim these scripts as somehow indigenous. Even if
one allows a somewhat loose or generous understanding of indigenous
87
88
89
90
Cyrillic and Latin script, entire texts are written in either Cyrillic or
Latin script, and one never encounters sentences, let alone whole texts,
that mix both scripts. Note that, just because Koreans agree to adopt
hangl-only orthography does not mean that Chinese-character education will disappear; nor should it. Quite apart from the practical goals
of learning Chinese or Japanese, Chinese-character education is necessary for the internalization of Korean itself. Even at a very conservative
estimate, at least half the Korean lexicon is made up of Chinese-character words. Even when a Korean text is composed entirely in hangl,
the outer garb of the better part of the text conceals beneath it undergarments composed of Chinese characters; as long as readers are oblivious to the fabric of these undergarments, they can never understand
Korean properly. To be sure, this does not apply to all Chinese-character words but certainly to a good number of them. That Koreans can
understand hangl-only texts with relative ease is a result of the knowledge (however vague) of Chinese characters that we bring to the reading
process.5 Though Chinese characters are Public Enemy Number One on
the writing-system front, they are not the only enemy. Besides Chinese
characters, the other foe that leaps to mind is the Latin script. Every
year around Hangl Day, when the language purists line up impure
street signs in their sights, one senses a desire to reject and exclude not
only foreign languages but also foreign scripts. Most recently, the newest
enemy on the writing system front has become emoticons, a subject to
which I return later.
In the struggle of the Korean-language and Korean-script community
against foreign languages, though, the more important front is definitely
the language. On this front, the two main enemies are Chinese-character
words, with their roots in either Japanese or Chinese, and foreign loanwords from European languages, of which English is far and away the
prime culprit. After liberation in 1945, the language nationalists strove in
the first instance to chase out all words whose origins in Japanese were
obvious and plain to the eye. Thus, smekkiri (J. tsumekiri) nail clippers
became sontopkkakki, pentto (J. bento) lunch box became tosirak, ssri
91
(J. suri) pickpocket became somaechigi, and nedabai (J. netabai) ripoff became sagi (Sino-Korean ). Likewise, takkuwang (J. takuan)
sweet pickled daikon radish, siage (J. shiage) finish; finishing touches,
adari (J. atari) bullseye, direct hit; success, yoji (J. yji) toothpick,
and temppura (J. tempura) tempura (this word, of course, being a loan
from Portuguese in Japanese) each became tanmuji, kktsonjil/mamuri,
tansu, issusigae, and twigim, respectively. In this particular battle, the
language purists have more or less prevailed. Japan has always been the
easiest target of Korean nationalism, and the Japanese identity of these
words was all too plain to see. Insofar as it was difficult even for the most
educated and refined Japanophiles to reveal their Japanophilia openly
and honestly, there would have been no way for the language nationalists to lose this particular battle.
The next target was wago ()6Japanese words written with kanji
(Chinese characters) in Japanese but pronounced in Japanese according
to their kun, or vernacular Japanese, readings. Because they were read in
Korean according to their Sino-Korean pronunciations, these are difficult, at first blush, to discern as Japanese loans. For example, purists
insisted on changing the Korean word ipchang situation from the
Japanese tachiba to chji, and susok procedures from the Japanese
tetsuzuki to chlcha. However, it must be said that the victory
won by the language nationalists in this particular battle was a paltry
one. For one thing, chji is not an apt replacement for ipchang in some
contexts, and for another, a great many words of exactly this type remain
in Korean without suitable pure Korean replacements: for example,
yps postcard (: J. hagaki), ipku entrance (: J. iriguchi),
chulgu exit (: J. deguchi), harin discount (: J. waribiki),
chwiso cancellation (: J. torikeshi), chohap a guild; union (:
J. kumiai), kynsp apprenticeship (: J. minarai), and so on.
The third front has been a more general struggle against Chinese-character words, whatever their origin. In fact, this particular struggle goes
right back to the end of the Chosn dynasty, to Chu Si-gyng and other
92
93
into Korean. If these words were to be purged from the language, Korean
would end up a truly anemic and scrawny language, indeed. If we let our
imaginations run wild for a moment, it is not difficult to picture a victory
for the language nationalists in this battle. If ever Korea should witness
a political regime like, say, that of Oceania in George Orwells 1984a
totalitarian regime much more repressive than that of North Koreaa
victory in this battle would not be impossible for them.8 But even the
most radical of language nationalists, as long as they were still in their
right minds, would not wish to see the advent of an Oceania in Korea to
ensure victory in this battle.
The battle with that other foe, words of European origin, has
proceeded more smoothly than the battle with Chinese-character words
and has also recorded comparatively more successes. Because such
words stand out like sore thumbs in Korean, it was easier for them to
provoke feelings of nationalist rejection and revulsion. But a final victory
will be difficult even in this battle. For better or for worse, the borders
around the Korean language are growing gradually lower and more
porous, and the number of made-in-Europe and made-in-the-USA words
crossing those borders and coming into contact with and interfering
with Korean will gradually increase. In particular, the extent of interference from English in Korean is bound to increase, and any attempts at
blocking it are unlikely to find satisfaction. Even Koreas most conservative daily newspapersto say nothing of the broadcast mediaare now
calling the opinion page opinin, as opposed to the Sino-Korean yron
, the finance and securities page mni (money), the international
economy page kllobl pijinis (global business), the buy-and-sell page
mat (mart), and so on. And there are pages with headings like poks
(focus), porm (forum), and kllik (click), too. It is an unavoidable trend,
and of course, that it is unavoidable does not mean it is necessarily desirable. The zealous overuse and abuse of foreign loans (including Chinesecharacter words) has a certain coolness and cachet to it at first, but there
is also clearly an element of (even an appeal to) vanity in it. But even
if one is able, at the individual level, to scorn this sense of vanity, it is
94
impossible to stop it at the societal level. Besides, there is nothing fundamentally horrific or out of the ordinary about a language incorporating
into itself numerous foreign elements and becoming somehow mixed or
hybrid in the process. This is precisely the process that Korean has been
undergoing, ceaselessly, since its birth in the ancient past.
95
96
state of affairs, either (that is to say, the impure state of affairs in the
Chosn dynasty Korean languagenot the political situation at the end
of the Kory period). In that case, there is no reason for Koreans today to
feel regret over the impure Korean wordswords that were unknown
to Koreans only a century agolike radio radio, terebi television,
kmpyut computer, pidio video, and the like.
Because of its size and its distance from the mainland, the island of
Cheju came to possess significantly different linguistic characteristics
from the Korean used on the Korean Peninsula and its smaller islands.
Even today it is difficult for a native Cheju islander to communicate with
a Korean mainlander using his or her own dialect. The linguistic criterion for distinguishing between an independent language and a dialect
is that of mutual intelligibility; if two different people from two different
regions are able to understand each other when they talk, they are
deemed to be using the same language, and if they cannot understand
each other, they are deemed to be speaking different languages. On this
point, the language used by Cheju Island nativesat least, from a purely
linguistic point of viewwould have to be recognized as a language
distinct from that used on the Korean mainland. And yet people accept as
a matter of course that the language of Cheju should be included within
the boundaries of Korean. It goes without saying that this is because
after the seventh century, Cheju Island was incorporated, along with the
Korean Peninsula, into one and the same political community. Because
of this political union, the Cheju language became a dialect of Korean.
From the perspective of Cheju Islanders, the linguistic invasion from
the mainland may even have been seen as an act of violence, but it
was also a natural, cultural development. That Cheju Islanders came to
call toksaekki chicken eggs by the mainland term talgyal and pibari
unmarried young woman by the term chny did not mean an
abrupt end to the history of Cheju Islanders.
It is most obvious in the case of Cheju dialect, but Korean is a
hybrid language composed of various dialects. Now that Seoul and
97
Pyongyang have been established as the centers for two rival standard languagespyojun , or the standard language, in the
South and Munhwa , or the cultured language, in the North
the mass media have spread these standards throughout and across
the peninsula, and the influence of the regional dialects has waned
accordingly. But the fact that the national language called Korean is far
from uniform can be seen clearly from these various dialects. Nor is it
the case that translation from one dialect to another can be achieved
simply through the mechanical replacement of one word here or another
morpheme there. For example, the Chlla Province dialect expressions mg- purss and ttaery- purss correspondmorpheme for
morphemeto the Seoul dialects mg- pryss and ttaery pryss,
respectively, but these latter Seoul expressions would not be accurate
renditions of the sense of the original Chlla dialect expressions. This
is because the auxiliary verb pryss in Seoul dialect is not used as
ubiquitously as the cognate auxiliary purss is used in Chlla dialect.
In other words, whereas in Chlla dialect the auxiliary verb pul-da is
virtually unmarked, in Seoul dialect the auxiliary verb pri-da is marked.
Thus, in most contexts a more appropriate rendition in Seoul dialect of
the Chlla expression mg purss would be simply mgss ate it.
An analogous situation pertains in the way North Koreans say kj smneda. A mechanical rendition into South Korean would be kj smnida, but in many cases this would be off the mark. Not only do South
Koreans use the adverb kj far less than North Koreans do, but nowadays (news broadcasters excepted) the formal hamnida style is used far
less frequently in South Korea. It would be more accurate to drop the
kj and change the speech level to polite hae yo style. Or, if the speaker
of the -smneda form was a teenage youth, the sentence could be cast in
the new final ending in -kdn yo for even better equivalence.
In any case, the point is that Korean is a hybrid mixturea huge jumble
encompassing within it various and divergent dialect elements. Korean is
not unique in this respect; generally speaking, no natural languages are
made up internally of completely uniform systems of signs. Nor is this
98
99
rities do not seem to base their criticisms on any worries about the
possibility of communication. This is because foreign elements with no
communicative possibilities or with weak communicative abilities naturally disappear. The reason they criticize foreign loans is an obsession
with an imagined purity. I touch on this again later, but because of this
obsession with purity, these critics are in fact willing even to sacrifice
communication. They lament the present, impure state of the language
and imagine some pure Korean from the past. But what is pure Korean?
The pure Korean words as defined by these language nationalists are
those entries in the Korean dictionary that lack etymological indications pointing to either Chinese characters or other foreign scripts. But
even among these supposedly pure Korean words there lurk, deep down,
numerous words with etymologies that lead back to China and Mongolia.
I have said that what is now called Korean is an evolved form of
the language spoken in Silla in the seventh century. But that evolution was a process that involved the adoption of an overwhelmingly
large number of foreign elements. If all those words from China, Japan,
and Europe had not entered the language, Koreans today would never
have come to possess the serviceable language that they do. And this
mixing of the flesh with foreign elements is by no means unique to
the history of Korean. Virtually every known language of civilization
has experienced the same mingling of the flesh with foreign elements.
Moreover, this hybridization has enriched these languages. To give but
one obvious example, recall that nearly half the vocabulary of English
was borrowed from French. And then there is the question whether the
Korean language used in seventh-century Silla was the same language
as the Korean of today. I have already noted that the criterion for distinguishing languages from dialects is mutual intelligibility. But the chances
that a seventh-century Sillan and a modern-day Seoulite could communicate with each other in their respective languages are nil. This also
means, then, that Sillan and Korean are, in effect, different languages.
This goes not just for the language of Silla but also for the language
of Chosn in the fifteenth-century, when hangl was invented: based
100
Hybrid Is Beautiful
Here is just one example. The obituary column in the Hangyoreh daily
news carries the heading kutkin sosik (). The word kutkin was
so unfamiliar to me that the first time I saw it I thought it was a typo,
but when I looked it up in my Korean-Korean dictionary, I discovered
that the verb kutki-da means to suffer death; die. This pure Korean
verb kutki-da must be appealing to the purists. And thanks to them, I
was able to add a new, pure Korean word to my vocabularynot a bad
thing at all. And because hardly a day passes without news (sosik) of
somebody kutki-da-ing, any Hangyoreh subscriber will likely be familiar
now with the meaning of kutki-da. But I doubt that the day will soon
come when this kutki-da or the expression kutkin sosik will find pride
of place in everyday Korean. To my mind, kutkin sosiks lease on life is
101
102
103
turn around and deploy the same type of language in the self-introduction that they attach to their applications for employment. Of course,
some elements of current chat language could someday be incorporated
into the standard languagewhen and if, that is, the majority of Korean
speakers deem those elements standard. And should this happen, there
is nothing problematic whatsoever about those elements being incorporated into standard Korean because the ultimate arbiters of what is
correct language and what is not are the speakers themselves.
As I noted earlier, the thing that is referred to as Korean is, even
from a synchronic perspective, full of internal variations and aberrations both great and small and is far from being something uniform.
The national language is, as it were, a linguistic supersetan aggregation of variants such as regional dialects and social dialects (dialects like
secret languages or specialized languages based on social conditions).
Chat language combines features of both regional dialects and social
dialects. That it is conditioned by a sort of place called cyberspace makes
it a kind of regional dialect, whereas that Internet surfers from a wide
variety of different regional backgrounds use it makes it a kind of social
dialect. If one understands dialects not as some form of virus to be eradicated from languages but as flowers and branches that enrich and beautify a language, then chat language is one such creature. Its not a big
deal.
At the risk of repeating myself, language is predicated on communication. People who use social dialects like chat language have already
determined whom they wish to communicate withthey do not use that
social dialect with just anybody. By using this social dialect with fellow
members of the social grouping to which they feel they belong, they reaffirm, perform, and construct their identity. This is no different from the
way in which, in certain discourse contexts, people express their identity
through the use of regional dialects. Unlike the Korean language purists,
those using chat language do not force their own personal dialect on
the entire language community. More than anything else, this alienese
104
quite in contrast to its nameis filled with aspirations toward communication. Those who would campaign for digging up and reviving pure
Korean words are so caught up in their pathetic, thoroughbred selfconceit that they have put aside the will to communicate. Moreover, their
neurosis about pure bloodlines is full of egotism and self-indulgence.
Contamination and infiltrationmixing, mingling, jumbling, miscegenation, and hybridityare unavoidable prerequisites for both cultural and
biological evolution. Pure Korean is a bogeyman that exists only in the
imagination. Even if one were to allow that such a thing existed, a
linguistic system formed exclusively on the basis of pure Korean would
be a ghastly, totalitarian language. The quest for a beautiful, pure Korean
is not a beautiful thing at all. Beauty resides in contamination and infiltration; it lives in the hybrid and the impure.
Inmul kwa sasang 30 (Spring 2004)
105
Notes
1. The custom of calling ones nations language the national language is
not all that widespread. In schools in England, the language used on a
daily basis by the English is called English, and in schools in France,
the language used on a daily basis by French people is called French. In
fact, the custom of calling ones nations language the national language
seems confined to just a few countries in East Asia. When Koreans call
their language kug and Japanese call their language kokugo (), one
must take into consideration (in addition, that is, to a certain amount of
self-indulgence) the fact that both Korea and Japan are rare examples of
monolingual societies in which the equation one language, one nation
holds better than almost anywhere else on earth. English and French are
simply the first official languages in England and France, respectively,
whereas Korean and Japanese aremore or less true to the wordthe
national languages in Korea and Japan. But any Korean mature enough
to engage in objective self-reflection would refer to his or her language
as hangug (Korean) and not kug (the national language). For more
extended discussion, see my essay Kug, Hangug, Chosn, in Kug
i punggyng tl [Scenes from the national language] (Seoul: Munhak
kwa Chisngsa, 1999), 1519.
2. Purssgi or linearized hangl orthography would write a name like
(Kang Chunman) as . Apparently, Kim Tubong
and other North Korean leaders were planning such an orthographic
reform in the early years of the North Korean regime but deferred implementation until after unification. The general contours of this effort
can be gleaned from Kim Il Sungs two famous Conversations with
Linguists: There have been several controversies about linguistic problems, in particular the problem of script reform. Some people advocated
immediate implementation of script reform, but we opposed this decisively. How would things be if, as they advocated, we were to implement
script reform now? If Koreans in the north and south come to write with
different scripts, they will not be able to read each others letters or publications like newspapers and magazines. This would destroy the common
national characteristics of the Korean people and ultimately would bring
about the dire consequence of dividing the Korean race in two. They
envisioned only their script reform and could not see the sundering of
106
3.
4.
5.
