I was watching an SBS TV series called “War of Money” when I noticed an American Pit Bull Terrier. Usually, in that States, people are a little scared of pit bulls because of their notoriety as being dangerous but this pit bull has such a wonderful personality that he is very popular nowadays. His real name is “Ssa-oum-bo” 싸움보 which is pure Korean for “excellent fighter”.
Talking to friends, they explained that by adding “보” to a noun, one can describe some one that is good at doing something, however here is where the language takes an odd twist. When one talks about people that are “fans” or lovers of a certain thing, Koreans use “광”, thus a “커피광” is a coffee-lover. The “광” came from the Chinese, being the language of the upper classes (yangban) in Chosun-dynasty Korea. Yangban would take exams for government service that relied heavily upon Chinese classics, thus the use of Chinese was an upper-class distinction that implied quality.
Words that were pure Korean (no Chinese source) were considered more the domain of the lower-classes, thus many words that are purely Korean have long been associated with negative or base connotations that imply something bad, thus the use of 보 instead of 광 actually has a negative meaning so that
when used with a noun, 보 might refer to someone that does some thing
too much instead of one merely being a lover of something or being good at it.
When I sometimes talk of the psychological antiques that still exist in the Korean mindset, this is one of such antiques that is rarely thought and is often taken for granted. Thus it seems as if there is, in certain circumstances, a kind of inferiority complex built into the Korean mentality as when comparing things Korean to things Chinese.
Considering the current events regarding China and Korea in the world, perhaps it would have been better for the Korean freedom fighters of the early Twentieth Century to have been tossing books instead of bombs — like Ahn Chang Ho who focused upon education and the development of the future leaders of Korea — since it is the understanding and appreciation of what virtues one’s culture has that makes for a good and prosperous future. Perhaps this is why Korea does not now need “광” but more 싸움보 and the realization that it is a good thing to be one’s self, only, no matter how humble ones origins.
Perhaps it is better to not be a slave to some linguistic antique of the mind or to invent the antiques of tomorrow by abandoning thoughtful reasoning. It’s just a thought.
25 Comments
A pit bull whose name is “excellent fighter”. Hmmm.
Calling Michael Vick.
狂 [광] means crazy, which is not entirely positive either…
Hmm… I thought “Gwang” literally translated to “fanatic” and was a slight pejorative? (i.e. calling someone Computer Gwang is considered rude)
^^; I think I see a bit of an over-analysis here. To link a modern Korean society’s psyche (which in itself is an overwhelmingly large academic subject… ^^ collective psyche of a whole society! Yikes!) to a historical linguistics development… An argument can be made for the notion, of course, but I’m not so sure if it would be correct…
Me either but, as explained to me, there does appear to be this discrimination between words of Chinese origin and words that are “pure” Korean. If this is the case, I would say there is something unhealthy in this subtle but important discrimination and I would ask “why”. It is not that a Chinese influence is bad or good but the sense of pure Korean being somehow inferior is not a good idea, IMHO.
I wonder if this sort of meme exists in minds of North Koreans.
Hmm.. I thought the “pure” Korean (”Soohn” Uri Mal) was making a comeback in modern Korea (at least that was the trend last time I was there… but then again, I was 11, so what do I know? ^^;)… you know, riding the new patriotism wave of recent years.
I really don’t think there should be any distinguishable merits assigned to either “Chinese-based” and “pure” words. Korean is a distinct language, despite the influences, and word configuration should be driven by necessity, convenience, literature, culture, etc. rather than some vague notion of superiority/inferiority (either way).
I don’t think it’s overanalysis. It’s a shameless plug for my blog sure, but in my post at http://thegrandnarrative.wordp.....ts-part-2/ I argue that yangban elites’ preference for and cultural affinity with Chinese and Chinese elites, rather than with the other 99% of the Korean population, puts paid to Korean notions of a Korean nation streching back 6000 years. What Korean nation was there if its most powerful and influential members disdained it and wished they didn’t belong to it?
Moreover, it wasn’t until genuine nationalists (in the modern sense of the word) in the late 19th century deliberately sought to create a sense of nationalism through the promotion of hangul, which was barely used until then, that a popular sense of Korean nationalism developed. Doing this at this time was not unique to Korea by any means, which again leads me to believe that Korean nationalism isn’t quite as unique and/or as strong as most Koreans like to think.
