When I hear accordion music in Korea, I think of the traveling troups of performers that used to move around in Korea, setting up shop where ever they could find an audience. I also think of North Korea where the accordion is still the one-man band of choice there. It reminds me of the differences that separate the two Koreas, not just culturally, but linguistically. If one asks a North Korean how they are doing, they might reply: 일없습니다 which can translate as “you take care of yourself” when they are simply saying that they are fine. Such would be considered blunt if not rude in South Korea, however. Due to this problem in differences between the two forms of Korean, the North and South will be attempting to create a new 300,000 word dictionary of Korean. The differences between the two forms of Korean are great:
Dongmu, once an innocuous word for “friend,” was banished from South Korea after Communists in the North adopted the term as the Korean equivalent of “comrade.” Euiboeui, which means “parents,” is seldom heard in the South, after North Korea redefined it as “one who gives the people their most valuable political life and blesses them with a love unsurpassed by that of their biological parents,” and reserved it for Kim Jong Il.
Despite the attempt of some to market things North Korean as being somehow fresh and unpolluted (eh?), being from the north is not seen as being a good thing, as per the observation of Kim Young Nam:
“Our accent brands us as people who come from a place of poverty,”
It may be that South Koreans might look down upon their northern kin but the accordion might sound good when compared to so much K-pop out here. It is a great pity that South Korean socioligists and people who could document North Korean society are not allowed to visit since there is undoubtedly much of interest that could be documented.
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I’ve been trying to get my head around this idea ever since news of the dictionary project came out. It’s apparently a joint project between scholars in the two countries. But there are such basic, basic problems: spelling for one. Some words that start with ㄴ or ㅇ in the South start with ㄹ in the North, for example. How are they going to alphabetize such words? Do they list the entries under their Southern spelling with a cross-reference from the Northern spelling, or vice versa? Whichever approach they choose, they’re showing a bias towards one or another version of the language. That’d be fine in and of itself, but presumably one of these scholars’ desires would be to exhibit no such preference. (Or the cynics among us could argue that the very attempting of such a project given the climate of the times suggests a pro-North point of view, but since I know nothing of the people involved in the project, I don’t want to go down that speculative road….) Or will there be two versions, one for each country, with the appropriate linguistic preferences in each case? And how about basic concepts that we who don’t live in communist dictatorships take for granted? Words like 자유, 민주주의, 권리 (freedom, democracy, rights)? How the heck will those words be defined in a way that’s palatable to Northern party flacks?
Basically, it’s a great concept: a comprehensive dictionary of Korean as it’s used in both countries. But the devil seems to be in the details of its execution.
Seems like N.K. is mostly in a linguistic time warp of Stalinist rhetoric, but there does seem to be some “Korean Korean” vocabulary left that isn’t tainted like that. That dictionary has been talked about for years, so it might not appear anytime soon.
Well, the project seems to be another anachronistic exercise in prescriptive grammar, sill quite popular in this part of the world. The pundits explaining the laymen how the should talk properly… But there will be a lot of fuss and some interesting examples of especially bizarre nationalist rhetoric are likely to be spotted by a connoisseur of such things.
Ah, prescriptive grammar. Language by legal injunction!
Indeed, part of the reason that the two varieties of Korean are so different now is probably due to pronouncements by scholars in the two countries. Had the language been allowed to evolve organically both before and after division, for instance, there probably wouldn’t be such fundamental problems today as how to represent ㄴ/ㄹ/ㅇ or how to denote 된소리. (Of course, there’d still be differences in words whose definitions are ideologically coloured….)
So can I pre-order this Newspeak dictionary from amazon.co.jp, or should I just obtain a copy from the Ministry of Unification (Minifiction)?
“Minifiction” is ingenious…has that one been used before?
’tis a Gardner original, I can assure you.