6.
their own people. We are not opposed to script reform per se. Insofar as
there are certain defects in our script, we need to engage in research to
remedy those defects in future. But even if we should undertake script
reform, we should do so only after north and south have been unified,
and after our scientific technology has reached a world-class level. Kim Il
Sung, Chosn rl paltchnsikigi wihan myt kaji munje [Some problems concerning the development of the Korean language], 1964; cited
from Kim Minsu, Pukhan i kug yngu [Research on Korean linguistics
in North Korea], revised and expanded edition (Seoul: Ilchogak, 1997),
136137. Insofar as possible, it would be good to linearize our orthography and thereby make typing easier and make it easier to recognize
words. We must begin a plan for script reform now, bring it to maturity,
and complete it before the unification of the fatherland. If all goes well,
it would also be good to teach the reformed script little by little in the
schools. If we prepare ourselves in this way, once the level of the peoples
technical culture has been raised and the fatherland is unified, we should
do away with our current blockish script and make it so that people can
use the newly reformed script. Kim Il Sung, Chosn i minjok-chk
tksng l olke sallynagal te taehay [On correctly preserving the
national characteristics of Korean], 1966; ibid., 137.
Any serious attempt at a linearized and desyllabified hangl orthography would have to do away with the ing or the placeholder circle
graph () that occurs at the beginning of a syllable that commences with
a vowel. This is precisely what Choe Hynbae proposed in his Hangl
karossgi tokpon [A reader in linearized hangl] (Seoul: Chngmsa,
1963).
Note also that the general inability to realize linguistic purism in practice in South Korea obtains becausecontrary to first appearances
linguistic purism is, in fact, inimical to democratic values.
For more discussion of this issue, see the chapter in this book Disposable
Legacy, Indispensable Heritage: Thoughts on Chinese Characters.
The term wago refers to indigenous Japanese lexical items that are
neither Chinese-character words nor loans from Western languages.
They are also sometimes referred to as yamatokotoba (). Words
borrowed directly from Chinese and words invented in Japan on the
basis of Chinese characters read in their on or Sino-Japanese pronunciations are called kango (). Thus, wago corresponds to native Korean
words and kango to Sino-Korean words.
107
7. For example, in the first edition (1981) of his work nhak [Linguistics]
(Saem munhwasa), one finds neologisms like trri nopim (kymyangpp = hearer deference), ttnaegisori patang (unyul chajil
= prosodic feature), sorihyungnaemal (isng =
phonomime), momtchit-hyungnaemal (itae = phaenomime),
chari (kyk = grammatical case), purimmal (mokchg =
object), kiummal (po = complement), tchak-mal (pandae
= antonym), sumtong (kigwan = trachea), papchul (sikto
= esophagus), soktchimsae (simchng kujo = deep
structure), kyttchaimsae (pyomyn kujo = surface structure), ttt patang (imi chajil = semantic feature), sori
patang (msng chajil = phonetic feature), holsorigorum
(mom chohwa = vowel harmony), kenggim holsori (kinjangmom = tense vowel), ap-holsori (chnsl mom
= front vowel), twi-holsori (huslmom = back vowel),
hymari sori (kwnsrm = retroflex), apkaji (chptusa
= prefix), twitkaji (chmmisa = suffix), hritkaji (chbyosa
= infix), putdalmm (injptonghwa = proximal assimilation), ttrjydalmm (kangyktonghwa = distal assimilation), kyptalmm (ijungdonghwa = double assimilation),
chidalmm (ykhaeng tonghwa = regressive assimilation),
naeridalmm (sunhaengdonghwa = progressive assimilation), tallajim (ihwachagyong = dissimilation), namumjik-ssi
(tadongsa = transitive verb), taggi (chpkun = approach),
taki (milchak = contact/touch), puri chogak (ssulbu =
predicate), and so on.
8. For a discussion of North Koreas ambitious attempts at lexical reform
and an appraisal of the process and results of their experiments, see
my essay Salgyundoen sahoe, wisaengchridoen n [A disinfected
society and a sanitized language], in Sldansang (Seoul: Kaemagown,
2002), 372424.
Chapter 5
110
111
In Defense of an Ingrate
But some of my teachers views puzzle me. For example, when he
stands by indifferently even though mass preferences have become the
most important criterion in literary criticism, or when he goes even
further and embraces the best-seller phenomenon as something that
will make the publishing industry more responsive to consumers, I feel
puzzled, and not just because these sorts of populist or demotic views run
contrary to my own. More than anything else, it is because such views
are fatal to the liberalism and individualism that Pok Kil espouses.
For example, the novel Mugunghwakkochi pissmnida (The rose of
Sharon has bloomed) proved that the general populace is already on its
way to becoming the sole judge of books. The ultranationalist message
spread by this book is unrealistic to achieve in practice, full of logical selfcontradictions, and ethically indefensible, yet numerous readers seized
upon it. The pitiful readers, stupidly intoxicated with the fantasies of
fascism and militarism, spouted on and on ridiculously about recovering
our ancient territories to the North and military retaliation against
Japan, and in the process failed to notice their ugly selves exploiting,
mistreating, and raping migrant laborersdespite, that is, the obvious
logic that as soon as wild notions of pukpl (punitive expeditions to
the North) and chngwae (subjugating the Japs) and the like cease
to be idle fancies and are put into practice, all constituent members of
the ethno-nation in their entirety would face the danger of destruction.
Encountering a reality now where the best-selling books are the best
books, one cannot simply stand by idly and watch, let alone embrace the
situation. I am talking not about the degree of artistic accomplishment of
novels today but about their message (even if, at some deeper level, the
two are inseparable). What is certain is that any time a novel carrying
an ultranationalistic message achieves commercial success, for whatever
reason, such a book can turn its readers into victims of collective autism
and shake the foundations of liberalism.
112
113
114
plenty of other phrases that fit both him and my feelings and attitudes
toward him.
A few years ago when An Tuhi was assassinated and in certain
sectors of society an atmosphere of embrace for his assassin formed to
the extent even that some democratic personages were exalting the
assassin as a patriot and publicly demanding that he be exempt from
prosecution, I wondered to myself if at this rate Korea was not doomed
as a nation. Some time later, after reading the essay A New Framework
for a Source of Social Authority in Pok Kils In Defense of the Minority
(Sosu rl wihan pynmyng), I once again confirmed my sense of pride
in belonging to the same species of human as my teacher. According to
Pok Kil, the attempt to change government by laws to government
by terror can never be justified. For once government by terror begins,
nobody can live with peace of mind.
Yet the way I see it, South Korean society for the eight years under
Chn Tuhwan was truly a society governed by terror rather than by
lawnot just symbolic terror but actual, physical terror. In those days,
too, the law prohibited torture, but even Chn Tuhwan himself would
never believe that there was no torture in those days. Worse, victims of
terror, the most vile forms of terror, were degraded in status to that of
a minority faction and treated with scorn by the general publicas if
having been tortured had come to function as some sort of scarlet letter.
The horrific things endured by Kim Kntae and Kwn Insuk ended up
sometimes as conversation pieces for the public. I have no doubt that the
ultimate responsibility for this kind of pannational breakdown in ethics
lies with Chn Tuhwan. Here and there in his writings, however briefly,
whenever Pok Kil touches on Chn Tuhwan and shows good will or
at least sympathy for this assassin of Korean democracy, I cannot help
feeling bitterness at the mere mention of this name and am unable to
maintain any sense of objective detachment in my heart. In other words,
whenever I encounter in Pok Kils works an occasional deficiency of
democracy, his cool detachment puzzles me.
115
There are still other times when I feel puzzled reading Pok Kilwhenever he sympathizes with the chaebl conglomerates that have turned
into rampant social villains and whenever he is overly critical of the
labor unions who are the true villains holding back our economy. I am
more or less in agreement with his criticisms of Korean labor unions. As
he notes, allowing companies the freedom to release excess labor freely
is hugely beneficial for society; but more importantly, it is because I think
that an ideally fair society is a society where, at least in principle, there
are no alliances composed of individual citizens. It is too easy for the
small interests of a combined minority to oppress the much larger interests of a dispersed majority.
I agree that in the contemporary market economy, labor unions are the
one last remaining legally guaranteed monopolistic forcethat by interfering with the rational and efficient distribution of resources, which
is the fundamental function of the market, they lower the quality of
labor and through wage decisions arrived at via collective bargaining,
they adversely affect prices and ultimately increase unemployment. That
is why I think it desirable to take back the labor unions monopolistic
power by adjusting legislation in the direction of protecting laborers
rights and expanding the social welfare net. Basically, I acknowledge
the virtues of the market and of competition, but then what about the
chaebl conglomerates? I think the chaebl conglomerates are just as
guilty of paralyzing the market as the labor unions are. That is, just as the
labor unions deserve blame for limiting competition by monopolizing
the supply of labor, the chaebl conglomerates (and here I really do mean
chaebl and not companies) deserve censure for limiting the role of the
market and limiting competition by strengthening their monopolistic
positions through their intragroup networks and their cozy relationship
with political power.
Its not so much that I have a different opinion from Pok Kils on
labor unions as that I have a different opinion from him on chaebl
conglomerates. I am hoping not that he will become softer on labor
116
117
118
national languages are one of the main traits that distinguish one ethnonational group from another, and ethno-nationalism often grows and
takes shape on the basis of the ethno-national language, meaning it is
only natural that in his desire to suppress ethno-nationalism with this
book, Pok should make mention here and there of the ethno-national
language.
Still, the book is divided into two partspart 1, titled Ethno-Nationalism in the Age of Global Empire, and part 2, titled The EthnoNational Language in the Age of Global Empireand of the various
essays included in both parts, the only ones that make explicit mention
of the ethno-national language appear in part 2, as the title would
suggest, and among these, the only ones treating the English-as-official-language question are the last two, titled Reflections on the International Language and How Are We to Greet the Twenty-First
Century? (though it also needs to be said that because ethno-nationalism and the ethno-national language are so intimately interconnected,
the boundary lines between parts 1 and 2 of the book are not entirely
clear).
Because the very notion of English as an official language is so
perverse-sounding and so provocative for the average Korean, most
Korean dailies, too, from considerations of commercial self-interest,
framed the debate primarily around this question, but I should emphasize for the sake of a fair evaluation of Poks book that his aim was to
discuss not simply the ethno-national language but ethno-nationalism
more generally.3
Actually, if one puts aside for a moment the two essays that explicitly deal with the English-as-official-language question that sparked the
most debate and glances over the other essays in Poks book, there are
no obvious statements so provocative as to rend asunder the universal
net of reasoning that all people possess, even if his essays deviate somewhat from the discursive practices dominant in South Korean society.
To be sure, and as Pok Kil himself has noted, ethno-nationalism in
119
Korean society is not only powerful but also largely indiscriminate, with
the result that many readers experience a certain amount of psychological discomfort reading his arguments. Nationalism is such a sensitive
topic in South Korea that it renders cool, detached discussion impossible.
As soon as the word nationalism comes up, the equations nationalism =
patriotism and nonnationalism = treason pop up as well, and the conversation stops there. But Pok Kil tells readers that the conversation should
not stop there; his hope is that continuing the conversation on this sensitive topic will help mitigate that sensitivity.
I think his hope may already have been realized to a certain extent.
The debate surrounding his book seems to have popularized the topic
somewhat; any reader that was able to endure the psychological discomfort and read the book to the end will have realized that nationalism
is not some sacred and inviolable doctrine and, moreover, that it is an
extremely dangerous and damaging ideology. Of course, just because
readers may have realized this does not mean that they will lightly
shed their nationalist garb becausejust as Pok Kil himself has noted
nationalism assumes the form of a doctrine when it is, in essence, an
emotional state.
120
121
122
the driving force behind those two political revolutions in the eighteenth century and behind the movements for national liberation since
the nineteenth century, and many would agree that there are quite
a few other cases in which nationalism became a stepping stone on
the way to freedom. Such views hold that nationalism, in combination
with certain historical contingencies, can be a progressive force. But I
am not particularly attracted by this form of common sense in world
history. To my mind, what helped make postrevolutionary America
and France free were the liberal, democratic ideas like the doctrine of
natural rights and sovereignty of the peoplenot nationalism. The same
goes for the national liberation movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The flourishing of nationalism may bring independence
to a people, but it cannot make the individual members comprising
the newly independent nation free. History proves this. How often has
nationalism, whether in the case of large nations or of small, brought
with it outwardly focused attempts at domination and inwardly focused
collectivism? In other words, that which gave freedom to individual
Americans, individual Frenchmen, and individual citizens in newly independent states was not liberal nationalism but liberalism. Even if one
concedes that it was liberal nationalism, the key word is not nationalism
but liberal.
123
tioneseI also believe that this problem requires just as much profound
discussion as the question of English as an official language does. So I
would like to elaborate at some length on several of the points Pok Kil
touched on his short essays. Readers may find this somewhat tedious but
should considerate it a warm-up to the related question of English as an
international language.
There is one period in the history of human culture that has always
held me in its thrallnot the time of the ancient Greeks and Romans,
which formed the basis of European culture, not the glorious times
of Tang China, with its refined and aristocratic culture that boasted
literary geniuses like Li Bo, Du Fu, Han Yu, and Liu Zongyuan, not
the European Renaissance, with its polymaths and well-rounded prodigies, nor the Korean equivalent of the Western Renaissance in the form
of the Sirhak (practical learning) School at its height under the
reigns of King Yngjo and Chngjo. Prominent cultural efflorescences
like these have their attractions for me, but what moves me even more
are the Japanese Rangaku (Dutch learning; i.e., the intense scholarly research into Dutch texts) episodes from the mid-Edo period and
the boom in translation that occurred during the Meiji period and after.
This is because between them, the Edo-period Rangaku movement and
the Meiji-period translation boom represent a brilliant chapter whereby
Eastern and Western cultures came into conversation with each other in
the form of a harmonizing of the hanmun civilizational sphere and
the Graeco-Roman civilizational sphere.
When, at the end of the eighteenth century, the Rangaku movement
officially began with the translation by Sugita Genpaku and
others of a Dutch anatomy manual by the title of Kaitai shinsho
, it soon expanded from the medical works of the early period to
include chemistry, physics, astronomy, military science, and more, until
ultimately it had laid the foundations for turning the entire world into
a single civilizational sphere. At this time, East Asia was the one region
on earth where the footprints of Europeans were still scarce. The great-
124
ness of the Japanese lay not in putting the finishing touches on the globalization of European culture but in voraciously absorbing that culture
and, in the process, completely assimilating it into Chinese characters,
the common legacy of East Asian civilization.
The first contacts between Japan and the West go back as far as
1543 and the Tanegashima incident (when Japan acquired two
firearms from some Portuguese who put ashore at Tanegashima Island,
to the south of Kysh; soon these weapons became widespread in Japan
and wreaked havoc in Korea during the Hideyoshi invasions of 1592
1598), but full-fledged cultural contacts did not get under way until the
eighteenth century and the compilation of a Dutch-Japanese dictionary
by the interpreters in Nagasaki under orders from the Bakufu.
The crux of the Rangaku enterprise undertaken by the Rangaku
scholars in the Bakufu in Edo (modern-day Tokyo) with the assistance of the interpreters in Nagasaki was translation. The Rangaku
scholars worked laboriously in order to translate into Japanese European concepts from Dutch (and from other European languages refracted
through Dutch), and after the Meiji Restoration, these efforts were
expanded into a much larger translation project on a vast scale that led to
the full-scale importation of European culture. These various translation
activities were by no means easy. After all, they had to absorb European
culture in an unmediated and independent fashion, rather than through
China, which had established contacts with European civilization much
earlier than Japan had. Besides, even if they had wanted to use China
as an intermediary, Chinas absorption of European culture was far too
insufficient to satisfy the intellectual demands of the Japanese. To put it
another way, there was no easy model for the Japanese to follow.
Today, for example, Korean lexicographers responsible for compiling
English-Korean dictionaries and French-Korean dictionaries have a
frame of reference in previously published English-Japanese and FrenchJapanese dictionaries. But there were no such frames of reference for
the interpreters in Nagasaki or for the Edo Rangaku scholarsin order
125
to translate a Dutch word into Japanese, they had to first investigate its
etymology, its changes through time, and its contemporary usage before
choosing corresponding Chinese characters and creating a new equivalent. And because in many cases, even if the book being translated was
in Dutch, the work itself might have been translated from another European language, the interpreters and Rangaku scholars were also obliged
to dip their toes into other European languages, as well as into the classical languages of Greek and Latin.
