Shikdang

Today was rainy. Erma and I took our placement tests at the Korean Language Institute. All of the new students gathered in a large auditorium where we received verbal instructions in, serially, Korean, English, Chinese, and Japanese. (A guy sitting near me, looking at a Russian text, was presumably out of luck.) Then we all separated into small classrooms where we took a written exam and had one-on-one oral exams with instructors. The whole process took about two hours. Our assigned class levels will be posted tomorrow.

After the test, the two of us went over to the main student center on Yonsei campus to have lunch in the dining hall. The student center was pretty old and run down. The dining hall itself was large and grimy. Most of the space was filled by long rectangular tables with white plastic chairs. At the back end of the room were a number of windows where you could pick up a brown plastic tray and some silverware, and get served a meal. After looking at a few of them, we chose this one:

We each helped ourselves to a small bowl of radish kimchi and a small bowl of bean-sprout broth. The worker behind the counter brought over, and put on each of our trays, a sizzling iron tray of kimchi fried rice.

Then we looked around to try to figure out where to pay. It wasn't obvious. By this time it was well after 1:00, and there were not too many students getting food, so there was no big line that we could just get in. The few other people we saw getting food were just sitting down and eating. The meals couldn't possibly be free, could they?

Finally, we spotted a woman sitting at a wooden desk in a far corner of the dining hall. We approached her with our trays of food and asked if this was the place to pay for our meal. "You didn't pay yet?" she said in surprise. We were, it turned out, supposed to pay her first, get a little meal ticket, and then use the meal ticket at the counter to get our food.

I took the two meal tickets back to the counter, where I found a plastic bucket at the bottom of which a whole bunch of similar tickets were forlornly clustered, and dropped them in.

The meals cost 3000 Korean won each. At current exchange rates, that about $3.25.

While we were eating, we looked around and realized how the system is supposed to work. When you enter the dining hall, you should immediately turn left. As you walk along the wall, there is a menu of today's dishes, and a glass-fronted cabinet in which you can see samples of each of the meals available, with prices. Here's the meal we got:


The sign says "철판 김치 볶음밥 & 후라이". That's kimchi fried rice and "hurai". "Hurai" is the Korean pronunciation of "fry", and means the fried egg. (This is a case where the English "F" sound, absent in Korean, is replaced with "H" rather than "P".)

The more observant of you will have noticed that the counter where we got our food has an orthographically bizarre name. Here it is up close:

There are three scripts involved here, and a trilingual pun. Let's start with the last two elements, 토랑. This is written in the Korean alphabet, Han-geul, and spells out "torang".

At the beginning is a Chinese character, 世. Chinese characters aren't used much in Korean writing anymore, but they are still used occasionally in signs or in certain formal settings to write Korean words that have historically been borrowed from Chinese. This Chinese character writes a word meaning "world", pronounced "se" in Korean.*

The middle element is, of course, the English "apostrophe s".

So what does the whole thing mean? Well, it appears to say something like "World's Torang", which has the look of a name of an establishment. But "torang" is not a Korean word, as far as I know. The trick to understanding it is to pronounce the whole thing in Korean. Then you get "Se + seu + torang". (The vowel transcribed here "eu" is a very short, whispery vowel. Its presence is necessary because Koreans cannot pronounce an "s" sound at the end of a syllable.) This pronunciation differs by only one consonant from "reseutorang", the Korean word for restaurant, which is borrowed from French.

What we have, then, is an establishment name that puns on the French-borrowed word for restaurant while incorporating a Chinese character meaning "world" and an English possessive form.

I wonder if any of the Korean students who see the sign ever think about this?

[Footnote added September 28]
*I've just discovered that the 世 is the Chinese character used to write the second syllable of Yonsei University. In this context it's got nothing to do with "world". So "Yonsei's Torang" is a better interpretation than "World's Torang".