I know this from many other sources of course, but I think all that is true and can be extrapolated merely from Koreans’ attitudes towards the Chinese and Korean languages.
“What Korean nation was there if its most powerful and influential members disdained it and wished they didn’t belong to it?”
^^; A bit of an overstatement, I think. No doubt culturally, Chinese dynasties had significant influences on Korean yangban culture and thoughts (Confucianism comes to mind as an obvious example), but I’m not so sure the preference of Chinese culture was to the extent of “let’s be Chinese”. A similar illogical assertion would be that England as a country did not exist when the French culture & language overwhelmed its aristocratic class. Of course the French culture/language had great popularity among the English lords and ladies (contributed partially to the fact of French political/military dominance at the time), but to assert that a nation doesn’t exist because of it… I can’t really see it.
In addition, there seems to be a contradiction in your presentation of the argument. Hangul, being considerably easier to use than Hanja (as the former was created specifically for the sake of the spoken language, as opposed to the latter where there were several linguistic conflicts) was extremely popular with the commoners while abhorred by the Yangbans.
Yet, you claim that in the 19th century, Hangul is hardly used… perhaps I’ve missed an assertion here?
곰보
꾀보
느림보
늘보
땅딸보
떡보
뚱보
울보
째보
털보
Given that electronics function on the binary code, Sambo would then be a strange name for a computer company.
#9 I know this was tongue in cheek, but just in case:
三寶 [삼보] TriGem
all-Chinese-name
That is my perception, too. The Chinese meaning of the character 狂 is “crazy or mad.”
#11 — /me points at #2
You guys miss the point: “광” may originally mean “mad” in Chinese, but in Korean usage, its very use denotes something of a higher standard than the pure Korean equivalent would fetch. It is a bit like saying “Chinese dross = Korean gold”.
Out of curiosity, I tried to find a pure Korean equivalent to “광” and found “쟁이” which originally referred to an expert like a craftsman or someone that was an expert in something but lo and behold, “쟁이” also has connotations of madness and is not very positive. There is a current trend though to use English as in “film-mania” or “Jazz-mania”. Again, here is the meme that somehow a pure Korean term is somehow lacking.
When I refer to English terminology that finds its way into everyday Korean usage, I realize that one could describe this as “the allure of the exotic” and talk of the temptation of things foreign and the promise of the exotic they offer but what I refer to in the language is more like a case of cultural envy that developed into something misunderstood and not really wholesome, IMHO.
Likewise, I am not sure I would proscribe the path that the North Koreans have taken in creating words that are “pure Korean” because theirs seems to be more an invention of political necessity rather than of natural cultural development. They have long sought to find justification for their version of government by claiming that they are more Korean than those in the South.
While one could point to the French Academy in their attempts to keep French pure, for example, by forbidding and fining advertisers that referred to “Le Walkman” instead of “Le balladeur”, this reflects a pride that the French have in their language rather than an attempt to hide a shame of things French.
It may be that all of my thoughts regarding the Korean language could be made somehow irrelevant to the reality of the language in use, but still, it is better to understand a thing and not to be held at a disadvantage because of an unreasonable tradition from the past.
I think you are making too much of this. With the exception of French, I would think most people find foreign loan words have a certain cachet of sophistication compared to the vernacular. For example “fake” is I believe from middle English slang, but “ersatz”being a better sounding German term. A French or Latin synonym would be better still.
Gbevers’ list of bo-ending words actually reminded me of another point. I think that bo and gwang cannot be linguistically compared, since bo is used with descriptions of characteristics (lazy, cry-baby, fat, bearded, sly, etc.) while gwang is used with descriptions of activities/objects (coffee, game, computer, manhwa, soccer, baseball, etc.)
Jaeng-Yi… is primarily used with occupations (usually manual and/or jobs that are looked down on) or occupation-related actions… once again, I don’t know if it can be compared to mania or gwang.
Mania and gwang, however, are perfectly synonymous, but they’re both foreign loanwords, so ^^;
Plus… I’m not so sure if presence of foreign loanwords and them being preferred over the ‘native’ words can be analyzed into a sign of inferiority complex ^^; (wouldn’t that attribute all human society of inferiority complex, then?). I think that a language being influenced by other languages is a perfectly natural development in linguistics.