In cases where Japan or East Asia already had vocabulary for similar
concepts, the problem was not so great, but because the majority of the
Dutch words the scholars were attempting to translate were alien to
126
Japanese and East Asian cultural tradition, their troubles were that much
greater. It was a labor requiring extreme passion and talent, and the
interpreters and Rangaku scholars carried it out successfully. Words like
the ones seen in table 4, which are still in use today, were first created
through translation from the Dutch by the Edo interpreters and Rangaku
scholars.
In cases where no satisfactory translation could be found, they sometimes also imported the word in toto. For example, instead of translating
the Dutch natuur (now J. shizen = K. chayn), they imported it as
natsuuru.
At the end of the Bakufu period, the center of ygaku (Western
studies = K. yanghak) shifted from Rangaku to eigaku (the study
of Western culture through English), but in accordance with the socalled Datsua ny (Out of Asia, into Europe = Reject Asia,
embrace Europe) line, Western studies reached its zenith in the years
following the Meiji Restoration (1868), during which countless calques
were created. As early as the end of the Bakufu period, several thousand volumes of Western books would arrive each month in the port
of Nagasaki, but after the Meiji Restoration this trend strengthened
and Western culture overwhelmed the Japanese archipelago in wave
after wave. Profound research followed, not only into the Netherlands,
England, and America but into all of Europe and its languages, and the
resulting new calques were even better elaborated than before. Tables
5a and 5b show some examples of these new calques.
127
128
129
Table 6a. Neologisms created by the Japanese by combining Chinese characters into new words.
130
Table 6b. Neologisms created by the Japanese by combining Chinese characters into new words (Continued).
131
Table 6c. Neologisms created by the Japanese by combining Chinese characters into new words (Continued).
For the most part, the calques created by the Edo-period Rangaku
scholars, especially the European words translated since the Meiji period,
were coined using Chinese characters and were absorbed as Sino-Korean
forms into Korean; a huge number of them were also reexported back
to China, the country of origin of Chinese characters. It is interesting
132
to note that the vast majority of the words cited here are familiar to
educated Koreans when presented in Chinese characters.
If, as some Korean purists advocate, Koreans were to purge from the
Korean language all remnants of the Japanese languageincluding even
made-in-Japan Sino-vocabularyKoreans would hardly be able to utter
a sentence and would be limited to single-word utterances. The vast
majority of words listed in Korean-Korean dictionaries are Sino-vocabulary items, and the vast majority of these Sino-vocabulary words were
created in Japan. The word nationalism, the theme of the book that was
the point of departure for my discussion in this chapter, is also a Japanese
invention, and the lovely essays by the Korean language purists urging
Koreans to banish Japanese-language elements from Korean are all made
up of words from Japan.
This is an unfortunate thing for Koreans. It would have been so much
nicer if the translations undertaken by the Japanese Rangaku scholars
and Meiji-period scholars of Western civilization had also been undertaken by our own early modern Korean ancestors. But Japan beat Korea
to the punch in terms of contact with the West, and it was the Japanese
with their amazing appetite who absorbed Western culture first and
metamorphosed it into Chinese characters, and because Japanese got to
play the role of national language on the Korean Peninsula from the
time of annexation in 1910 until liberation in 1945, Koreans missed their
chance to adapt Western culture independently and incorporate it into
the Korean language system. Like it or not, and thanks to the labors of the
Japanese, Koreans have traversed the path of Sinographicized Western
culture with relative ease. And one thing is certainprecisely because
they used the medium of Chinese characters, the countless neologisms
coined on the Japanese archipelago ever since the Meiji period were
absorbed immediately into Korean, thereby doubling the Korean lexicon
and greatly elevating Koreans consciousness of the wider world. That
all of this was not achieved through Korean efforts does not change the
133
fact that the ensuing enrichment of the Korean language and epochal
change in Korean consciousness was a good thing for Koreans.4
That the Edo-period interpreters in Nagasaki, the Rangaku scholars
from the same period, and the Meiji scholars of Western culture who
followed them all translated Western concepts using Chinese characters is extremely important. There were many reasons for them to use
Chinese characters in translating Western concepts. First and foremost
must have been the remarkable word-formation power of Chinese characters, but a certain respect for Chinese culture must have played a reinforcing role, too. Indeed, just as most of the Sino-vocabulary in Korean
comprises high-level concept words, whereas native Korean words tend
to be basic vocabulary, in Japanese, too, kango (words imported
directly from China, or else words created in Japan using Chinese charactersi.e., the equivalents of Sino-Korean vocabulary) are mostly conceptual words, whereas wago (words assumed to be neither SinoJapanese nor Western loanwords, hence native Japanese, also referred
to as Yamato kotoba ) comprise most of the basic vocabulary. It must have been only natural that Rangaku scholars and their
descendants chose kango rather than wago in order to translate new
Western concepts in such a cultural and linguistic atmosphere. Their
choice must have been an unpalatable one to the ultranationalists who
worshipped the so-called Yamatodamashii , or Japanese spirit,
but it was precisely their unpalatable choice that eventually lent Japanese
the greatness and glory it enjoys today.
134
cultural (and political and economic) power was greatest among the
three East Asian nations beginning at the end of the nineteenth century.
Besides, for a substantial portion of the first half of the twentieth century,
Koreans had to learn Japanese as the national language, so it is hardly
strange that many Japanese words should have entered Korean.
But if the Japanese had created their neologisms based on native
Japanese rather than on Chinese characters, would those new words
have been imported on the same grand scale into both Korean and
Chinese? I think it would have been impossible. Even if a certain
number of such words had been imported, most of them would have
been pushed out immediately by so-called language-purism movements.
Indeed, the language-purification movements pursued in both North and
South Korea after liberation managed to drive out most of the nonSino-vocabulary words that had crossed over from Japan. Words like
nedabai (J. netabai) swindling, cheating, ssri (J. suri) pickpocket,
and nawabari (J. nawabari) domain, stomping grounds, bailiwick still
remain, but there are few such cases, and their days are numbered. Moreover, because most such words tend to be confined to professional jargon
or slang, it is difficult for them to penetrate beyond the outer periphery
of Korean. But made-in-Japan Sino-vocabulary is completely different.
These words will maintain their vitality as long as both Korean and
Chinese continue to exist.
One of the important reasons for this state of affairs is that neither
Koreans nor Chinese think of these words as Japanese. It is possible to
write them in Chinese characters, but because one reads the characters
in either their Sino-Korean or Mandarin pronunciations, there is virtually no worry of clashes between such words and preexisting Korean
or Chinese vocabulary. In fact, without specialized knowledge, average
Koreans and Chinese have no way of knowing whether a Sino-vocabulary item was coined in China, Korea, or Japan. Even though the made-inJapan Sino-vocabulary that began pouring into Korean after the opening
of Korean ports must have struck Koreans at the time as newfangled,
135
it did not strike them as being Japanese. This was all the more true
because the words entered the language mostly in written form rather
than via spoken language. Even Koreans with absolutely no knowledge
of Japanese were able to incorporate these words into their vocabularies with ease, and using the words occasioned none of the psychological burden of using a foreign language or foreign loanwords. As far as
Koreans back then were concerned, the words were not Japanese vocabulary but simply Sino-vocabulary of the sort that Koreans had already
been using for nearly two thousand years.
That this was so is confirmed by the fact that wago words (native
Japanese words, as opposed to Sino-Japanese words = kango ) could
be imported into Korean and would stick, with the proviso that their
kundoku (vernacular Japanese) readings were jettisoned in favor of SinoKorean pronunciations based on the Chinese characters with which they
were written in Japanese. In other words, Japanese wago written in
Chinese characters and read with kundoku vernacular readings
entered Korean as written loans and were read with mdok SinoKorean pronunciation, as seen by the examples in tables 7a and 7b.
It is words like these in particular that have been targeted by Korean
language purists, who, for example, wish to change susok to chlcha,
or taemaechul to (English!) pagensseil bargain sale, but this type of
imported word wont go away easily because words like these are
read according to their Sino-Korean mdok pronunciation, which is
completely unrelated to the original Japanese kundoku reading, and have
therefore become Koreanized. If these words had been imported from
Japanese in their kundoku readings, it would have been difficult for them
to survive for long.
136
137
138
139
make solidify. with the Sino-Korean nggo solidification, congelation + causative siki- make do/be. Likewise, whereas the Latin
verb auscultare listen attentively evolved into the modern French
couter listen, it was also borrowed from texts in the form ausculter.
Whereas the formation populaire in couter more or less preserves the
Latin meaning, the formation savante in ausculter has taken on the more
specialized meaning of listen via auscultation/stethoscopy. The Latin
frigidus cold evolved into the French froid id., but was borrowed
in the form of frigide (indifferent, cool) from texts; the Latin navigare
(navigate) evolved into the French nager swim, whereas the textual
borrowing naviguer retains the original Latin meaning. There are also
cases in which the semantics of these doublets are quite different. The
Latin articulus, meaning joint, evolved into the French orteil, which
means finger, whereas the textual loan has the shape article, which
means clause; provision, (grammatical) article, and (newspaper)
article, in addition to its original Latin meaning. In cases where the
doublets are similar in their semantics, the popular forms tend to belong
to colloquial language, and the scholarly forms belong to written or
literary language.
To be sure, evolution from Vulgar Latin and borrowings from classical Latin are not the only routes that produce doublets. Though they
are somewhat less common, there are also several other routes whereby
modern French has come to have doublets. For example, in doublets
in table 8, both modern forms have evolved from the same textual
borrowing (formation savante). Doublets like these have come about
through different developments of the same Latin suffix in French.
140
Yet other doublets came about through survivals of the Old French
nominative and accusative case forms; see table 9 for examples. And in
the doublet consisting of djeuner lunch and dner supper, the same
etymon has come to designate two different mealtimes.
Table 9. Doublets from the Old French nominative and accusative case forms.
There are also cases in which the formation savante hails not from
Latin but from another Romance language. The popular form noir black
has evolved from Vulgar Latin, but its doublet formation savante in ngre
141
(as well as ngro black person) is a loan from Spanish negro black. Of
course, the etymological source of both Spanish negro and French noir
is Latin nigrum (the neuter gender of niger black). In similar fashion,
the formations savantes corresponding to the popular forms in cheval
horse ~ chevalier knight ~ chevauche cavalcade are cavale mare
~ cavalier cavalryman ~ cavalcade cavalcade, all of which are loans
from Italian. Ditto for the learned form cadence rhythm, beat, which
has a doublet in the popular form chance luck; opportunity. Sometimes
languages outside the Romance language group participate in doublet
pairs. The popular form voeu oath; wish is thought to form a doublet
with vote vote, an English loan; like the French voeu, the English word
vote, which first appeared as a political term in the fifteenth century,
has its origins in the classical Latin votum, meaning supplication, oblation. In the case of some doublets, one of the pair retains the form of the
original Latin word intact (or at least with the bare minimum of French
makeup), as seen in table 10.
Table 10. Doublets where one word retains the original Latin shape.
Some cases attest not doublets but triplets; see table 11 for examples.
142
Quite a few doublet forms originate in ancient Greek, albeit via the intermediary of Latin. For example: amande almond and amygdale tonsils
Latin amygdale Greek amugdal; blme blame, reproach and
blasphme blasphemy Latin blasphemia blasphemy Greek blasphmia verbal abuse, slander; cercueil coffin and sarcophagie stone
coffin, sarcophagus Latin sarcophagus grave Greek sarkophagos
flesh-eating; colre anger and cholra cholera Latin cholera
bilious illness; irritability Greek cholera diseases of the digestive
organs, including cholera; parvis front yard and paradis paradise
Latin paradisus land enclosed in a wall Greek paradeisos
land enclosed in a wall Persian pardez land enclosed in a wall;
safre cobalt oxide and saphir sapphire Latin sapphires Greek
sappheiros. Some doublets go back to non-European languages, such
as Arabic: chiffre number, numeral and zro zero Arabic sifr
empty; zero, mir emir, and amiral admiral Arabic amir prince;
commanding officer; leader.
In some doublets, both words are loans but were borrowed at different
times. For example, communier take communion and communiquer
inform, be in contact with, relate communicare share with; form
a relationship with. Or in opposite cases, both words in a doublet
have evolved from a common etymological source but have ended up
in different phonetic places by chance. For example, pavilion pavilion;
barracks and papillon butterfly are both from the Latin papilio (genitive papilonis) meaning butterfly; tent, canvas.
143
But doublets formed via routes like these represent the minority
in French. Most French doublets have come about through retentions
and developments of Vulgar Latin forms into formations populaires and
borrowings from or neologisms based on classical Latin as formations
savantes.
There are also cases when doublets are not at all immediately obvious,
because although there are occasionally cases in which both forms are
virtually the same in form and semantics, there are many more in
which these are quite different. And there are almost no rules governing
how and why both form and meaning come to diverge. At the level
of signifiant (signifier), one finds examples like piti pity and pit
piety, piousness that look quite similar, but compare the very different
gaine scabbard and vagin vagina or the case of orteil toe and
article clause, provision, mentioned earlier. Without research into their
etymologies, it is difficult to know that these words share the same
etymological source. In general, one can say that the formation populaire
is shorter because the evolutionary process from Vulgar Latin to French
has typically involved the loss of phonological segments. At the level of
signifi, too, the relationship between the two forms in a doublet is difficult to discern. In rare cases, the two forms are virtually synonymous
for example, geindre and gmir groan, moan; plier and ployer bend,
fold; pieu and pal stake.
In the following cases, the doublets cannot be called synonyms, but the
difference in meaning is more a difference in nuance, and the forms could
be classified in Korean as yui words of similar meaning: grle
spindly, lanky and gracile slender; aigre sour; bitter and cre acrid,
pungent; charbon coal, charcoal and carbone carbon; fal loyal,
steadfast and fidle loyal, faithful; froid cold and frigide cold, heartless, unfeeling; jumeaux twins and Gmeaux Gemini. But doublets
like essaim swarm of bees; large group and examen test, exam, or
orteil toe and article clause, provision are very difficult to link semantically.
144
145
level of signifiant and often on the level of signifi, too. Kwang and
kobang shared a nearly identical signifi, but the signifis for sanyang and
sanhaeng are rather different. As can be seen in the case of kwang and
kobang, Korean popular formsjust like the popular forms in Romance
doubletsare frequently shorter than their learned counterparts because
the process whereby formerly learned forms change into popular forms
involves not just sound change and the loss of segments but often the
loss of entire syllables. But Korean doublets and Romance doublets also
differ in certain respects. First of all, in the case of Korean doublets,
both forms are loanwords. The popular forms undergo so much change
in shape that it becomes impossible to write them with Chinese characters, which means they are usually regarded as native forms, but
etymologically speaking they are still loans. In contrast, in the case
of the Romance languages, the learned forms are borrowed from classical documents, and the popular forms have evolved from the vernacular. This is why the learned forms in the Romance languages are
loans (even though the source of the loans is the mother language), and
the popular forms are indigenous or native. Of course, this difference owes to the fact that whereas the Romance languages are daughter
languages of Latin, Korean is genetically unrelated to Chinese. Second,
whereas in the Romance languages most of the learned forms are of relatively late provenance (compared to the popular forms), in Korean the
popular forms came about later than the learned forms didthe popular
forms are simply learned forms that have undergone morphological
and semantic change and distortion. Finally, in Korean the popularlearned doublets are frequently in a relationship that is better described
as loose synonymy than as true synonymy. The same phenomenon is
not unknown in the Romance languages but is rarer. For more examples
of doublets showing loose synonymy like kwang and kobang, see tables
12a12b; and for more examples along the lines of sanyang and sanhaeng
with somewhat more divergent semantics, see tables 13a13c.
146
Table 12a. Examples of doublets showing loose synonymy like kwang and
kobang.
147
Table 12b. Examples of doublets showing loose synonymy like kwang and
kobang.
148
Table 13a. Examples along the lines of sanyang and sanhaeng with somewhat
more divergent semantics.
149
Table 13b. Examples along the lines of sanyang and sanhaeng with somewhat
more divergent semantics.
150
Table 13c. Examples along the lines of sanyang and sanhaeng with somewhat
more divergent semantics.
