On April 5, scholars from the two Koreas will meet to examine progress on a joint dictionary that by 2012 will hopefully contain some 300,000 words as well as unified spelling and grammatical rules. Probably a waste of time, but interesting none the less.
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9 Comments
I wonder if that dictionary will have a word for “abduction” or “extortion”?
This is going to be a very “prescriptive” dictionary, so, more about “how to speak proper ‘unified’ Korean” than “this is how Korean is spoken.” That being the case they are going to exclude a lot of words for being improper, like “aint” in English.
Given the over use of exclamation marks by one and the forgotten periods by the other a punction handbook would have been a better start. Looks like we’ll still have to see this: U.S out of Korea!!!!!
I wonder if there will be some hard-nosed people who will eventually attempt to purify their language like the Académie française and their attempts to fine retailers who use words like “le Walkman” instead of “Le Baladeur” for a Walkman CD player?
An attempt to purify and police the language would most likely be doomed to failure unless the more extreme North Korean methods of political control were used. I certainly hope that does not occur.
Oh yeah, baby, prescriptive. Gimme gimme gimme gimme; I wanna see 젖싸게 replace 브라 in that dictionary of theirs…
Abduction being 拉致 – 납치 in the South, I wonder whether they’re gonna cover it up with the initial ㄹ: 랍치…? Wouldn’t that be crazy?
As for “purifying” the language, the Norks have been at it for a while I am afraid. The few times I’ve been in the same room as Norks, I saw South Koreans asking their black-suited, grim-faced counterparts what this or that word meant. I guess they’ll have a lot of unifying to do. And if the Commies at Yonsei’s Dept of Korean Litt are given a fee rein, there’s gonna be some, oh yeah.
Been thinking about the many loanwords that will need be explained to the Norks. Gay, transgender and oral sex for example. Bring Harisu to the conference? And will the Norks want these in the dictionary?
젖싸게 man, that sounds awful… and unsexy. Though they haven’t any modern PCs in the North for the public (and no electricity either), can’t imagine a North Korean saying the imperialistic words “ceomputah” or “ppeessee”.
Somehow, I can’t see this dictionary going with many South Korean spellings/loan words, nevermind the fact that SK has the numerical and economic advantage over the North. Somehow, I envision this project being supported/funded by the pro-North ‘unification’ wackos who think making a NK-SK dictionary will somehow stop North Korean and South Korean from becoming different enough from each other to be considered different languages. I kind of doubt that the delegation working on this from the South will want to upset their ‘brothers’ to the north by suggesting that any of those imperialistic English, French, Dutch, or Chinese loan words be included in a Korean dictionary.
There’s the basic problem of alphabetization to boot—never mind disputes over vocabulary selection! Should words that start with ㄴ/ㄹ be listed under ㄴ (the Southern spelling) or ㄹ (the Northern spelling)? Should one spelling be cross-referenced to the other, and if so, which spelling should be the main one (where the definition is given and the other entry cross-references to)? What about the doensori, sometimes represented in the South with a ㅅ and sometimes with nothing at all, while in the North (apparently), they use an apostrophe or some other punctuation mark?
Or will there be two editions…one for the South with Northern spellings cross-referenced to Southern spellings, and one for the North, with the cross references reversed? (But then, that would kind of defeat the whole purpose!)
As everyone else has already pointed out, this seems to be a project that’s fraught with complications….