No more pyeong? No more inbun? [Korea Times] 500,000 won fines for violators? Surely, the MOCIE can’t be serious, can it?
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Bye, Bye, Traditional Measurements
This entry was written by Robert Koehler, posted on June 29, 2007 at 2:10 pm, filed under Asides, South Korea. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.
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25 Comments
“In typical fashion, the government is introducing this policy without any of the public debate or forewarning you would expect in a democratic society.” Sometimes Mr. Breen has deadly aim.
I’ll bet everyone will keep right on using these terms though, and the next government will drop the whole thing.
I read a news article a few months ago (it could be one year ago) that the government would prohibit a few informal units including “pyeong.” There might have been a forewarning. One of the reasons that many non-Korean speakers miss a lot of news, which I noticed here, is that only some of news reports are translated into English. Of course, this is something newspapers should improve. This is a news regarding the prohibition of “pyeong” reported in April:
http://news.jknews.co.kr/artic.....353854.htm
Yes but French Quarter, a lot of us non-Koreans can speak Korean, like the Marmot, my coworkers and friends (whereas I’m at the babytalk stage) and might still miss news like this. Maybe the Korean government buried the story on purpose just to avoid debate.
If you think something newsworthy is being missed, post it here and we’ll all thank you.
I’ll try to post some helpful news reports related to the topics being discussed.
I don’t think the government intentionally buried it. It just flew under the radar for some folk. I just asked around in the office, and some people knew, some didn’t.
Here’s an English-language report from October of last year announcing the foolishness:
http://english.chosun.com/w21d.....30021.html
Mr. Breen was mistaken that there was no forewarning, but right that there was no debate.
Well, actually, this has already been the law of Korea. The Measures Act was adopted in 2000, and it was promptly ignored by everyone. But its original intent was exactly the same. There was an amendment of the Measures Act back in September 4, 2006 to be effective from July 1, 2007. In this amendment the W500,000 penalty was introduced.
Prior to the amendment there was a public notice, however brief and abbreviated, and then it’s been lurking in the wings for nine months. Plus it has been reported off and on in that interim. Mike Breen missed it, and frankly so did we (who can catch every change to law?) — but this was not a midnight job.
This Measures Act amendment was adopted primarily to hit measurements of floor area, which are in Korean pyung; (36.44 sq. ft. / 3.3 sq. m.) and measurements of bulk foods sold in traditional markets, which are in a variety of crazy-quilt units including keun. Each of these informal traditional units is slightly different from place to place, which means there is a consumer-protection angle here as well.
The Ministry of Commerce, Industry & Energy (MOCIE) is responsible for enforcement. MOCIE has published an FAQ which says that any printed materials bearing the “wrong” measurement units and produced before July 1 may continue to be distributed until stocks are exhausted. After that, look out!
The standard measurement for CRTs and LCD monitors is inches worldwide. In Korea, too. We use inches to describe televisions and tube displays (generally the biggest tube for sale here is a 29-inch CRT) and LCD and PDP flat-panel displays (32, 37, 42, 50 and whatnot). But the Measures Act requires metric units, no questions or quibbles allowed; if they were to make an exception for inchi there would be a clamor to exempt all of the other traditional units which have a heck of a lot more claim for special treatment than the foreign interloper inchi.
But there’s good news! When we called the government to talk about computer monitors, we were told that enforcement efforts at this time will focus on apartments (pyung) and bulk foods sold in markets (keun) — MOCIE says it will put off any attention to televisions and computer monitors until “after 2010″.
We additionally contacted LG Electronics and Samsung Electronics to ask some friends there about the inch-measurement practice. Both these manufacturers intend to use the description “17 form-factor” or “type 17″ (17-hyung) from July 1. The character “hyung” is not a unit of measure — it means “type”, “style”, or “form factor” — and therefore if used with a number but no other measure it can’t be said they are advertising in inches.