151
152
153
154
But that such neologisms based on Latin and Greek are being created
in European languages, too, is extremely important. Much as was the
case with the Japanese Rangaku scholars and their descendants who
have created new Sino-vocabulary based on Chinese characters out of an
abiding respect for Sinitic civilization, European and American scholars
creation of new conceptual vocabulary using Latin and Greek roots
reflects their respect for ancient Greek and Roman culture. This practice is perhaps somewhat unsatisfactory for those European scholars
who speak a language more distant from these classical languages (e.g.,
speakers of Germanic or Slavic languages), but this nonnational, nonegocentric choice of the scholars actually lends prestige and glory to
their mother tongues. If the new words created by scholars from the
Germanic- and Slavic-speaking spheres had not been based on Latin and
155
Greek, they would hardly have been able to spread so quickly to other
languages.
For example, suppose that American scholars with particularly strong
feelings of allegiance for English as a Germanic language created new
terms based on Germanic roots. Of course, because the United States
is such a powerful country, such terms would likely spread beyond the
Anglophone world. But they would not spread as quickly as new words
based on Latin and Greek do and would create a greater psychological burden on their users. If scholars were to create the new words
using native English (Germanic) roots, French and Polish speakers (for
example) would perceive them as completely foreign. But everything
changes if the neologisms are created on the basis of Latin and Greek.
Whoever creates such new words, and whatever language the creator
of such new words speaks, they are accepted as somehow familiar by
speakers of European languages because such neologisms are just additional items added to a long list of words with classical roots encountered
in all these languages for more than a millennium. In other words, just as
Chinese characters are not the unique possession of Chinese speakers
but function instead as a common cultural resource binding East Asian
peoples together, Greek and Latin lexical roots are a cultural resource
binding together speakers of European languages. In a sense, then, just as
all East Asians are Chinese, all Europeans are Greeks. Equally important
to remember is that, just as the overwhelming majority of Sino-vocabulary loans in East Asia have taken place via writing (through texts), the
vast majority of Graeco-Latin loan vocabulary in European languages,
too, has come in through writing and texts. Needless to say, this is closely
related to the fact that Latin functioned as the common literary language
of Europe for a very long time, and classical Chinese (hanmun , as
it is called today in modern Korea) had the same function in East Asia.
But I will need to revisit this question later, in my discussion of English
as an official language.
156
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164
165
166
long enough to fill a sizeable dictionary. English has the richest vocabulary of all the languages ever known, and the most important reason for
this is to be found in the fact that English has been fundamentally open
to foreign loanwords.
And the most important such foreign loanwords have been those
from French and Latin. That the Anglo-Saxon words in these semantically related doublets tend to be more familiar everyday words whereas
the French-derived words are typically more serious and official can
be readily seen from the examples just listed. Of course, the AngloSaxon word dale is a more literary and difficult word than the Frenchderived valley, but for the most part the nuances of the French-, Latin-,
and Greek-derived words are weightier than those of their semantically
similar Anglo-Saxon counterparts. It goes without saying that the SinoKorean words on the left in the list in table 15 are similarly weightier and
more official sounding than the native Korean equivalents on the right.
167
Table 15. Sino-Korean words weightier and more official sounding than the
native Korean equivalents.
In Korean, too, one can find exceptions, like the native Korean pal and
the Sino-Korean chok (), meaning foot, in which the latter has a
more vulgar feeling to it than the former, but such cases are rare. Just
as the Norman invasion of 1066 led to an invasion of French words that
nourished English, the invasion of Sino-vocabulary since ancient times
(whether the invaders were from China or Japan or were made-in-Korea
words) has swelled the Korean lexicon and added to it a myriad of refined
nuances. And until the end of the nineteenth century when the language
nationalists and their purism movement began to advocate ousting the
Sino-vocabulary from Korean, Koreans viewed Sino-vocabulary as an
integral constituent part of the Korean language, an attitude much like
that the English took toward French-derived vocabulary.
168
The absorption into English of foreign words did not end with French.
Starting with the Renaissance, English took in countless Latin words, too
sometimes directly via Latin documents, sometimes via the medium
of Frenchand Anglicized them. Naturally, Greek words already assimilated to Latin were also imported. And of course, humanists added many
Greek works to English through direct contact with Greek texts.
English never showed any resistance to French or the European classical languagesor to any foreign language, for that matter. Even back
when England was still the epicenter of English, there were already
words in English with pedigrees traceable to every corner of the world,
and when the United States became the new epicenter for the English
language at the beginning of the twentieth century, American English
had been borrowing words from Native American languages, too, for
hundreds of years. A similar situation held for the varieties of English
that had put down roots in other parts of the world. This was truly a boon
for the English language. The rich stock of vocabulary borrowed into
English from numerous languages lent a fine-grained texture to English,
thereby contributing massively to its ongoing refinement.
To be sure, purism was by no means absent among Anglophone
literary figures. Writers like Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Gerard
Manley Hopkins, and George Orwell praised the strength and beauty
of Anglo-Saxon vocabulary. It was in the nineteenth century, in particular, when Romanticism swept through Britain, that the poet William
Barnes (18011886), in an effort to protect the Anglo-Saxon purity of
English, considered it his duty to drive French, Latin, and Greek words
from the language. He revived Old English inwit to replace conscience
and used the neologism birdlore in place of ornithology. He even made
up the word mate-wording to replace synonym. Most Anglophone lexicographers today ignore his effortsthe Oxford English Dictionary lists
only his speechcraft (for grammar) and starlore (for astronomy).
Actually, Barnes had a predecessor in the sixteenth-century humanist
and classical scholar John Cheek (15141557), who in the course of
169
translating the Bible into English used mooned for lunatic, hundreder for
centurion, foresayer for prophet, crossed for crucified, and gainrising for
resurrection. Likewise, in the eighteenth-century, Joseph Addison (1672
1719), poet and founder of the Spectator magazine, launched a campaign
to purify English of French words.
But whether by chance or owing to something in the English temperament, language-purification movements in England remained at the level
of salient intermittent personal efforts and fleeting episodes, never developing into group movements as they did in Germany.
It is not just the influence of foreign languages to which English has
been indifferent. English has also been wholly unconcerned with the
entire notion of language degradation. That neither England nor the
United States has ever felt the need for a language-protection agency
along the lines of the language associations that were all the rage
in Germany, the Italian Academia Crusca, and the French Acadmie
Franaise reflects this open posture of English speakers.
But England was not completely without attempts at such organizations. Jonathan Swift, famous author of Gullivers Travels, was incensed
with the degradation that he perceived in eighteenth-century English
and proposed creating an academy. What most concerned him was
the craze for abbreviated words, and he cited concrete examples like
rep for reputation, incog for incognito, plenipo for plenipotentiary, pozz
for positive and mob for mobile vulgus. In the last example, the vulgus
(popular masses) dropped away, leaving just mobile (noisy), which in
turn was abbreviated to simply mob, which then gained its current
modern meaning. It is often thought that such forms are the creations of
twentieth-century journalism or the inventions of new generations, but
in fact they are specimens of popular linguistic wisdom from as early
as the eighteenth century. Despite Swifts criticism of abbreviated forms
like these, abbreviation is gradually spreading not only in English but
in other languages, too. Swift would have been annoyed to see that the
170
form in mob he vehemently decried has now won the day and pushed
out mobile vulgus entirely.
Swift proposed the establishment of an academy to institutionalize
corrective mechanisms for the degradation he perceived, but after much
acrimonious debate, the English opted to do nothing. Instead, they
set about compiling a dictionary. The dictionary compiled by eighteenth-century Englands Samuel Johnson (17091784) and the dictionary of American English compiled by nineteenth-century Americas
Noah Webster (17581843) became models for the countless dictionaries
that appeared after them in the Anglophone world. Ultimately, the work
performed by these dictionaries was similar to that performed by academies insofar as it helped establish language norms, but there is a fundamental difference: whereas academies (or dictionaries compiled by them)
assert leadership over a language, dictionaries produced by ordinary citizens, like those of Johnson and Webster, follow the languages lead. In
other words, whereas the English and the Americans gave their language
free rein, the Germans, by fetishizing and idolizing their language for a
considerable period of time, evinced a much different attitude.
171
present day. In the early Shwa period (19261989), Tokyo University professor of Japanese History Hiraizumi Kiyoshi used to
preach to students in his lectures as follows: It is only natural that there
are no languages genetically related to Japanese. For Japan is a shinkoku
(realm of the gods) and Japanese is a descendant of the language
of the gods.
This bizarre linguistic mysticism has left strong traces even today to
the extent that there are even some language specialistslinguists in
Japanwho maintain that Japanese is somehow special and is different
from any other language in the world. In 1979 a scholar by the name of
Tsunoda Tadanobu wrote a book titled The Japanese Brain, in
which he claimed that Japanese people use their brains in a completely
different way from people in other nations and in which he claimed
to have found physiological evidence for the special features of the
Japanese language. Even after this linguistic mysticism was refuted by
mainstream linguists, attempts have persisted until today to emphasize that, for example, the Japanese language is unique in the world
in using several different writing systems like Chinese characters, hiragana, katakana, and Arabic numerals all at once or that Japanese is
unique in its reading of Chinese characters in that it uses not only SinoJapanese ondoku readings but also vernacular Japanese kundoku
readings, and so on. But it is hardly the case that the essence of
these unique featuresorthographic variability (e.g., hito person can
be written three ways: as the Chinese character , with hiragana
, and with katakana ) and variability in pronunciation (e.g., the
Chinese characters spring and autumn can be read as haruaki or
shunj; if one adds to this the completely ad hoc way in which personal
names are read, it is basically difficult to know with 100 percent certainty
how many Chinese characters are to be read, even in the case of many
common words) somehow reveal the linguistic genius of the Japanese
people. If anything, they reveal the immaturity, if not of the Japanese
language itself, of Japanese orthography.7
172
173
acters, one has become neurotic and the other psychotic. The
castration experienced by Koreans in the course of accepting
Chinese characters is a typical phenomenon of peripheral ethnonations that come into contact with more advanced civilized
nations. In this respect, one might say that the Koreans are easier
for Westerners to understand than the Japanese, and precisely
for this reason, Koreans pose no mysteries. Japan is different.
Only Japan distinguishes the etymological source of words with
three types of writing. This typically Japanese feature is the key
to understanding not just Japanese literature but all manner of
Japanese institutions and thought.
The original title of An Analysis of the Japanese Psyche was Japan and
Foucault, Japan and Lacan, and it was only the Japan and Lacan that
was translated into Korean for publication in Changjak kwa pipyng.
But even this short excerpt contains numerous incongruities with fact
and inconsistencies of logic. The first point to emphasize is that kundoku
, despite any misunderstandings easily occasioned by its constituent
Chinese characters, is not a reading method but a writing method.
Reading Chinese characters with non-Chinese vernacular pronunciations (kundoku in Japanese, hundok in Korean) was adopted for a time
and to a certain extent by Koreans and is used today by Japaneseagain,
to a certain extent. It is not a reading method but simply a clumsy means
of writing (Korean or Japanese using Chinese characters) engendered by
the lack of an indigenous writing system suitable for writing an agglutinating language. Nor is Karatani ignorant of this point. This is why
he claims that the Japanese first internalized foreign Chinese characters via kundoku. In order to explain the meaning of internalize, Karatani
kindly comments that Japanese people no longer think they are reading
Chinese characters in their kun readings and instead simply believe they
are expressing Japanese through Chinese characters, but quite apart
from what Japanese people might think, this is precisely the essence of
kundoku~hundok. Whereas Japanese persists in using this clumsy orthographic practice, Korean has long since outgrown it.
174
175
176
177
scope and scalethe katakana forms indexing foreign loans in modernday written Japanese are so numerous as to make ones head spin. The
foreign words that entered Japanese from the warring-states period until
the end of the Bakufu came mostly from Portuguese, Spanish, and Dutch,
whereas those that entered the language in great numbers starting in the
Meiji period came from major European languages like French, German,
Russian, and Italian, but of course the overwhelming majority of these
European loanwords came from English. A substantial number of these
European loans were also imported into Korean after Japans annexation
of Korea in 1910.
The fondness of the Japanese language for foreign loanwords (and
foreign languages) is not restricted by occupational group, and government agencies, in particular, stand at the vanguard, spreading this
linguistic laissez-faire-ism. For example, in the 1980s the postal administration came up with a teretopia (teletopia) project, and the Ministry of
Construction developed a plan called sheipu appu mai taun (shape up my
town). Moreover, the Japanese have adopted a liberalism in pronunciation whereby they summarily chop off the ends of European loanwords for conveniences sake and create new words like depto from
department store, sando from sandwich (which then becomes a homonym
with sando from sand), panku from puncture, and terebi from television.
Foreigners complain that they find learning European loanwords like
these even more difficult than learning wago or kango. Just as a considerable number of wasei kango (made-in-Japan Chinese-character
words) were created between the time of the Rangaku scholars in the Edo
period and the time when the huge numbers of translated words were
created during the Meiji, numerous new Japanese-style English words
have been created in Japanese. On top of this, the Japanese have also
created many hybrid words that combine, willy-nilly, native Japanese,
Sino-Japanese, and foreign elements. It is as if Japanese cannot make
up its mind among German-style exclusionism and xenophobia and
English-style laissez-faireism.
178
179
180
181
Kil didnt actually use the expression worldliness) is just another word
for individuality, and this individuality is more concretemore local, to
borrow Yi Yungis phraseologythan any collective properties, ethnonationality included. If Yi Yungis concrete locality can be subsumed
within individuality, then Yi Yungi (whatever his original intention may
have been) is supporting Pok Kil. But if Yi Yungis concrete locality
means only the walled-off ethno-nationin other words, if what he
means is our home, our native place, our neighborhood, and our friends
must never go beyond the enclosures of our ethno-nationthen the last
two sentences in this passage are disingenuous.
182
183
184
185
186
187
was both wise and unavoidable for them. Even if one concedes that
English as an official language is necessary in Korea, he adds, it will
be possible only several centuries later in a situation where English has
spread far and wide naturally. And, he says, even if one supposes that
English as an official language is possible in Korea, there needs to be
intense discussion as to whether it would be a rational choice to replace
the ethno-national language that carries the spiritual heritage of seventy
million people with a foreign language. Pak Imun also points outin a
premise similar to Pok Kilsthat language does not exist simply as a
tool. I seem to be vacillating between Pak Imun and Pok Kil.
188
189
nology in Latin, it would never have been able to take root as the definitive international system of botanical binomial nomenclature.
It needs to be emphasized that scholars adoption of Latin for their
works was not simply a matter of prestige; communication and propagation were also key motivations. Both Galileos Dialogue Concerning
the Two Chief World Systems (1632) and Francis Bacons Sylva sylvarum
(1627; a kind of scientific encyclopedia, the title of which means forest
of forests in Latin but which was originally composed in English) were
translated into Latin after their authors deaths, and Descartes translated
his own Discours de la mthode into Latin in 1644. In tandem with the
rise of the vernaculars as languages of publishing, books published in
the vernaculars were also frequently translated into Latin. Translation
into Latin was the only way to make these works available to foreign
readers; besides, authors also had to keep in mind those scholars in their
own communities who worked only in Latin.
Thus, Latin was used as the language of science until the beginning
of the eighteenth century, and lectures in theology and classics were
conducted in Latin until the beginning of the twentieth century. Use of
the vernacular in university science education did not begin until 1740 in
Germany (and then only partially) and in France not until after the revolution in 1789. But Latin continued to be used, if only partially, in French
universities right up to the middle of the twentieth century. And the
requirement in colleges of humanities to write ones graduation thesis in
Latin was not abolished until 1908. In other words, Latin as the language
of science and philosophy completely monopolized higher education, a
state of affairs aided in no small part by the aura lent to Latin by its
status as the direct heir of Roman philosophy and as the vessel of Greek
philosophy. It was not even possible to find university texts composed
in the vernaculars.
In 1687 Christian Thomasius (16551728) at the University of Leipzig
was the first professor in the history of German universities to deliver
a lecture in German, but it would not be until the nineteenth century
190
191
Even in Japan, with its relatively older and more substantial literary
tradition whereby composing waka poetry had become part of the daily
life of the aristocracy as early as the ninth century, and where a type of
narrative fiction called monogatari had appeared at the beginning of the
tenth century, education in literary Sinitic (called kanbun in Japanese)
was the mark of an intellectual. The ability to read and write texts in
literary Sinitic was an essential feature of the cultivated person.