Not necessarily, no — see 미치광, for instance. 狂 means crazy, and is used as is, like you’d say in English “I’m crazy about football”. Don’t try to over-analyse…
Being French, this “mania” of making up French versions of loanwords – fioul, mél, spoule, etc – seems to be to be more a by-product of latent xenophobia [or at least anti-Americanism], laziness and self-denial.
More so in North Korea, which is reportedly trying like heck to expunge foreign loan-words from the vernacular and to come up with ‘pure’ Korean substitutes… Which is, incidentally, engineering a situation where (after another generation of separation) North Korean may eventually constitute a completely separate (and mutually unintelligible) language from South Korean (making the whole issue of ‘reunification’ slightly more problematic). As for language nationalists in South Korea… well, there’s always some nut out there… I wouldn’t be overly surprised to find some dude in Britain who thought that going back to Old English is a good idea. Personally, I think we should all be speaking some form of Pictish, but that’s just me.
I thought using English loan words was more of the problem. Sometimes those loan words being Engrish loan words, having gone from English to Japanese and then to Korean.
Look, for example, I can totally foresee young Koreans saying I’m going to Mart.
Instead of market.
Replacing ga-gae, of course.
Or calling a cart, cart.
Instead of say soo-rae, which would be kind of weird.
But, they’re gonna get some ? looks when they come to America and ask a person where is the mart.
I could probably come up with a bunch of examples.
But I won’t.
If they’re gonna use foreign English words to make the population better aware of basic English usage, fine.
But I think it’s excessive to refer to margin instead of ee-yool, although acceptable, and probably stupid to use English loan words that would not be recognized in English speaking countries, such as saying
That win was a huruku. Fluke.
‘I think you are making too much of this. With the exception of French, I would think most people find foreign loan words have a certain cachet of sophistication compared to the vernacular. For example “fake” is I believe from middle English slang, but “ersatz”being a better sounding German term. A French or Latin synonym would be better still.’ 京
the best explanation as to why you’re reaching here.
Can we say the U.S. and British judicial systems have inferiority complex toward Italy or the Roman Empire because the U.S. and British jurists still unnecessarily use many Latin legal jargons? There is no inferiority complex toward China when South Korean use Chinese letters. Inferiority complex toward China does not exist currently, while there might have been long time ago.
BTW, “싸움보” means “someone who likes to fight” rather than “excellent fighter.”
Koreans should savor whatever expressions they have to describe things.
Not sure where jjak-toong came from, but I think I’ll find it queasy when they start saying
“that is a pirated product.”
etc, etc.
Like I said, Korean stacks letters vertically, so it saves space, and that’s an advantage.
#13,
Different etymology, hence different meaning. I get it. Meaning also changes with time (since we’re having fun with words). Case in point: exuberant. If you look at the original meaning of the elements that make up this word, it means ‘overflowing breasts’ (ex- ‘overly’ and uberare ‘to make fruitful’, which comes from ‘uber’ (udder)). I can already imagine it. One Roman tells the other, “Hey, look at that babe jumping up and down.” “She’s very exuberant!”.
Goddammit I want my 2 minutes back.
Wow. The first post in several weeks I feel qualified to comment on, and I get here to find all the meaningful commenting’s been done.
Oh well, here’s my two cents anyway. I’m with Jing et al. on this one. I’d assumed it was more or less universally acknowledged that foreign loanwords are considered more prestigious (and therefore more formal, academic, and literary) than their native equivalents.
English, as noted above, has a comparably mixed lexicon, of Germanic and Latinate words. A “warm welcome”, an expression rooted in Saxon, is much more casual than the Latinate “cordial reception”. I can’t remember who to attribute this to, by the way. It might be Steven Pinker.
The fascination that people have with all things foreign even manifests itself as hyperforeignism.
Surely everyone’s heard a Korean say something like “This so veautipul.”
Anyway, the wholesale importation of Chinese vocabulary is perfectly understandable given the historical context. Not a deliberate judgment of linguistic inferiority, but simply the result of sociocultural inertia. The fact that China has a more or less standardised writing system probably helped, too.
Re: #13,
while we’re having fun with etymology, orchid gets traced to testicle in Ancient Greek, and vanilla is cognate with vagina
On another note, methinks the emphasis on native Korean terms is a fairly recent development (see also: 상상플러스), and simply a product of Korea’s particular brand of ethnic nationalism. Any thoughts?
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