We expect that 32- and 43-hyung apartments will be popping up soon enough as well.
Awesome !
Wow. I won’t miss “keun” but like Breen, I kind of like pyung.
#7 - That’s enough to make an anarchist, or at least a minarchist libertarian, out of anyone.
I love the pyung! Perhaps it’s the uniqueness (unlike Breen, I never heard of it while living in Japan) that I find so attractive. Hopefully this plan goes the way of the metric system in the US back in the seventies.
Are all pyeong the same size? The Japanese equivulent (Jo) are slightly different in Tokyo and Osaka (and I think vary else where) a bit like the Keun that Brendan Carr mentions.
In the UK there was a well known campaign by various market traders to continue using pounds and ounces insetad of grams (http://www.metricmartyrs.co.uk/ ). They appear to have sort of won finally but initially they lost big time.
Where’s multiculturalism when we need it? Fight Heterodoxy, Save Orthodoxy!
One pyung equals about two jo, I think. People all seem to agree on pyung (about 3.3 sq. meters).
Breen spoke about sil pyeong. I might sound foolish here, but I haven’t heard that term before. Is he talking about 전용면적 (basically, 분양면적 - 공용면적)?
“Sil Pyung” (real pyung, or 실평수 in Korean) is functionally equivalent to the legal term “proprietary floor space” (전용면적).
“일근” of ground beef - now Australian or NZ and maybe soon again to be American - has always been the perfect amount for making a big batch of spaghetti sauce, or a smaller sized chili. It is just as easy to order 600 grams instead, but is always interesting to see the reaction of the ajumah when the foreigner orders in “근”. (It might also just be their reaction to a guy - foreign or not - and his kid doing the shopping minus wife/mom!)
I suspect it will be quite some time before these terms fall out of use, despite what the posted price may be.
Will Korean age be scrapped, too? That would clear up a lot of needless confusion.
“but is always interesting to see the reaction of the ajumah when the foreigner orders in “근””
I’ve been doing it for 10 years and I’ve never gotten anything but the same reaction one of the Korean customers gets.
The ‘Korean age’ thing, though, is frustrating. My son thinks he’s two years older than he really is (he was born late in the year).
I could see a lot of room for mismeasurement in pyeong, unless surveyors, contractors, and realtors walk around with ja measuring sticks (1 ja being just a little over a foot or 30 cm (), and there being 6 ja square or 36 square ja in a pyeong (link)). If folks are measuring in metres, calculating the area, then converting to pyeong, there’s potential for error. The move to metres would make sense from that point of view.
Sorry, let me fix the links:
I could see a lot of room for mismeasurement in pyeong, unless surveyors, contractors, and realtors walk around with ja measuring sticks (1 ja being just a little over a foot or 30 cm (link), and there being 6 ja square or 36 square ja in a pyeong (link)). If folks are measuring in metres, calculating the area, then converting to pyeong, there’s potential for error. The move to metres would make sense from that point of view.
Damn, took me all these years to start automatically thinking of room/home sizes in pyeong, and then…
I thought its origin was the size of a Japanese-style tatami (rice-straw) floor-mat. No?
The equivalent unit in .jp is the tsubo 坪, not the 畳 [jō] as someone said above [1 jō == 1/2 a tsubo]. Note that 坪 in Korean is read, yeah, you got it, pyeong…
If the foreigner asks for “일”근 instead of “한”근, the 아줌마 may just well chuckle a bit.
The problem with pyeong measurements isn’t so much the non-international unit as much as the policy of quoting apartments and officetels in pyeong, when that measurement isn’t anywhere near the actual size of the space. Apparently the quoted measurement includes shared areas like hallways.
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The Pyeong is Dead….
Over at the Marmot’s Hole, Robert Koehler picked up on a story in the Korean Times on the Government’s policy to eliminate the measurements of pyeong, inbun and geun. We’ll have to wait and see just how successful this policy is.
……