Thus, even though East Asian intellectuals had no knowledge of the
vernacular languages of their counterpart nations, they were able to
communicate with each other via the common literary language of
literary Sinitichanmun was an Esperanto for the eyes. Just as Latin
served as a universal language for Europeans, so hanmun was a universal
language for East Asians. And now English seeks to bind together Latin
and hanmun, intellectuals and the general public.
192
193
to bear sound quite bold, but to me they actually seem too cautious. In
fact, even now it is already a significant burden, at least for anybody
professionally concerned with knowledge and information, to speak an
ethno-national language other than English, and if one understands the
expression most societies loosely, it doesnt seem to me that it will take
as long as five generations for English to become the official language.
When it does happen, and when those people who have come to use
English as their official language find out not only that somebody called
Pok Kil in Korea had already suggested English as an official language
at the end of the twentieth century but also that he encountered vociferous criticism at the time, they probably wont believe itthey will find
incredible, that is, both the eminent sensibility of the suggestion and the
resistance that it encountered.
194
195
196
alization in economics, science, and technology and leading the intricate network of media and advertising, English has draped itself in the
mantle of a conveyor of modernity and spread first to Europe and then to
the entire world. Just as Latin was the universal language that conveyed
science and culture in the middle ages, English is well on its way to
becoming the universal language of our times.
197
198
soon as the Cold War ended, people in this region ditched Russian in
droves. For Eastern Europeans, Russian was associated with the image
of Russia in tsarist times.
Some point out that one reason for the establishment of the hegemony
of English in Europethe home of those languages that might actually
have had a chance at challenging English brieflyis that the linguistic
frontline on this continent has congealed between English and French.
If this frontline had also formed in other places, say, between English
or French and German, or between English and French or Spanish, the
establishment of the hegemony of English would have proceeded more
slowly, but because only French stood up to the giant that is English, it
has been easier for English to advance across the continent.
So how did it come about that mighty languages in the recent past like
German and Spanish fell from power and ended up confined within the
borders of their countries? One reason is that these are the languages of
politically fallen countries and cultures. When a language becomes the
conveyor of ideologies like nationalism, racism, or absolutism, people
imagine the traces of these ideologies to reside in the languages themselves. When a language becomes the expression of a people unjustly
enjoying certain privileges or occupying certain territory, or if that
language is used as a tool to propagandize racial purity, it loses its
basis for any claim to universality. And yet German and Spanish played
precisely these roles in the Europe of the 1930s and 1940s. In the case
of Spanish, the language continued to play this sort of role even after
the war and until the death of Franco in the mid-1970s. When World
War II ended with the defeat of the Axis Powers, German lost forever
its former prestige as a language of culture. And the fact that people in
Catalonia continue to resist Castilian Spanish while resolutely defending
their own language of Catalan has everything to do with the image of
Spanish under Francoism. And so English came to fill the void left by
German and Spanish.
199
What, then, is the image of English? As with any society, there are
many dark stains on parts of the Anglophone world, starting first and
foremost with the United States, so there are bound to be differing opinions, but it is a fact that the image of English is associated with aspects
of American society like its multiethnicity, multiculturalism, religious
pluralism, openness, populism, progressivism, antielitism, secularism,
liberalism, and individualism. The imperialist image of the United States
that has formed in the third world and in other places and its image as
an international cop is neutralized to a great extent by the more positive images just listed. As mentioned briefly, this counts as a strength of
English vis--vis the classical languages. For new learners of English, any
historical baggage that might evoke psychological resistance has been
erased with relative ease.
Thus, principally by the logic of the economy, and partially also owing
to additional political and cultural factors, English in the not-so-distant
future will turn most people of the world into bilinguals. Even if one
supposes that the United States falls from its position at the center of the
global empire sooner than predicted, the language of the empire will still
be English. Latin persisted in Western Europe even after the fall of Rome,
and even after Greece as a nation became completely insignificant, Greek
remained for a long time the language of the Eastern Orthodox Church.
If this is the case, then there would appear to be no pressing reason
to delay the adoption of English as an official language. The important point is not to interrupt natural trends, and English as an official
language is one such natural trend. If active promotion of English as an
official language is somehow unnatural, then trying to stop the trend
toward it by artificial means is just as unnatural. Simply because we can
stave off this trend by building a wall around ourselves made of bricks
called nationalism does not mean that the waves of English will simply
stop outside our wall. The zeal of Koreans to learn English today has
not been forced on them by legislation, and just as in many other nonAnglophone societies, it is gaining momentum with each passing day.
200
Any effort to thwart this trend is futile. If one starts teaching children
when they are young, it is not so difficult for them to become bilingual.15
One thing that needs emphasizing here is the class implications behind
opposition to English as an official language. To oppose English as an
official language means to allow certain groups to monopolize knowledge and informationjust as the medieval elites who were able to read
and write Latin and hanmun monopolized knowledge. Information is
power. Whether English is made an official language in Korea or not,
members of the Korean ruling elite will eagerly teach English to their
children. And their children, with their familiarity with English, will
continue to rule over the children of the general Korean public who
are alienated from knowledge and information because of their unfamiliarity with English. Democracy as I understand it does not take kindly
to special groups monopolizing knowledge in this way. Questions of
democracy aside, there are many differences between societies in which
all members of society share in knowledge and societies in which only
a special class can acquire knowledge.
201
culture but all of human culture, East and West, from ancient times until
that moment; it will be a partially regionalized English. And the society
that we live in then, unlike Korea today, will not be a monoethnic society.
We will learn how to make friends with neighbors who do not have the
same blood as we do, and we will also learn how to share our blood
with them. The word honhyrin ( person of mixed blood) will not
have the same nuance of contempt that is has now, and instead miscegenation will be so common that honhyrin might even disappear from
the dictionary. To be sure, all this is far in the future, in a distant future
that is hard for us to imagine.
We are all Greeksjust as we are all Chinese and Koreans. And I dont
mean in the distant future. Even now, we are all Greeks. And I dont
mean this simply in the sense that the English we Koreans start learning
in our early teens is filled with European culture starting from the time
of the Greeks. European culture ever since Greece (or Egypt, for that
matter) is now a fundamental part of our institutions, our daily life, and
our thought. It has already become (as Pok Kil has noted) our dominant
tradition. That it is a foreign civilization is not a problem. The traditional civilization, many parts of which were pushed out by this foreign
civilization, was hanmun civilization, which in turn was yet another
foreign civilization that we just happened to adopt even earlier. In other
words, the foreign civilization that we have adopted from Europe is just
another traditional civilization that we accepted a bit later.
The temporal difference between these two foreign civilizations or
between these two traditional civilizations is little more than a thousand
years and a few centuries. And when reckoned in the light of the time
since humans left behind their natural state and began to create culture,
those thousand years and a few centuries are not a very long time. It
needs to be pointed out that, in terms of temporal density, those thousand
years and a few centuries are far more compact than the tens of thousands of years that preceded them. And the temporal density of the last
century or so, during which Koreans have made European civilization
202
203
Notes
1. Pok Kils collection of essays, Hynsil kwa chihyangHan chayujuija i sigak [Reality and intentionality: A liberals perspective] (Seoul:
Munhak kwa chisngsa, 1990), published at the beginning of the 1990s,
counts as one of the most important books published in Korea after liberation in 1945. All the other essay collections that Pok Kil has published
since are simply variations on this book. As he frequently reminds
others, concrete predictions are always dangerous, so, for example, the
timing he imagined for US troop withdrawal from Korea in his chapter
Things to Do before the US Army Exits Korea was, in retrospect,
premature. But this does not detract in any way from the appropriateness of the change in perception concerning the US Armed Forces
in Korea as a positive choice of the Korean people, suggested in the
same essay. Moreover, rather in contrast to his own modest worry, the
themes treated in the essays in this book have by and large retained their
significance until today, and the liberal perspective he adopts in treating
these themes will retain its timeliness well into the future. At present
there is too little liberalism in South Korean society, and this is likely to
be the case for quite some time into the future.The criticism that this
book is not original; the ideas that Pok Kil is expounding in this book
are common in Europe and the United States does not detract significantly from the books value. The important point is that this book was
written in Korean for Korean readers with the Korean social situation
in mind. Besides, the Korean in it, too, even if it can be criticized for
being an extreme form of Western translationese, is a neat and beautiful Korean that is hard to find on the Korean literary scene. To put it
another way, this book can be read as a literary text. But of course the
reason I am saying that this book was the most important postliberation
Korean book that one could read is not its literary charms. This book
mitigated the predilection for left-right collectivism forced upon Korean
society by the experience of colonialism and division and opened up a
path (however narrow) toward the individual. Broadening that path, as
Pok Kil occasionally notes so sardonically, will be extremely difficult,
but just opening it up in the first place was even more difficult. There
are plenty of intellectuals in South Korean society who fancy themselves
liberals, but there are very few who are unaffected by either populism or
204
fascism. And among those few rare souls, I daresay Pok Kil is the only
one to have made any deep investigation of what liberalism really is. The
reason for this lies in the oppressive ideological climate of South Korean
society, but this is precisely what accentuates Pok Kils intellectual
independence. The brief polemic waged between Pok Kil and Chng
Unyng about Reality and Intentionality (judging, at least, by the tone
of the remarks they exchanged) was one of the most beautiful episodes
created by the collision of individual versus universal and collective
versus particular in the history of South Korean polemics. That this beautiful episode was so short-lived, ending up merely a minor illustration
attending the publication of the book, is connected to the autism and selfsatisfaction of South Korean intellectual society. Pok Kils misfortune
is not simply that the disquieting radicalism of his liberalism is viewed
with such disdain and alarm by society but that he has also never met
his equal among his critics. For the most part, and with the exception
of Chng Unyng, Pok Kils critics have been individuals whose spirits
were infinitely smaller than that of the object of their criticism. If I occasionally criticize Pok Kil in this book, the same applies to me. Its not
that there are no individuals in South Korean society with the intellectual
wherewithal to meet him on an even playing field, but they shy away
from involving themselves in this sort of debateit is always safer in the
case of a daunting opponent to pretend he doesnt exist and ignore him
than it is to take him seriously and meet him head on. Thus, the task of
getting blood on ones hands has fallen to the intellectual midgets. This
is why the debates about Pok Kil, rare though they be, always end up
resembling a series of bizarre non sequiturs.
2. Kim Yongok, Sae Chunhyang tyn [New tale of Chunhyang] (Seoul:
Tongnamu, 1987), 242243.
3. In fact, the liberalism debate of the early 1990s and the nationalism
debate eight years later were fundamentally the same. This is because
Pok Kils main weapon in his new book is his liberalism, and his critics
are attacking his liberalism, just as they did in the early 1990s. Of course,
those who attacked his liberalism in the early 1990s were on the left of
the political spectrum, whereas those who attacked his liberalism eight
years later were on the right, so the arguments against him in both cases
are different. If eight years ago the liberal Pok Kils antipopulism was
accentuated, eight years later it was his antinationalism. Nonetheless,
both debates were still fundamentally debates between the universal and
the particular. In any case, that in the course of an eight-year period Pok
205
Kil was attacked from both the left and the right shows just how narrow
the space for liberalism in South Korea is (although Pok Kil would claim
that space is narrow in any society).
4. Sad to say, but in writing definitions for Sino-vocabulary in KoreanKorean dictionaries, postliberation Korean lexicographers have more or
less plagiarized Japanese-Japanese dictionaries (evading the headaches
of observing Korean language realities in the process). And this applies
in equal measure even to the Urimal kn sajn (Great dictionary of
the Korean language) compiled by the Hangl Hakhoe, the leaders
of twentieth-century Korean linguistic nationalism. It is a well-known
fact that compilers of South Korean bilingual dictionaries (EnglishKorean, French-Korean, Korean-English, Korean-French, etc.) have been
hugely reliant on the parallel bilingual dictionaries published in Japan
in completing their projects, but it has rarely been pointed out that
even South Korean monolingual dictionaries are dependent on Japanese
dictionaries. That the inventories of Sino-vocabulary in modern-day
Korean-Korean and Japanese-Japanese dictionaries look like twins can
be ascribed to certain well-known linguistic and extralinguistic factors,
but that Korean-Korean dictionary compilers have habitually referred to
Japanese-Japanese dictionaries when writing definitions of Sino-Korean
vocabulary is also a secondary reason. It is by no means rare in cases
of borrowing for the borrowed words to undergo certain distortions in
their semantics when they are absorbed into the lexicon of the new
host language, but the Sino-vocabulary borrowed into Korean from
Japanese beginning with the enlightenment period in the 1890s did
not undergo much semantic change. On the contrary, preexisting Sinovocabulary items in Korean with the same shape but different meanings
from their Sino-Japanese counterparts lost their original Korean meanings and acquired new, Japanese meanings. Even now the Sino-Korean
and Sino-Japanese entries in Korean and Japanese monolingual dictionaries are virtually identical, as are a substantial portion of the definitions recorded for them. Needless to say, the primary reason for this is
the linguistic and political influence that Japan has (and the Japanese
have) exerted on Korea for the past century and more, but this linguistic
naisen ittai (Japan and Korea as one) has been aided and
abetted in no small part by the expediency and opportunism of Korean
lexicographers who have preferred to copy from Japanese dictionaries
rather than trace in detail the way individual Sino-vocabulary items
have participated in Korean semantic networks. The earliest Korean-
206
Korean dictionaries were copied from Japanese dictionaries, and the next
generation of dictionaries after these was copied from the first generation. Lexicographers themselves, who know how excruciatingly difficult dictionary compilation is, would not applaud this opportunism, but
by the same token, they would not simply denounce it, either. After
all, the cultural conditions during the Japanese colonial period and in
the years of national rebuilding after liberation were far more desperate
than one can imagine today. And that the Sino-vocabularies of modernday Japanese and Korean have come to resemble each other so much is
neither a good thing nor a bad thing in and of itself.
5. That it is the United States, rather than a European nation speaking a
Romance language, that has become the most important producer of
Graeco-Latin neologisms is comparable to the way in which, ever since
the end of the nineteenth century, Japan rather than China has become
the most important producer of neologisms based on Chinese characters.
6. Translation from Peter H. Lee, ed., Sourcebook of Korean Civilization:
From Early Times to the Sixteenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), vol. 1:516.
7. One thing that renders even Sino-Japanese ondoku pronunciations unpredictable is that Sino-Japanese pronunciations reflect Chinese
pronunciations from different periods in Chinese history. In the case
of Sino-Korean pronunciations, scholarly opinions are divided as to
whether they reflect any particular Chinese period or regional pronunciation, but the overall system has basically solidified as one Sino-Korean
reading per each Chinese character. One cannot exclude the possibility
that in certain individual Chinese characters or Sino-Korean words the
pronunciations reflect differences according to period, but Sino-Korean
pronunciations do not reflect such chronological differences in any sort
of three-dimensional or systematic way. Thus, excluding a very small
number of Chinese characters with more than one Sino-Korean reading,
such as (pungnyk puk = north vs. taranal pae = flee) and
(pungnyu ak = music vs. chlgil lak = enjoy vs. choahal yo = like),
for the most part, Chinese characters in Korean have just one fixed SinoKorean pronunciation. That is, even if it turns out that Sino-Korean
pronunciations in their internal system somehow reflect a particular
time or region in China, outwardly they present a unified system of
readings. But in Japanese, the Sino-Japanese (ondoku) readings for both
individual Chinese characters and Sino-vocabulary items not only retain
internal systematic traces of the regions from which and the times at
207
which they were imported from China, but they also betray these in their
outward appearances. Thus, depending on when a Chinese character (or
the word in which a certain Chinese character occurs) was imported, one
and the same Chinese character in Japanese can be read with a variety
of pronunciationsthe Sino-Japanese readings are a three-dimensional
representation of the history of the importation of Chinese characters
and Sino-vocabulary into Japan. The different Sino-Japanese pronunciations are usually called koon old readings, goon Wu readings, kanon Han readings, ton Tang readings = son
Song readings, and kanyon customary readings. That
Sino-Japanese pronunciations were never unified must be related to the
fact that Japan was a typical feudal system with only a weak tradition
of centralized authority.
