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?

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!”.

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.

BTW, “싸움보” means “someone who likes to fight” rather than “excellent fighter.”

the best explanation as to why you’re reaching here.

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.

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…

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.

this reflects a pride that the French have in their language rather than an attempt to hide a shame of things French.

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.

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.

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…