8. In cases where some of the Chinese characters in set phrases are read
via kundoku and others via ondoku, Karatanis claim sounds even more
farcical. There are quite a number of compound words in Japanese
written with Chinese characters that are read partially in ondoku and
partially in kundoku. Words where the first character is read in kundoku
and the second character is read in ondoku are called yut-yomi
(yut readings), and words where the first character is read in
ondoku and the second character in kundoku are called jbako-yomi
(jbako readings). The word yut refers to lacquerware
used in Buddhist temples or Shinto shrines to drink hot water from after
meals and has become the metonym for yut readings, while jbako
means nesting boxes and likewise has become the metonym for
jbako readings. That is, in the word yut , is read with its
kun reading yu, whereas is read with its on reading t, and
in the word jbako , is read with its on reading j, whereas
is read with its kun reading bako. Other examples of words in
the yut-yomi category are yhan (supper, evening meal),
mihon (sample merchandise), aitai (face-to-face meeting),
nimotsu (luggage), and kuromaku (black curtain; behind-the-scenes
story); other examples of words in the jbako-yomi category are
rygae (currency exchange), ttori (boss; bank director), dango
(rice cake dumpling covered with bean paste), zki (shrubs),
maiasa (every morning). Actually, whether they are read as yutyomi or as jbako-yomi, in essence these words are simply compounds
made up of kango (or kanji ) and wago elements. So in other words,
in compounds made up of a combination of Chinese characters (Sino-
208
209
210
for health reasons I keep a safe distance from the Chosn ilbo these days
and learned through a friend of the debate about Pok Kils book that
had erupted on its pages. This friend is yet another person who reads the
Chosn ilbo only in order to curse it. I was curious as to the contents of
the debate but out of consideration for my health concluded it was best
not to buy the Chosn ilbo. Thats why I read the texts only quite some
time after the debate had finished, thanks to the assistance of Munhak
kwa Chisng Publishing.
11. In fact, any user of Korean (myself included) would think that it is impossible to take Nam Yngsin to task on questions of language. As a conscientious and talented lexicographer, he has contributed as much as any
contemporary literary figure and Korean language scholar to the development and promotion of Korean language and culture. I hope I have
the opportunity someday to pay homage to him at length in writing.
12. It annoys me that certain individuals on the Korean literary scene maintain the bad habit of using hangl where one ought to use Korean
language. But Chng Kwari will likely not change his speech habits just
because I keep harping on this.
13. I have no idea why Choe Wnsik writes for the Chosn ilbo. The reason
I am making a point of picking him out from all the other participants
in the debate is that Choe Wnsik is the only one who labels himself
as being in the progressive camp. I have a low opinion of anybody
who writes for the Chosn ilbo (except for dyed-in-the-wool fascists),
but I have a particularly low opinion of anybody who writes for the
Chosn ilbo while throwing around the word progressive. Sociologist and
political commentator Kang Chunman (1956) has already gone on ad
nauseam in various venues about why these people are even worse, so I
will not elaborate here. When Choe Wnsik sticks the progressive label
on his forehead and contributes to the Chosn ilbo, cant he hear the
laughter in the fascist camp and the sighs in the antifascist camp? If the
Chosn ilbo is so disgusting to the liberal in me, it is truly bizarre that
the progressive Choe Wnsik should like the Chosn ilbo so much.
And the reason I can say that Choe Wnsik likes the Chosn ilbo so much
is not just because he writes for it. Its because I know just how hard
he works as editor of the leading literary and critical journal Changjak
kwa pipyng to place articles connected with his journal in the Chosn
ilbo and only in the Chosn ilbo.The liberal in me hates the Chosn ilbo
because I believe this paper is the enemy of an open society and of
liberalism; I have no idea why the progressive Choe Wnsik likes the
211
Chosn ilbo. Perhaps (to give him the benefit of the doubt) he is thinking
back to the time when the Chosn ilbo was a great newspaper, for the
Chosn ilbo clearly had its own period of greatnessthe period of the
Singanhoe (19271931), that great model of left-right cooperation that
Choe Wnsik likes so much. Is Choe Wnsik really thinking of the
Chosn ilbo from those days? If so, Choe Wnsik is seriously behind the
times. If not, then according to his logic, because fascism and progressivism are two sides of the same coin, his journal Changjak kwa pipyng
must be a very special kind of Chosn ilbo. But surely this is not what
he is saying? How silly of me not to know the deeper significance of
his love for the Chosn ilboIm still not quite sure what it is, but it
is probably closely connected to the search for a new model. Whatever
that deeper significance is, I think that Choe Wnsik must realize more
than anyone that he is no longer the Choe Wnsik of the past. Back
then, when he was just one of many editors at Changjak kwa pipyng,
and when he was just a humble working literary critic, his love for the
Chosn ilbo could have been interpreted as an individual quirk or preference. But now he is the editor-in-chief of Changjak kwa pipyng. Whatever his personal predilections and intellectual capacity may be, he is
the lead editor at the journal responsible for a huge portion of South
Koreas progressive intellectuality. He needs to be conscious of the fact
that whatever he writes now is no longer just a question of his personal
literary output or activity but can also be interpreted as representing the
position of Changjak kwa pipyng. I think he needs to be more cautious
about the venues in which his contributions appear, and to my mind,
the Chosn ilbo is not an appropriate medium for the editor-of-chief of
Changjak kwa pipyng.
14. When an individual or groups of individuals use two different languages
at the same time, this is called bilingualism (bilinguisme in French).
This is bilingualism in the broad sense. Some Francophone sociolinguists divide this bilingualism in the broad sense into bilingualism in the
narrow sense and diglossia. Bilingualism in the narrow sense (henceforth, just bilingualism) refers to situations in which an individual or a
society uses two different languages, and those two different languages
show little or no difference in their social functions. For example, in
the province of Quebec in Canada, both French and English are used,
and most individual Quebecois use both languages. Moreover, these
two languages are virtually the same in functional terms. This is bilingualism. By contrast, diglossia is when an individual or a society uses
212
213
Chapter 6
Disposable Legacy,
Indispensable Heritage
Thoughts on Chinese Characters
On the evening of October 24, 1998, EBS (the Educational Broadcasting
Service) aired a live discussion program titled The Fifty-Year War of
Writing Systems: Hangl-Only vs. Mixed Script. I was channel-surfing
and only happened upon the program by chance, so I was unable to
watch it from the beginning, but ignoring my second sons bored expression, I watched the discussion to the end. The reason I kept the channel
on EBS was not that the topic was interesting per se but that I recognized
one of the panelists. Nonetheless, I watched the program until the end
because I immediately became curious as to how the discussion would
develop and conclude.
Much as with the past fifty years, the discussion that day did not end
in victory for either side. The opinions from both sides ran along the
same old parallel lines, and the two opposing opinions regarding which
writing system to adopt were reflected directly in questions of education.
That is, all those on the side arguing for Hangl-Only maintained that
Chinese characters should not be taught in elementary schools, whereas
216
217
218
219
they also represent the system with the longest continuous process of
evolution and creation. And this process of evolution and creation is not
finished yet. Some characters are struck from the records, and new characters receive new identities. So it has been in the past, and so it will
continue in the future. Most of this process of evolution and creation has
happened through the category of phonetic compound ( xingsheng)
that is, through the combination of semantograms (graphs indicating
meaning) and phonograms (graphs indicating sound)and this process
will continue in the future. Some one hundred new characters for chemical elements, including (Sino-Korean yu, uranium) and (SinoKorean s, selenium), were created at the beginning of the twentieth
century. All of them are phonetic compounds ( xingsheng).
220
221
222
lation (though we can always tease such people: Look whos trying to
show off his hanja knowledge!)
Actually, the temptation to use Chinese characters is built right into
the hangl writing system and orthography. Although Korean is a
phonemic writing system, it groups individual letters into orthographic
syllables housed in an imaginary square and uses so-called syllabocombinatory spelling. In other words, whereas other phonemic scripts
connect individual letters in a string to form words, Korean first collects
individual letters into a syllable block and then creates a word by
combining similarly formed syllabic blocks. Thus, Korean spelling is
also a kind of orthography of assemblythe Korean word for spelling;
orthography is matchumbp, derived from the verb stem matchuassemble; cobble together. This assembly is a process of creating words
by forming syllables with phonemes and then creating words from the
syllables.
Insofar as the actual deployment of hangl is essentially syllabic,
one hangl syllable can easily correspond to one Chinese character
because in Chinese characters one character also constitutes one syllable.
If Korean had been written from the very beginning by stringing the
individual hangl letters along in a linein other words, if little room
had been left between the level of phoneme and word for syllablesthere
would have been less room for Chinese characters to mix with Korean.
Just recall the ungainliness of Chinese characters mixed in among texts
written in Roman script (as in my earlier example). But because hangl
is written in syllabic blocks, there is plenty of room for the inclusion of
Chinese charactersthat is, for Mixed-Script orthography. To be more
precise, the creators of hangl had already envisioned something like
Mixed-Script orthography from the very beginning. Thus, it was not
by some coincidence that hangl orthography was syllable-based and
therefore amenable to the incorporation of Chinese characters, but by
design: hangl spelling was conceived of in syllabic blocks precisely in
order to accommodate the integration of Chinese characters into Korean
223
Hangl-Only Orthography:
Model Inscriptional System for Korean
However, in my personal opinion, it is probably fair to say that at least
official publications should use Hangl-Only orthography. For example,
if the earlier quotes were dialogues in a play or novel, they could be
written in hangl alone. In fact, whether one engages in spirited debate
about Hangl-Only orthography or not, the reality is that there has been
a trend toward the Hangl-Only option. Traditionally, Korean fiction
has always used Hangl-Only orthography, and now most newspapers
have also moved in this direction. Much the same goes for academic
publications. It is a natural trend borne of the unconscious desire of the
general public for unification of the writing system.3
In the early days of the Republic of China, Chinese intellectuals
proclaimed a slogan: If Chinese characters do not fail, China will fail.
Copying this slogan, one faction on the Mixed-Script side has come up
with the provocative slogan Unless hangl fails, Korea will fail. But
I fail to see how the success or failure of hangl is related to the rise
or fall of Korea. Hangl-Only publications have been on the rise thus
far and will continue to increase. Because the rise and fall of nations
follows the laws of nature and history, it may well be that someday Korea
will collapse, but if it does, it wont be because of hangl. Actually, that
224
South Korea has done as well as it has owes in no small part to hangl.
The movement to popularize hangl that began at the beginning of the
twentieth century played a great role in reducing illiteracy in Korea. All
one needs to do is place Chinese characters in parentheses next to those
words whose meanings are not immediately obvious when written in
hangl.
But banning the use of Chinese characters in publications is also
rather foolish. There was also the tragic episode in Korean history when
Prince Ynsan (Ynsangun, r. 14941506) banned the use of hangl, but
banning any writing system via legislation is ridiculous, and as long as
people feel the urge to write Chinese characters, this custom will never
be eradicated through laws. The trend is already very much in favor of
Hangl-Only usage, and all that is necessary now is to let the trend run
its course.
If I may be allowed to share another personal opinion, I also think that
textbooks at all levels in Korean schools should be rendered in HanglOnly spelling. Textbooks bring together texts in standard Korean, and
such standardized texts should reflect the model inscriptional system for
Korean. Needless to say, the model inscriptional system for Korean is
Hangl-Only orthography because of the democratic values it represents.
In fact, it is entirely natural for a language to be written in just one
orthographic system. Other than Korea and Japan, few nations jump to
mind that customarily use different writing systems side by side in one
and the same sentence or text. For example, the first official language
of the former Yugoslavia was Serbo-Croatian, which could be written in
either Cyrillic script or Roman script, but even in this case, texts were
written either completely in Cyrillic or completely in Roman script, and
one never mixed both scripts in the same sentence or even the same
document.
225
226
227
228
229
230
231
That is, one does not need Chinese characters to explain the principles
of modern-day morphophonemic hangl orthography. But for Korean
children and for foreign learners of Korean encountering hangl orthography for the first time, it is rather more difficult to explain its morphophonemic principles without the medium of Chinese characters.
To be sure, in the process of learning words like tokhak selfstudy, independent study, tokchae dictatorship, tokchm
monopoly, tokchang vocal solo, tokcha-jk independent and original, tokpo-jk peerless, unrivaled, tokpang
single room, toktan arbitrary decision; dogmatism, toksin
unmarried person, toksn self-righteousness, tokchu
solo recital, tokpaek soliloquy, monologue, kodok solitude, isolation, and tandok independence, separateness, and
so on, one might naturally come to understand the meaning of the
morpheme tok, and likewise, in the process of learning the words kirip
rising, standing up, surip establishment, founding, charip
independence, self-reliance, sllip establishment, incorporation, chorip construction, assembly, taerip confrontation, sirip municipal[ly established], torip provincial[ly
established], and so on, one might naturally come to understand the
meaning of the morpheme rip. And, as already discussed, one could
explain all these words as containing tok = alone, independently and
rip = standwithout the medium of the Chinese characters and .
But in order to explain this without the medium of Chinese characters, one would be forced to resort to long and complicated explanations like this: The tok just mentioned is different from the tok in tokyak poison or haedok detoxification, and is different yet
again from the tok in tokchok urge, demand and kamdok
superintendence; direction, which is also different from the tok in toks
reading books and in aedok read with pleasure, which
is again different from the tok in tokchiga benevolent person,
supporter or widok critical condition (of an illness). One must
232
keep all these distinct. Next, the rip just discussed is different from the rip
in soripcha elementary particle (in physics). The rip in soripcha
means grain, granule. Whats more, there is a word sarip meaning
straw raincoat and conical bamboo rain hat, i.e., raingear, but here
the rip means conical bamboo rain hat, so it is yet another rip. There
are several different morphemes with the shape tok and several different
morphemes with the shape rip, all of which need to be carefully distinguished. In other words, in Korean (the same goes for Japanese, too, and
even for Chinese, though to a lesser extent) there are large numbers of
morphemes (in this case, Chinese characters) in Korean with the same
pronunciation. Clearly, in cases like this the explanations become much
more elegant if the Chinese characters are brought into the equation.
Now that I have broached the subject of Chinese characters with
the same pronunciations, I can embark on a discussion of the problem
of homophony in Korean Sino-vocabulary. As a matter of fact, the
single greatest reason for users of Korean to acquire a knowledge of
Chinese characters is precisely the abundance of such Sino-Korean
homophoneswords with the same pronunciations but different meanings. This homophone problem is the trusty fallback argument for all
advocates of Mixed-Script orthography. And every time they raise the
issue, the Hangl-Only advocates reply that all languages have homophones and that words are not learned or used in isolation; they are used
in specific contexts that render understanding easier. In principle, I am
in agreement with the Hangl-Only advocates. Homophones obviously
exist in all languages, and because words acquire their concrete meanings in context, the existence of homophones cannot be a reason for
deploying Chinese characters in a Mixed-Script orthography. In contexts
where the meaning is still vague, it suffices simply to provide the Chinese
characters in parentheses next to the word in question.
But I would not go so far as to say that I am in agreement with those
Hangl-Only advocates who believe that Chinese-character education
is unnecessarybecause we still need some knowledge of Chinese char-
233
234
Naturally, all the various meanings in this case maintain their etymological identities. Thus, in the case of polysemy one is dealing with just one
sign. The question of Sino-vocabulary that concerns me here is one of
homonymy, whereas the cases of the English verbs take and have raised
by certain Hangl-Only advocates concern polysemy. In fact, technically speaking, the various meanings of English take and have are so
closely related to each other that it is dubious whether they qualify even
as polysemy.
Chinese-character education is necessary in order to distinguish these
various concepts represented by Sino-Korean homonyms. And as long as
we concede that Chinese-character education is necessary anyway, the
earlier we start it the betterit is less of a burden to learn the characters
at an age when our memories are still like sponges.
Sure, Chinese characters are difficult to learn. Compared to hangl,
they are very difficult to learn. There are tons of different characters,
and for each character one has to learn its shape, pronunciation, and
meaning(s). But because the vast majority of Chinese characters belong
to the phonetic compound categorythat is, the category of Chinese
characters that includes both a semantic and a phonetic elementit is not
the case that there are no phonetic or semantic connections linking characters to one another. Thus, learning two thousand Chinese characters or
so is not at all one hundred times more difficult than learning the twentyfour letters of hangl or the twenty-six letters of the Roman alphabet.
Whereas in the oracle bone script phonetic compounds accounted for
only 20 percent of the characters used, by the time of the Han
dynasty and Xu Shens (30124 CE) Shuowen jiezi , the
first Chinese dictionary, this percentage had grown to 80 percent, and at
present it exceeds 90 percent.6
Moreover, the Chinese characters that we Koreans need to learn do
not run into the tens of thousands. According to one statistic, even
in Chinese publications, just 950 different characters account for 90
percent of all the characters used, whereas 2,400 characters account for
235
236
237
238
239
names from the past are rendered in their Sino-Korean readings, whereas
personal names of contemporary Chinese are supposed to be rendered
according to their Chinese (Mandarin) pronunciation. Thus, the Qin
emperors prime minister, Li Si , is Yi Sa rather than Li Ss in Korean,
and Jiang Zemin , the former general secretary of the Communist Party and president of the PRC is Chang Tchmin rather than Kang
Taek-min. This represents a compromise between the traditional Korean
custom of rendering foreign proper nouns in their Sino-Korean pronunciations and the current trend of rendering them according to (or in an
approximation of) their native pronunciation, and on the whole I think
this is a reasonable approach. Sometimes the requirement to distinguish
historical Chinese personal names from contemporary Chinese names
seems a bit forced, but in fact, a similar custom has been tolerated in
European languages.
It is not exactly 100 percent comparable with the situation of the three
East Asian nations and their respective Chinese character pronunciation systems, but baptismal names in European languages that share
the same etymological roots often have slightly different forms in the
modern languages. For example, the English Charles is Charles in France,
Karl in Germany, Carlos in Spain, and Carlo in Italy. If one compares
only English and French, the two languages most familiar to Koreans,
the English Peter, Stephen, John, Joan, Henry, and Mary correspond to
Pierre, tienne, Jean, Jeanne, Henri, and Marie in French. And in the
cases of many well-known historical figures, names are often rendered
differently depending on the European language. For example, Joan of
Arc is known as Jeanne dArc in French. But contemporary individuals or otherwise unknown people are simply referred to according to
(an approximation of) the pronunciation of their names in their home
languages without any changes in form. For example, the famous English
economist Joan Robinson is known in France as Joan Robinson. An ordinary Englishman John Smith is just John Smith in French, and the ordinary Frenchman Pierre Dupont is simply Pierre Dupont in English.
240
241
242
different from the readings in either Chinese or Japanese, and thus the
Sino-vocabulary items borrowed from Chinese or Japanese are neither
Chinese nor Japanesethey are Korean. For example, the word chnji
heaven and earth is neither Chinese nor Japanese; it is Korean
and Korean only. If one says chnji to somebody from China or Japan,
there is no way for them to understand it as , meaning heaven
and earth. Sino-vocabulary items like these make up the majority of the
Korean lexicon.
In order to understand the many Sino-Korean words like these that
have penetrated so deeply into Korean, it is essential for Koreans in quite
a number of cases to have knowledge of Chinese characters. To deny
this fact would be dishonest. Even supposing that in most cases a knowledge of Chinese characters is not necessary for an understanding of Sinovocabulary, it remains that knowledge of Chinese characters nonetheless
helps with the understanding of Sino-vocabulary. This is why elementary schools in Korea should be teaching Chinese characters starting in
elementary school. If this can help with understanding the Sino-vocabulary items that comprise more than half the Korean lexicon, the learning
of two thousand Chinese characters or so can hardly be described as
unjustified mental torture.
Munhak tongne (Winter 1998)
243
Notes
1. I myself am also very poor at communicating. Whenever there is a TV
camera in front of me, it feels like my tongue freezes up.
2. See William Boltz, The Origin and Early Development of the Chinese
Writing System, American Oriental Series 78 (New Haven, CT: American
Oriental Society, 2003), 143149, for a discussion of the liu shu .
3. There are huge implications in the fact that the hangl movement in
modern times began with translated versions of the Bible during the late
Chosn period and continued with modern fiction. One might say that
Hangl-Only spelling has been the outcome of a desire to communicate
with the wider public. Hangl-Only orthography is deeply connected
with democratic values.
4. Actually, when distinguishing phonographic writing from ideographic
writing, one typically abstracts away certain key features of each system,
but in fact it is not the case that phonographic writing is always only
phonographic or that ideographic writing is only ever ideographic.
There are ideographic elements in phonographic writing and phonographic elements in ideographic writing.
5. To be sure, we mustnt push this point too far. In most cases, there is
actually a clear semantic link between the meaning of Sino-vocabulary
words and the semantics of their constituent characters. What I am criticizing here is the simplistic view that severs the meanings of Sino-vocabulary items from their social context and sees them solely as a function
of the semantics of the constituent characters.
6. The (zi) in the title of the Shuowen jiezi indicates precisely
this type of character. The title of this work means literally Explanations
of and elucidations of . According to Xu Shen, refers in the main
to characters that imitate or resemble things according to their shapes,
while appeared later as combinations of shape and sound. In other
words, refers to pictographs and to phonetic compounds.
7. See Choe Yngae, Hanjahak kangi (Seoul: Tongnamu, 1995), 21; and
Choe Yngae, Chunggug ran musinga (Seoul: Tongnamu, 1998), 161.
8. My argument here does not concern the official orthography for foreign
words. That is, I am not concerned with whether we render the name
of Japans capital () Tokyo, Tokkyo,
Tookyoo, Tookkyoo, or Tookkyoo. Thus, the ques-
244
Chapter 7
France
From Pullans ~
Pmnans to Prangs
I spent the latter half of my thirties in France. It was a rather decadent
period for me, but because I had no specific goals from the outset, my
decadence was in some ways premeditated. I dragged my family all the
way to Paris on a lark and returned to Seoul in the wake of various
minor calamities. My two children who had boarded the flight to Paris
as elementary school pupils returned to Seoul as a middle schooler and a
high schooler. And my wife and I were now in our forties. Our childrens
French had become quite fluent, but their Korean had become clumsy.
My wife and I were now clumsy in both Korean and French.
When I returned to Seoul, I had no job and no place to live. I was
unable to return to the position I had abandoned five years earlier for a
prolonged picnic in France. I was grateful for any writing commissions
that came my way, regardless of the venue or genre, and with financial
assistance from my mother and older sister I was able to put a roof over
the heads of my wife and children. When I lie down beside them at night
246
France
247
Few Koreans my age and even very few Korean children refer to
Germany as Toichillant, but in the case of the two words for France
it seems that Pullans is gradually being pushed out by Prangs.
Still, for me, Pullans films, Pullans optometrists, Pullans cuisine, and
Pullans bakery all sound more French to me than Prangs films,
Prangs optometrists, Prangs cuisine, and Prangs bakery. The
word Prangs just doesnt give me the same tingle that Pullans does.
With Pullans, I feel the power of a dynamic history and refined culture,
but with Prangs I sense only the veneer of modernity symbolized by
the TGV and Mirage jet fighters. But so much for personal impressions.
The original Chinese characters behind Pullans are a sound
translation created by the Japanese. Nowadays in Japan they just write
the countrys name in katakana: (huransu). Thus,
is quite outdated in Japan, too. In any case, the same , read
according to its Sino-Korean pronunciation as Pullans, qualifies as yet
another linguistic relic left by the Japanese in Korean.
248
France
249
250
anyway) of the United States of America. In other words, it isnt the way
Americans normally refer to their own country.
The name Yngguk for England is also likely to last a long time. The
word Yngguk is a partial sound translation of Inggllaend; thus, on a
purely etymological level, Yngguk and Inggllaend are homonyms. But
in modern Korean the terms Yngguk and Inggllaend refer to different
things: Yngguk designates the island of Great Britain and Northern
Ireland combined as the United Kingdom, whereas Inggllaend refers
to only the English portions of the island of Great Britain, minus Scotland and Wales. This more fine-tuned usage is especially salient when
each of these different regions fields its own independent team at international soccer tournaments. Thus, there is no Yngguk team that takes
to the field during the World Cup. Rather, there are teams representing
Inggllaend and Skotllaend.
Nor will Togil for Germany yield any time soon to Toichillant.
Among other reasons, Toichillant is simply too long in comparison
to Togila reason that also applies to Hoju for Australia. The name
Ostreillia is just too long compared to Hoju. Whats more, Ostreillia
is easily confused with the name of the central European nation Ostria
Austriayet another factor lending longevity to the name Hoju.
The name Monggo for Mongolia will also continue to be used because
of the historical weight it carries. The original characters for Monggo
are , a sound translation first coined by the Chinese during the
Tang dynasty as an approximation of the word Mongol, the self-designation of the Mongols. Some linguists insist on keeping the words Monggo
and Monggol conceptually discrete in Korean; to be more specific, they
want to distinguish Monggo- from Monggol-, where Monggo (Mongolic) designates the entire family of different languages used by
Mongols throughout their history until the present and Monggol- designates standard Mongolian as used at present in the Mongolian Peoples
Republicso-called Khalkha Mongolian. According to this distinction,
the sound translation Monggo carries the broader sense of Mongolic,
France
251
whereas the form in Monggol closer to the original Mongolian pronunciation is narrower in scope and refers to contemporary Mongolia.
This practice owes to influence from the customary usage of Japanese
scholars and is not followed by all South Korean scholars, but I daresay
the attempt to create a conceptual distinction of a scholarly nature based
on the difference between a traditional sound translation and a newer
name closer to the original language is rather elegant.
The word Indo India also seems destined for a long life. South Korean
school textbooks of all levels use the (somewhat distorted) English name
India, but the mass media prefer the name Indo. In contrast, Taeguk
for Thailand has a weaker lease on life than Indo does. Taeguk is still
holding on stubbornly in the speech habits of the older generations, and
younger South Korean speakers will also inadvertently use Taeguk, but
newspapers and other mass media seem to be switching over gradually
to Tai. Taeguk kunbu for Thai military is gradually losing
ground to Tai kunbu, and Taeguk kugwang for Thai king is
ready to yield to Tai kugwang. The same goes for Hirap for Greece
for most South Koreans today the English word Kris feels more natural
than the sinographic sound translation Hirap, the original characters
for which were , a sound translation not of Greece but of Hellas, the
Greek word for Greece.
Besides these, there are yet other countries whose Korean names
are sinographic sound translations: Pullans as discussed earlier, Itaeri
for Italy, and Hwaran for Holland. But these names
are also gradually being pushed out by Prangs, Itallia, and Nedlland. The word Hwaran is similar to Yngguk in that its Dutch-language
source, Holland designates only the western region of the Kingdom of
the Netherlands, whereas in Korean Hwaran refers to the entire Dutch
kingdom, including Holland. Of course, this probably also reflects the
fact that European nations, too (including the Netherlands), often use
Holland to refer to the entirety of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. But
there is a clear difference between the Korean word Hwaran and its
252
France
253
the original appellations for these lands in their original languages but
are connected to the names used by speakers of English (albeit slightly
distorted).
But attempts to change these back to names closer to the appellations
in the original languages are likely futile. What determines a words
fate is not the set of clear principles laid out by specially designated
language legislators but the (at times capricious) customary usage of the
people who employ the word. These English place-names have already
put down deep roots in the speech habits of South Korean speakers. On
one hand, this speaks to the enormous influence that English has exerted
upon Korean throughout the course of the twentieth century, but on the
other, it also shows the extent of the influence of the Japanese language
on Korean. The Korean habit of calling foreign place-names by their
English-style appellations is a result of the direct influence of English
but owes just as much to Japanese influence, too.
Foreign proper nouns, including country names, first came to be
imported in great numbers into Korean at the end of the nineteenth century. To be sure, one can find foreign place-names in
earlier Korean documents, as well: for instance, Kwawa (Java
in the fifteenth-century Korysa ) and Pasa (Persia in
Kim Manjungs seventeenth-century Spo manpil ). And the
travelogues written by Korean envoys to the Qing capital of Beijing
during the late Chosn period also include place-names such as
(K. Ynggilli, Mandarin Yingjili = England) and (K.
Abiriga-ju, Mandarin Yafeilijia-zhou = American continent). Names like
these are sound translations created by Chinese and then imported
into Korea. Thus, even before the Korean enlightenment period, a
number of foreign place-names were by no means unfamiliar to Korean
intellectuals. But it was during the enlightenment period after the
opening of Korean ports in 1876 that the names of all the worlds
countries and still other foreign proper nouns were systematically
absorbed all at once into the Korean lexicon. In various documents
254
France
255
256
For example, sticking just with this chapters point of departure, the
country of France was rendered variously as Pullans,
Pmnans, Ppkuk, Pullyansy, Pullansy,
Pmnansy, Hrans, Pranss, and Prangss.
As mentioned earlier, the name Pullans originated as a Japanese
sinographic sound translation, whereas Pmnans was a sinographic sound translation coined by the Chinese, of which Ppkuk
is an abbreviation. Even today, France is rendered Faguo in China.1
The Korean terms Pullyansy and Pullansy are
hangl renditions of the sinographic sound translation from the
end of the nineteenth century, and Pmnansy is the hangl
pronunciation of from the same period. Hrans,
Pranss and Prangss were attempts to render the original French pronunciation of France in hangl spelling, and Hrans
appears to have been influenced by Japanese pronunciation.
Chinese versus Japanese sinographic sound translations were not the
only source of differences in spellings. Often there were multiple and
competing sound translations for the same proper noun, and because all
this was happening before hangl orthography had been unified and
standardized, the chaos in hangl spelling was much worse than it is
today.
I examine sinographic sound translations of foreign proper nouns first.
Sound translations are similar to the jiajie (loaned and borrowed
[graphs]) category of the six traditional categories of Chinese characters (liu shu ); that is, semantics play almost no role, and instead
the characters are chosen for their sounds. This means that even in the
country that first invented sinographic sound translations (as well as in
Japan), it is not unusual for the same proper noun to have multiple renditions in writing. Small wonder, then, that there should have been such
chaos after these various forms were imported into Korea.
France
257
258
France
259
260
abandons the enlightenment-period practice of sinographic sound translations read according to their Sino-Korean pronunciations in favor of
hangl renditions that approximate the pronunciation in the original
language. In principle, this type of original-soundism is both correct and
natural. One cannot refer in writing to Denmark as or Chngmal,
nor can one refer to Washington as or Hwasngdon. Yet even
here there are exceptionsexceptions owing to customary usage. Just
as we can never change Ilbon Japan to Nippon or Chungguk China
to Chonggw, it will not be easy to change from Togil Germany
to Toichillant or from Hoju Australia to Ostreillia. And original-soundism will probably never be a powerful enough principle to
force changes in customary usage. As long as one accepts this point,
original-soundism in the broad sense is correct.
France
261
Third, they forget that there are limits to peoples knowledge of foreign
languages.
Probably the most representative among contemporary South Korean
media that ignore the current regulations concerning the spelling of
foreign words in Korean and advocate a narrow original-soundism is the
literary journal Changjak kwa pipyng (Creation and criticism; henceforth, Changbi). In this journal, the French capital is Ppari, and
the author of la recherche du temps perdu is Prustt.
Because the voiceless stops in French, unlike English, are unaspirated, it
should be Ppari rather than Pari, and because the same voiceless stops revert to being aspirated in front of r, it should be
Prustt instead of Pprusttat least, such are the justifications of the Changbi editorial team. And this is by no means incorrect.
But these original-sound fundamentalists are so wrapped up in putting
South Korean readers through their paces in elementary French that they
ignore the fact that in French the p in Paris and the p in Proust are one
and the same phoneme. If they were to push to its logical conclusions
their principle that the first sound in Ppari and the first sound in
Prustt should be kept apart, they would have to render
English spy as sppai rather than spai, and style as
sttail rather than stail. After all, the sounds p, t, and k in
English are regularly deaspirated after s as long as they are not followed
by r. But the editors at Changbi seem not to have reached agreement
on this point yet. It is hard to guess at their intentions, but for now the
Changbi editors are still writing spai and stailit
makes no sense at all.
Fundamentalist original-soundism would probably have Koreans
change rilloti (reality) to riaelliti, and
Inggllaend (England) to Inggllnd. But we render the
English reality as rilloti not because we are unaware that the
words pronunciation is closer to riaelliti. The real reason is
that the word rilloti is tightly bound in Korean to another
262
France
263
264
France
265
266
Notes
1. This is somewhat off topic, but it is interesting that China and Japan
rendered the first syllable of the word for France with the Chinese
characters and , respectively. Each country must have selected the
Chinese character based on what worked best for the sound translation on the basis of their respective Chinese-character readings, but it is
curious that both characters agree in their semantics. means Buddha
and means (among many other things) Buddhist truth; Buddha
dharma. In essence, both China and Japan attached a Buddhist image
to Francethe country often called the oldest daughter of the Roman
Catholic Church was turned into a solidly Buddhist state by Chinese and
Japanese. If the character in Japanese is pronounced butsu, it means
Buddha, and if it is pronounced futsu it means France. Thus, if the
word is pronounced butsugo it means Buddhist terminology
or Buddhas words, and if pronounced futsugo it means French
language. The same goes for words like (Buddhist/French books)
and (Buddhist/French studies)the meaning changes depending on
the ondoku reading of .
Chapter 8
268
269
Let me pursue this topic a bit further. The objective name of the
language used on the Korean Peninsula and its surrounding islands is
hangug : Korean. In the school curriculum it is called kug
(national language), but the custom of calling the language of ones
country the national language is not very widespread. In English schools
they refer to the language they use on an everyday basis as English, and
the French also call their language simply French. In fact, the custom
of calling the language of the land the national language seems to be
specific to just a few nations in East Asia. Just like Koreans referring to
Korean history as kuksa (national history) and to Korean literature
as kuk-munhak (national literature), the custom of calling the
Korean language kug, the national language, betrays the dynamics of
a certain self-respect or self-conceit.
Moreover, in these words can be heard the echoes of the seventeenth-century and later Japanese kokugaku movement that strove to
enhance the indigenous Japanese spirit and culture through research
into classical Japanese documents. Just as Japanese kokugaku
scholars (kokugakusha ) ever since the Edo period have made
chajon an independent, self-respecting stancevis--vis Chinese
culture the psychological basis of their scholarship, so have Korean
kukhak (national studies) scholars relied on chajon vis--vis foreign
culture in establishing their academic field. Thus, the ideological expression of this chajon, this independence and self-respect upon which they
rely, whether one of resistance or of hegemony, can be called a kind
of nationalism. When the chosn (hak) () (Chosn language
[studies]), chosnsa (hak) () (Chosn history [studies]), and
chosn munhak (Chosn literature) practiced during the
Japanese colonial occupation regained their old names of kug(hak),
kuksa(hak), and kuk-munhak after liberation in 1945the names they
had held during the brief Kuhan malgi period at the very end
of the Chosn dynasty, the model for the change in names was Japanese
academic custom.
270
Besides the egotism and narcissism that underlies the Korean practice
of calling their language kug and the Japanese practice of calling their
language kokugo (or of calling the related academic fields kukhak and
kokugaku), one should also note that both these countries are rare examples of monoethnic or monolingual societies. English and French are
simply the first official languages in England and France, respectively,
whereas Korean and Japanese truly are, just as the term indicates, the
national languages in their respective countries. And even if one admits
that the shadow of Japanese kokugaku hangs over Korean kukhak to
a certain extent, the roots of Korean national studies are to be found
in the late Chosn Sirhak movement or in the quasi-national-oriented
scholarship of the period just preceding it, not in Japanese kokugaku.
Besides, when one considers that North Korean academia, which prefers
chosnhak, chosn, chosnsa, and chosn munhak to kukhak, kug kuksa,
and kuk-munhak, is actually much more blatant in its autism and selfabsorption, one can see that the term kukhak in and of itself need not
always imply a national studies autism.
In any case, whether it is North Korean chosnhak or South Korean
kukhak, one should try to avoid rashly branding what are clearly
universally available epistemologies with the labels of imperialism and
colonialism. The magic wand of national characteristics is a tempting
weapon, and kukhak in particular finds it difficult to resist the temptation to wield it. But as soon as one gives in to that temptation, scholarship turns into ideology.
But the new name Nuije ka that Hong Kimun gave to Che mangmae
ka has taken me away from my original topic. Actually, Hongs new
hyangga names were simply the excuse for this little digression and are
by no means symptomatic of the autism or ignorance of North Korean
national studies. As I mentioned earlier, I am rather more fond of Hongs
new hyangga names than of the old ones. This is especially true of the
name Nuije ka, for the (Sino-Korean) word mangmae deceased
271
sister is too funereal and lacks the loving affection inherent to the
(native Korean) word nui (boys) older sister.
In any case, let me conclude this long digression with what I fear will
be an immodest observation (well, this entire essay is really just one
long digression, but anyway). It is quite interesting that both North
and South Korea, at virtually the same time, have had a great national
studies scholar with the given name Kimun. The Chinese characters
for one Kimun are and for the other . Needless to say, I am
speaking of Hong Kimun in the North and Yi Kimun in
the South. If I could be so presumptuous as to hazard an observation
on the work of these senior and distinguished scholars, I daresay that
where in the North is broader in the scope of his scholarship,
in the South is the more meticulous of the two. How interesting that the
Northerner Kimun hails originally from Chungchng Province in what
is now South Korea, whereas the Southerner Kimun was originally from
the northwest. In effect, they have switched homes.
272
universality, this eighth-century song can still stir the hearts of modern
readers after more than a millennium.
Hong provides the following loose translation of the song:
Saengsa kil iran
273
274
275
living my day-to-day life, I forget about death. In the course of this dayto-day existence, I do things like get together with friends to enjoy tasty
drinks and fatty foods, play word games with my children or my wife,
curse the Chosn ilbo, and read worthless books.
The times when we suddenly wake up from the anesthesia of everyday
life and think about death are when we or our close friends are terribly
ill, or else when we suddenly lose a close friend. It is not just our own
deaths that we fear; we also fear the deaths of others close to us. When
someone close to us dies, we are sad. This goes even for me, with my
taedium vitae. In which case, perhaps my taedium vitae still has a way
to go. Perhaps there is still a friend or older sister out there for me to
love. Maybe.
The clich expression I feel like Ive lost my right arm is frequently
used to describe the grief felt by those who have suffered the death of a
close relative; this is neither an unmotivated nor exaggerated figure of
speech and does not necessarily pertain only to family members, either.
When a dear friend leaves this world, we truly feel a pain as if we have
lost one of our limbs. This is not because of our altruism but because of
our egotism. Actually, if all altruism is just expanded egotism, we could
probably say that it is because of altruism after all.
When we bury a family member or friend and grieve, it is not grief
for the family member or friendit is grief for ourselves. When we bury
a family member or friend, we bury a part of ourselves with them. We
bury the past that we shared with them. We bury the future possibilities
that we would have shared with them had it not been for their death.
The sadness we feel after the funeral of a close friend is precisely the
sadness induced by the loss of that part of our selvesin which case the
love that I prepared for my older sister may, in the end, be simply the
love that I prepared for myself. Im back where I started.
276
277
278
Notes
1. I learned this idea from mile Cioran. He once said that he never felt
despair, no matter how hard life became, because he knew that if life ever
became so difficult as to be unbearable, all he needed to do was commit
suicide. He lived a long and healthy life and died peacefully.
Chapter 9
On the Peripheries
of Sgyng pylgok
Song of the Western Capital
The newspapers in November 1998 reported that Ko Kn, mayor of
Seoul, on the occasion of the ground-breaking ceremony held on
November 6 at the Seoul World Cup Stadium in Sangam-dong, Mapogu, pronounced the following: In order that the 2002 World Cup might
become an opportunity for North-South reconciliation and cooperation and expeditious unification, I have presented, as mayor of Seoul,
a proposal to the chairman of the Pyongyang Peoples Committee to
revive Seoul-Pyongyang soccer. His proposal was to use the first exhibition match in the new World Cup Stadium to recall the annual KyngPyng, or Seoul-Pyongyang, soccer games that alternated between the
two cities during the Japanese colonial period. The obstacles to realizing
such a proposal were many, but even just imagining Pyongyang soccer
players in Seoul or Seoul soccer players in Pyongyang was cause for
excitement. It was even more exciting to imagine the prospect of Seoul
fans cheering on Pyongyang players and Pyongyang fans cheering on
the Seoul team.
280
281
282
283
284
285
286
287
In the second stanza the speaker accepts as reality the parting. And
so she sings, Though pearls be dashed upon a rock, how would their
string be broken? Though I go alone one thousand years, how would
my faith be broken? This second stanza sings of the ideology that in
Western literary history is often called romantic love. The notion that
each person has one soul mate, that the identity of that one mate is preordained millions of years in advance, and that therefore each must remain
faithful to that one person is the basis of romantic love. Romantic love
like this is the same ideology enshrined in the Korean proverb Im to hana
yo tal to hana daTheres only one beloved and only one moonand
in the same philosophy of hypocrisy and oppression that supported the
medieval and modern European family system.
The speaker in Sgyng pylgok sings of the eternity of this love
and seems to gesture as if to brace herself. But although this is an oath to
the speaker herself, it is also a plea: My love for you is firm, and you are
all I have: please turn your heart and stay with me. The second stanza
of Sgyng pylgok also happens to be the final stanza of yet another
Kory popular song by the name of Chngsk ka (Gong and
chime). In other words, this pearl stanza was a pattern that appeared
frequently in love songs of this period. Whether in the case of Chngsk
ka or that of Sgyng pylgok, the theory that these songs are blends
composed of two or more different songs is based on this pearl stanza.
In any case, through this second stanza depicting the firmness of her
love, the speaker in Sgyng pylgok declares that she belongs to her
beloved and to him only, and through this declaration she tries to turn
her beloveds heart. But her beloveds heart does not turn. He is determined to abandon the speaker and cross the Taedong River, whereupon
the speakers fury erupts again, revealing that her calm and collected
grace in the second stanza was nothing more than a tactical gesture
designed to turn her beloveds heart. As soon as this gesture fails, the
speakers emotions lose their balance and erupt in a violent lament.
288
289
ousy is as cruel as the grave and has a most vehement flame. It abjectly
acknowledges the futility of its position, but it is the source of passion,
without which any real love is impossible. The speaker in Sgyng
pylgok already knows that her beloved will pick flowers as soon as he
has crossed the river.
The phrase picking flowers means sleeping with other women. Flowers
symbolize women, both in the East and in the West. A number of Korean
proverbs compare women to flowers and men to butterflies in order to
express love between a man and a womanfor example, Kkot pon nabi
pur-l hearirya (The butterfly that has seen the flower is oblivious to fire)
and Kkot pon nabi-ga tam ani nmgalkka (The butterfly that has seen
the flower always flies over the wall). The proverb Kot pomyn kkkko
sipta (When you see a flower, you want to pick it) was created in exactly
the same context as will pick flowers in Sgyng pylgok. Note also the
English expression deflower: etymologically speaking, it means to pick
flowers, but it is only ever used now in its metaphorical, sexual sense.
The speaker in Kasiri whispers a quiet pledge for the future:2
Chapsawa turimanan
Snhamyn ani olsera
I would seize you, but I fear
You would not soon return.
Srun nim ponaeomnani
Kasinan tat toshosos
Sad, I will send you love but, pray,
Ere gone, come back to me!
290
She wants to seize him and hold him back, but because that might anger
him and cause him never to return, instead she swallows her sorrow and
sends him off with a request that he come back as soon as he arrives.
She controls herself to the very end, thereby creating the possibility that
her beloved might return. The speaker in Sgyng pylgok is different
from this. She has no future, so this parting is forever. Unable to restrain
herself, she speaks her mind. The wiser and more realistic of the two
in terms of love is probably the speaker in Kasiri. Because she sends
her beloved off with good memories of their parting, she leaves open the
possibility of his return. By contrast, the speaker in Sgyng pylgok
closes off all such possibilities with her furious tirade and risks losing her
beloveds affection entirely. But for me the speaker in Sgyng pylgok
seems more beautiful. She knows that all of life is here and now, in the
present moment.
Chillichayu (Fall 1998)
291
Notes
1. The translation of the first two stanzas is adapted from that by Marshall
Pihl in his A Reader in Traditional Korean Literature: From Myth to
Oral Narrative (unpublished manuscript, 1993), 6768.
2. The translation of the first two stanzas is adapted from that by Marshall
Pihl in his A Reader in Traditional Korean Literature: From Myth to
Oral Narrative (unpublished manuscript, 1993), 67.
Glossary
294
Glossary
295
Pioneered the new hangl orthography in the late 1920s and 1930s.
Renamed as the Hangl Hakhoe in 1949.
Chosn Ynguhoe : The Chosn Hakhoe went by this name
from 19211931.
chosnsa (hak) (): Chosn history; the term for Korean history
under Japanese colonial rule.
Chu Si-gyng (18761914): Grammarian and patriot considered the
grandfather of national language studies in Korea.
Cioran, mil (19111995): Romanian philosopher and essayist who wrote
mainly in French after 1945 and whose works are famous for their lyricism
and pessimism, skepticism and nihilism.
diglossia: Sociolinguistic situation characterized by the use of two different
linguistic codes used in complementary distribution: a high code and a
low code.
Edo period: Also known as the Tokugawa period; the period from 1603
1868, when Japan was ruled by the Tokugawa shogunate.
Hanbo scandal: Also known as Hanbogate; a multibillion dollar scandal
involving Hanbo Iron & Steel Co. in which South Korean president Kim
Yngsam and his second son, Kim Hynchl, were implicated.
Hangl Day: The national holiday celebrated today in South Korea in honor
of Koreas indigenous script, hangl. Hangl Day was first implemented
by the Chosn Ynguhoe in 1926 and is celebrated today on October 9
in South Korea.
Hanguk ilbo : Leading South Korean daily newspaper.
Hangl hakcha: Scholar of hangl; term used to refer to scholars of
Korean and Korean grammarians who work in a more traditional national
language studies framework.
Hangl Hakhoe: The post-1949 incarnation of the Chosn Hakhoe in
South Korea.
Hanhinsaem: The ho, or courtesy name, for Korean patriot grammarian Chu
Si-gyng (18761914).
296
Glossary
297
298
Glossary
299
300
Glossary
301
302
Glossary
303
304
Index
306
Index
Latin (continued), 83, 8587, 90, 125,
138145, 151155, 159, 161162,
164, 166, 168, 175, 186191,
196197, 199200, 206, 212
lexicography, 9, 21, 3738
liberalism, 10, 109112, 117,
119122, 177, 183, 185186, 199,
203205, 210
linguistics, 1, 6, 89, 2628, 39,
49, 6465, 6769, 72, 79, 98,
106107, 160, 212, 225, 311
literary Sinitic, 23, 7, 910, 45,
156157, 187, 190191
linguistic nationalism, 5, 7, 10, 21,
33, 37, 81, 8687, 137, 205
linguistic purism, 3334, 37, 106,
122, 152, 164
literary Sinitic, 23, 7, 910, 45,
156157, 187, 190191
loanwords, 5, 28, 33, 5859, 72, 74,
84, 90, 100, 122, 133, 135, 145,
158159, 161, 164, 166, 175, 177,
241
Mischsprachen, 72
mixed languages, 7172
mixed script, 215, 226227
minjog, 74, 117
munhwa, 41, 97
Nam Yngsin, 27, 33, 3739, 183,
210
nationalism, 5, 7, 10, 21, 31, 3334,
37, 81, 8687, 91, 117122, 132,
137, 164, 179186, 198200,
204205, 268269, 280
national language, 1, 7, 9, 2021,
2627, 29, 3337, 40, 74, 7982,
92, 9495, 97, 102103, 105,
117119, 122, 132, 134, 158, 179,
307
national language (continued), 187,
192196, 200, 235, 268269
neologisms, 35, 41, 44, 5859, 92,
107, 129132, 134, 143, 153155,
159162, 206, 220, 228
North Korea, 3334, 4142, 93,
106107, 268, 281
Ogura Shinpei, 48, 50
ondoku, 171, 174175, 206208,
236238, 266
nhae, 36, 156158
orthography, 11, 40, 84, 8790, 101,
105106, 160161, 171, 175, 216,
222226, 230232, 243, 255256,
258259, 263, 265
Paekche, 95
Pak Chnghi, 19, 112, 116, 186,
209, 255, 282, 284
Pak Yongsu, 27, 33, 37
phonogram, 51
Pok Kil, 10, 31, 109112, 114120,
122123, 156, 178187, 191193,
201205, 210, 212
populism, 199, 203, 268
pyojun, 41, 97
racism, 198
rangaku, 10, 56, 123126, 131133,
137, 152, 154, 177, 220
romanization, 41, 76, 258
romanticism, 65, 168, 268
Sanskrit, 23, 6465
semantogram, 51
sijo, 75
Silla, 10, 4648, 51, 56, 59, 76,
9495, 99, 267, 271, 283
Sin Chung, 4748, 5964, 74
308
310